What is the Online Safety Bill?
Late last year the government released a draft of a new law to keep Australians safe online.
It’s a big piece of legislation that will affect how digital services operate, and the powers that government has to intervene to stop the spread of harmful content.
So why are we getting it? What’s in the bill? And how could it be better? Let me explain everything that you need to know.
Why are we getting a new online safety law?
The legal framework that deals with online safety in Australia is fragmented and spread across different laws that have been created over the past thirty years.
At the moment, the Broadcasting Services Act and the Enhancing Online Safety Act have only been given limited powers to tackle online harms.
But with the growth of services like social media and gaming, the laws are no longer fit to deal with the new wave of harms that can be caused online.
What is in the proposed law?
In short, the Bill gives the eSafety Commissioner stronger powers that allow them to require the removal of harmful content from digital services.
This means that posts, accounts, apps, websites, and anything else that lives online can be removed if it poses a threat to online safety.
At the moment the focus of the bill is on preventing individual harms such as cyberbullying and online abuse, the spread of non-consensual intimate images, and extremist and violent content.
What is missing from the proposed law?
Content take down is an important tool, and one that can help keep Australian’s safe online.
But a focus on downstream harms without simultaneously tackling upstream root problems will inevitably fall short of achieving the goals of this law — a safer online environment.
For services like Facebook, TikTok, and Google, the spread of harmful content is fuelled by data collecting algorithms that are geared towards engaging you, and are developed and maintained behind closed doors. These algorithms decide what content we see and who we connect with.
It’s not just an issue that harmful content exists online, it’s an issue that these algorithms are designed to spread harmful content in the first place.
To help prevent harms caused by these algorithms, this Bill should empower a regulator to investigate and audit online services that operate in Australia to make sure that they are operating in the public interest, but this must be done under a system of clear checks and balances.
Final thoughts
It’s encouraging to see the federal government beginning to tackle the harms caused by the big tech giants — and the Online Safety Bill presents a real opportunity for progress.
But if the focus remains too heavily on the symptoms of the problem and not the root cause, we will fail to keep Australians safe from the wide range of harms that are occurring online.
You can read Reset Australia’s full policy submission on the Online Safety Bill here.
This blog post is a part of Reset Australia’s Explained series. Every month we explain and break down a question submitted by readers like you.
Reset Australia is a non-profit organisation advocating to prevent digital threats to democracy. You can learn more about us at au.reset.tech.
