The government’s sudden flurry of communications regulation, covering “anti-doxxing” laws, an anti-misinformation regime, privacy reforms and hate speech laws covered a range of legislation and portfolios — Communications, Attorney-General’s and potentially Treasury — but have a running theme: the biggest peddlers of misinformation, the biggest doxxers, the most serious threats to privacy, won’t be caught. And that’s the mainstream media.
Instead, as is the pattern with this government, the media will be given a privileged position compared to the universally vilified social media.
The anti-doxxing bill, aimed at the malicious release of personal information, was created amidst a moral panic after people organising to wreck the careers of critics of Israel were exposed. While there’s no direct media exemption in the bill, “doxxing” must be done in a “menacing or harassing” way to trigger the criminal provisions — and the explanatory memorandum states “media reporting, political commentary and public debate identifying key figures are not typically done in a manner that reasonable persons would regard as being menacing or harassing, and therefore would not be captured.”
That’s despite repeated instances of the mainstream media, usually for ideological or partisan reasons, revealing personal information — often about women deemed a threat to conservative interests. The outrageous abuse and humiliation dished out by The Australian to Brittany Higgins, using her illegally leaked text messages as part of its campaign to punish her for embarrassing the Liberal party, wouldn’t be caught.
While Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’ overhaul and updating of privacy law is already being denounced as too weak before the legislation is even released, Labor is at least finally introducing a version of a tort for serious invasions of privacy, a reform urged by the Australian Law Reform Commission a decade ago. But the media will continue to be exempt, despite being one of the biggest threats to individuals’ privacy (political parties, too, will continue to be exempt from limits on how they exploit the personal information they have access to via the electoral roll).
Similarly, the government’s misinformation bill aims to “enable end-users to better understand the accuracy and credibility of content disseminated using digital communications platforms, particularly content that purports to be factual or authoritative”, but explicitly excludes mainstream media as “professional news content”. That’s despite the bill simply establishing the same type of co-regulatory regime that applies to broadcasting — that is, the industry itself gets to develop a code of practice, registered by ACMA, that it can be held to (to the extent ACMA holds anyone to anything).
Social media platforms will be subject to this exercise in enabling users to understand the accuracy and credibility of content, but Sky News Australia and the Seven Network won’t be.
Throw in the government’s inane plan to ban children from social media, and the result is a bizarre ritual in which the straw man of social media is being subjected to an elaborate auto-da-fé by both the media and politicians, for sins that are routinely perpetrated by the media on a far vaster scale than anything Facebook or Instagram could ever manage, with no one batting an eyelid.
Who shames kids, demonises trans people, and peddles bigotry toward Muslims and Indigenous peoples? Who platforms rapists and neo-Nazis and employs war criminals? Who reveals women who have made sexual harassment complaints against their will? Who published Brittany Higgins’ text messages? Who bottom-feeds on the personal lives of celebrities? Who insists climate change is a lie, runs right-wing conspiracy theories, and falsely outs people as mass murderers? Who employs blatant double standards in their political reporting? All to audiences far bigger than most social media accounts, and rarely with anything more than a wrist slap from the media regulator.
While all governments pander to the mainstream media, the latter leads a particularly charmed existence under the Albanese government, which can’t even bring itself to end gambling advertising despite the extensive evidence of the harm gambling is doing, and which is now threatening to impose a levy on social media companies to fund the mainstream media because the previous government’s shakedown of Google and Facebook to prop up the industry is no longer working.
A long time ago when Labor was last in power, then communications minister Stephen Conroy commissioned a review on “convergence”, which the mainstream media hated — Kim Williams, then at News Corp, claimed it was “payback” — but which was about a different kind of media regulation, one based on content, rather than the platform-specific regulation that characterises the Broadcasting Services Act (BSA).
The idea died with the Gillard government, and ever since then more and more non-broadcasting platforms have been shoehorned into the BSA with special regimes for each. For users, of course, “convergence” has long since happened, and the artificial distinctions in the regulation mean little. But it will never happen in legislation. The privileges of the mainstream media are too precious to government.
