Australia’s government spent the week boxing Big Tech

With social media age limits, anti-scam laws, privacy tweaks, and misinformation rules Elon Musk labelled 'fascist'

Simon Sharwood

Australia's government has spent the week reining in Big Tech.

The fun started on Monday when prime minister Anthony Albanese announced his intention to introduce a minimum age for social media, with a preference for the services to be off limits until kids turn 16.

"I want kids to have a childhood," the PM urged. "I want them off their devices … I want them to have real experiences with real people."

Albanese promised legislation to enact the rule will be tabled before Australia's next election, due by 2025. Opposition leader Peter Dutton broadly supported the proposal, which is pitched at parents who are tired of having to protect their kids online.

On Wednesday, Meta fronted a parliamentary Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence and admitted it has used Australians' posts to train its AI models – and has done as far back as 2007 – unless they were denoted as private, or posted by users under 18 years of age.

When pressed on whether that meant pictures of minors posted by an adult, Facebook execs reportedly first said it wouldn't happen, then corrected their position and admitted images of minors could be ingested.

That admission didn't go down well. Even so, the fact that scraping Australians' content was made possible by privacy laws that are less strong than those in the EU meant Meta was able to emerge without looking entirely villainous.

Later the same day, Zuckerberg's minions struggled to escape that status once again. Other ministers foreshadowed a response to Meta's decision to stop paying local publishers under Australia's News Media Bargaining Code – the scheme that sees certain social media and search operators pay for the right to link to locally produced content. Meta claims it has all but stopped linking to such content, and the government thinks that was done largely to evade payments – and is threatening to use powers that would compel The Social Network to come to the bargaining table.

It's widely expected that Meta will ignore that process, so ministers have floated the idea of a special levy on Big Tech – and perhaps also a new scheme that would require them to pay the sources of content they use to train their AIs.

On Thursday Australians learned of a privacy law update for the digital age aimed at protecting citizens whose data is exposed by breaches. The law will also make doxxing a crime. Next came amendments to hate crime laws that strengthen existing criminal offences which prohibit a person urging another person to use force or violence against a group or member of a group. That change will cover online conduct.

Also on Thursday, Australia introduced laws that will require digital platforms to explain how they handle misinformation and disinformation on their services. If tech providers don't agree to a voluntary code, the government will create one for them – and make it enforceable.

The definitions of misinformation and disinformation in the Bill are narrow and the law will only apply when content is felt to have potential to seriously harm the Australian community or infrastructure.

Elon Musk nonetheless labelled Australia's government "Fascists."

Which wasn't helpful: politicians of all stripes criticized him fiercely on Friday.

On the same day, the government announced an anti-scam plan that singles out digital platforms as "a point of vulnerability in the scams ecosystem" and criticizes them for taking "limited action to protect Australian consumers from scams."

Penalties of up to AUD$50 million ($33.5 million) have been suggested as appropriate for breaches of planned requirements to detect and block scams.

That's a lot of tech-related law in a single week.

Plenty of it has a chance of passing in coming months – but the dispute with Meta and others over paying for content has the potential to get ugly. ®