A Senate Committee has been told that the Labor government’s proposed misinformation bill will turn social media platforms into “arbiters of truth” while unnecessarily burdening small businesses.
Jennifer Duxbury, a director at the Digital Industry Group (DIG), a not-for-profit industry body whose members include various major digital platforms, was questioned about the sector’s view on the legislation.
While Duxbury acknowledged that misinformation and disinformation were difficult areas to draft legislation, she said the new bill did not strike the right balance between protecting the community against serious harm and ensuring the right to freely debate matters of public concern.
“We don’t think that balance is right. We think the definitions [of misinformation] are too broad, and they unfortunately put the digital platforms in the position of being the sole arbiters of truth online,” she said.
Under the bill, social media platforms are required to crack down on misinformation and disinformation on their platforms or face fines.
Misinformation is defined as content that is “reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive” to Australian online users and is “likely to cause or contribute to serious harm” to authorities, government entities, and various identity groups.
Meanwhile, disinformation is defined as content that is false, misleading, or deceptive and created with the intention of misleading and causing harm.
Duxbury said the bill strongly incentivises social media companies to take a conservative approach to information published on their platforms.
Misinformation Bill Imposes Burden on Small Businesses
The DIG director also raised the issue that, due to the broad scope of the legislation, a large number of very low-risk businesses, including small businesses, would be subject to mandatory obligations like media literacy requirements.Duxbury gave the example of online forums where people shared information about flights and travel and other types of forums.
“For example, you have forums where hobbyists will share information about their hobby,” she said.
“There are also smaller businesses that do more specialised, aggregated information. For example, product reviews on agricultural or machinery or mining machinery.
DIG Says the Bill Should Focus on Disinformation
Due to the bill’s broad scope, Duxbury suggested that it should mainly focus on a single area: disinformation–misleading information created with the intention to cause harm.Specifically, she said the new powers provided to the communications and media regulator (ACMA) under the bill, which included developing a set of code of conduct for the industry and imposing fines for breaches, should be confined to disinformation.
Duxbury explained that tackling misinformation for digital platforms was challenging due to difficulty with judging people’s motivations online.
However, she noted that detecting whether disinformation campaigns were in operation was possible.
“There are a number of indicators of that. Are there spam bots? Is discourse being manipulated by artificial intelligence? Are there fake accounts which are called sock puppets, spewing out information that sort of evidence of coordinated activity?” Duxbury said.
“[This] kind of thing is more objective, and it provides a much more solid foundation for platforms to take strong action.”
Furthermore, Duxbury stated that it might be possible for some provisions of the bill to target misinformation, provided that their scope was limited to those services presenting a high risk of misinformation and the kinds of harms that were intended on the information’s widespread virality.
