We know exactly the moment Pandora’s Box was opened. The US Congress legislated a special provision to give the tech companies an exemption from all responsibility. Until the passage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, those companies had the same obligations as any other publisher. They were liable for everything they put on the internet.
But when they were magically reclassified as mere “platforms”, they had impunity. Why were they so favoured?
At the time, the tech companies portrayed themselves as cool innovators doing fun stuff. But, much as the gods fashioned Pandora “in the likeness of a modest maid”, in truth she was a snare. She opened the box of misery.
All the evils of the world were loosed upon us. Every harm that civilisation had fought to tame, contain or manage was now freed. Of course, the web has delivered a multitude of advantages.
But the pernicious power of Section 230 was not evident until “social” media was popularised a decade later.
From that moment, every one of us has been forced to fend for ourselves against the extractive industry that feeds on our attention, our fears, our fetishes, our families and pays the dividends to their shareholders.
Labor’s Tanya Plibersek this week pointed out that your home washing machine has more safety protections than the internet. But your washing machine won’t encourage your kids to self-harm. “Social” media has fed most Australians self-harm and suicide-related content, according to a survey of about 3,500 of us conducted by the Patrick McGorry’s non-profit Orygen. That’s in spite of the fact that fewer than 1 in 5 people had actually searched for it. And kids were four times more likely to have been fed this poison than adults.
The Australian Psychological Society reports that the rate of hospitalisation for intentional self-harm has surged by 70 per cent in young women aged 15 to 19 between 2008 and 2021, the heyday of “social” media uptake.
At the macro level, “social” media has fomented anger, fired up racial and sexual hatreds, divided societies, skewed elections around the world.
Nor will your washing machine covertly monitor you, or secretly sell your personal life on a wholesale market you’ll never see, or expose you to abuse and scammers. Your washing machine won’t do any of these things to you. Unless, of course, it’s a smart washing machine.
This week, Anthropic informed us that rogue “AI worms” will soon be able to hijack web-connected devices such as smart ovens, TVs, security systems and thermostats. Even smart washing machines and smart lawnmowers.
Anthropic warned that these AI worms may be months away from being able to self-replicate beyond human control and spread across insecure devices like “digital slime mould”. Tech is so cool.
But we shouldn’t worry too much. By then, AI might have eliminated our species, as its multibillionaire makers and their trillion-dollar corporations cheerfully remind us from time to time.
We are left to fend for ourselves against this onslaught. Unless governments choose to step in and redress some of the power imbalance.
Australian governments have led the world in comprehending the problem and attempting some basic protections. The Liberal Party was first mover. Tony Abbott created the world’s first agency for protecting children from online harm, Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner.
Malcolm Turnbull relaunched it as the Office of the eSafety Commissioner to broaden its remit to adults. He appointed Julie Inman Grant to lead it. She’s still there, until her term expires in January.
Scott Morrison legislated a ban on anonymous trolling in 2021. A Liberal senator, Sarah Henderson, applauded her prime minister for “holding social media companies to account for the terrible harm caused by anonymous trolls”.
She recounted her own experience of “systemic abuse and harassment” and damned Twitter for ignoring a police warrant demanding to know the identities of her tormentors.
When Labor’s Peter Malinauskas announced a ban on social media accounts for kids under 16 in South Australia, Peter Dutton pledged to introduce one federally if elected. He wasn’t. But when Anthony Albanese implemented the ban last year, he did it with the support of the Coalition.
The under 16 ban has been only partly effective because the big tech firms made sure of it. Inman Grant’s office is now preparing cases against five of them – Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok – to ask the courts to fine them.
And that’s where bipartisanship ended in Australia.
This week, the government introduced to parliament the next effort to add protections for Australian internet users. Its “digital duty of care” seeks to “shift the burden from the shoulders of victims to the companies that are creating the environments where harms occur”, in the words of the Communications Minister Anika Wells.
It explicitly encompasses AI firms. It sweeps away a number of existing codes and replaces them “with one duty enforceable directly by the eSafety Commissioner and backed by civil penalties of up to approximately $109 million for a body corporate”, law firm Minter Ellison summarises.
The proposed law would require companies providing internet services to protect all Australians from material or conduct that’s already against the law. Including child sexual exploitation or abuse, sexual violence, extreme violence or cruelty, terrorism, and incitement to criminal offences. In other words, bringing the online world into line with laws that govern our physical world.
The bill proposes extra protections for kids. Companies would be required to shield kids from porn, promotion of eating disorders or hostile attitudes towards women, glorification of crime or dangerous stunts, and cyber-abuse.
Some design features would need to be changed, too, to allow users to opt out of the automatic algorithmic feeds that companies sic onto us. Other addictive features such as endless scrolls, too, would be limited.
The Coalition declared itself against the bill early and hard, when it was still in draft form. Its concerns? The Coalition worried that the bill could have unintended consequences of capturing websites hosting professional news services and legitimate entertainment and the arts. So the government has exempted them.
Another Coalition objection was that the minister would have too much power with a unilateral authority to list new categories of “serious harm”. So the government dropped this from the final version of the bill. Now only parliament would have that power.
Yet the Coalition still opposes the bill. The shadow minister is Sarah Henderson, the same one who welcomed Morrison’s action against online trolls.
Says Henderson: “This is a blank cheque for political censorship by a government desperate to shut down its political opponents”.
This is a nonsense claim that rests mainly on the fact that the proposed law would allow the eSafety commissioner to use so-called “sock puppet” accounts. These are accounts created in fake names for investigating tech companies. Researchers use these extensively already, but have to go offshore to do so because it’s illegal in Australia. It’s from this research that we learned, for instance, that an account posing as a teen boy will be fed misogynistic content – unbidden – after a mere 20 minutes or so on his new “social” media account.
The opposition reckons that the government would use these accounts to create propaganda and to censor political enemies. Julie Inman Grant rather likens them to “secret shoppers” in the physical world. But the reality is that the Coalition opposes the bill because it is still cravenly courting One Nation voters. Pauline Hanson says the bill is a crime against free speech, so the Coalition is performing its One Nation back-up dance.
The telltale is that Henderson says the entire bill is a “dog’s breakfast” and refuses to negotiate with the government. The Coalition’s high principle against censorship was exposed when Donald Trump said that the US government would livestream publicly the execution of a convicted murderer.
Sarah Henderson demanded that the eSafety Commissioner block it in Australia. So did One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce, calling it “Roman amphitheatre stuff”.
The eSafety commissioner doesn’t have the power to pre-emptively ban or block anything, although Inman Grant did write to the tech firms to remind them of their obligations under the existing Online Safety Act.
Trump now has called off the livestream, so the question is moot. But the Coalition’s hypocrisy is not. Nor is the Coalition’s impotence; the government expects to be able to navigate the bill through the Senate by negotiating with the Greens. The Coalition comes out of it looking pathetic.
Hesiod tells us that as a result of Pandora’s act against humanity, “countless plagues, wander amongst men; for earth is full of evils and the sea is full”. When she closed the lid, only one spirit remained: Hope.
The web-enabled forces ranged against our society, every society, are vast. The Liberals claim to be a party of government. It would be helpful to the national interest if they acted like one. Hope generally benefits from action.
Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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Peter Hartcheris political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect viaemail.
