A sure sign that a politician is up to authoritarian no good is when they start blithering, ‘think of the children!’ What they really mean is that they are going to use children as political voodoo dollies to stick pins into the grown-ups – and tell us it’s for our own good. Any politician who talks about ‘safety’ is really talking about control.
Case in point: the Albanese government’s diabolical ‘online safety’ laws. They’re nothing more nor less than a Trojan horse for digital ID: a Chinese communist-style total surveillance network. The UK is already showing how fast the slippery slope careens into the dungeon of state monitoring. Albanese is barely even pretending he’s doing anything different.
The latest downward turn in the slippery slope is so-called ‘digital duty of care’ draft legislation.
A “global reckoning” is coming for big tech as Anthony Albanese announces the government’s long-awaited digital duty of care.
This, coming from the Labor party who ridiculously tried to blame its recent shock by-election on “bots”, sounds more like censorious attempt to shoot the messengers.
“We’ll require social media platforms [to] provide user empowerment tools that give people over the age of 16 genuine and enduring choice about what they see in their feeds,” Mr Albanese said.
“We have an opportunity to shape technology for the better rather than let it shape us. That is what our reforms are all about.”
Are they, though? Judge the thing by the company it keeps. Flanking the prime minister at the announcement was the usual rogue’s gallery of the Karen class: Chanel Contos and her Teach Us Consent operation, and every other professional busybody who has discovered that ‘the children’ is a blank cheque for prying into other people’s privacy. When the people lining up to clap are the same people who want the internet put on a hall pass, you may safely assume the hall monitor is the point.
With the Maoist obsession with euphemistic slogans that characterises modern Labor, Albanese called it ‘My Feed, My Way’. Platforms must ping every user over 16 and offer a pretend choice: the algorithm, or only the accounts you already follow. “If people want to doom scroll … that’s up to them,” he said, with the air of a man granting a privilege. “It’s about giving people control.”
People? Or the government and its army of e-Karen curtain-twitchers? Does anyone really doubt that it’s about giving the likes of Julie Inman-Grant more levers, more removal notices, and a fine of more than $100 million when a platform’s ‘duty of care’ fails to match whatever Canberra currently finds ‘harmful’. The list will lengthen. It always does. The UK’s Online Safety Act began with child protection and arrived, in short order, at age-gates, VPN panics and Ofcom counting how many Britons were routing around the checkpoint. Albanese is walking the same path and calling it choice.
Inman-Grant, the “eSafety Commissioner”, has already shown what she does with the powers she has: informal takedown notices sent when her own investigators found a post did not meet the statutory test. Geo-blocks on a mother’s criticism of a primary-school “queer club”. A global suppression order over a Muslim stabbing attack video that a Federal Court judge found was not a reasonable demand. She has lost, withdrawn and appealed, then tried the novel defence that because she exceeded the law she cannot be held to it.
Now Labor wants to give her even more power.
The money trail is no prettier. Contos and Teach Us Consent received a multi-million-dollar taxpayer grant to tell the government exactly what it wanted to hear. Contos campaigned to put Australians behind a Great Firewall in the name of fighting the ‘Manosphere’. Labor duly used the campaign it had funded and to announce it had been listening to Australians.
“It shows the government has heard what Australians have been telling us for months. We demand and deserve control over what we see online,” she said.
With heavy emphasis on the royal ‘we’. Not me, not you: just them. The online thing they heard was the echo of their own cheque.
One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce called it what it is.
“I know what they’re up to, this is censorship,” he told News24.
Mr Joyce linked the looming measures to One Nation’s win in the Secret Harbour by-election in Western Australia, which he said Labor believed was connected to “malfeasance in the social media process”.
“The thing about this socialist crowd is they lie,” he said.
“So, when they say things, you say, why would I believe that? You also said you weren’t going to change the capital gains tax.”
Activist Drew Pavlou sees exactly where this is heading: once ‘harm’ includes the wrong politics, a $100 million fine is just the price of a right-wing post with too much reach for the government’s comfort.
They will keep saying it is about children. It is about a list, a regulator who already treats the statute as optional and a digital identity regime that cannot function unless every account is pinned to a real name.
