Australian PM and Deputy threaten Facebook and Twitter with defamation liability for users' posts
- Reference: 1634011273
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/10/12/australia_social_media_defamation_push/
- Source link:
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce last week penned an [1]opinion piece detailing how one of his daughters became the subject of salacious online rumours that he said are a "malicious lie".
Joyce called for Australia's defamation laws to apply to tech platforms, even if it is their users that post defamatory material.
[2]
"The platform must be held liable. If they enable the vice, they pay the price," Joyce wrote.
[3]
[4]
Australian PM Scott Morrison supported Joyce's stance.
Microsoft tells Biden administration to adopt Australia’s pay-for-news plan [5]READ MORE
"Social media has become a coward's palace, where people can just go on there, not say who they are, destroy people's lives and say the most foul and offensive things to people, and do so with impunity," the PM said, adding "Now that's not a free country where that happens."
Big Tech's Australian lobby, a group called [6]DIGI , of which Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo! Are full members, has responded with its pledge for better governance.
DIGI's [7]Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation requires signatories to "commit to safeguards to protect Australians against harm from online disinformation and misinformation, and to adopting a range of scalable measures that reduce its spread and visibility". Participants must release an annual report detailing those efforts.
[8]
The group has added an independent Complaints Sub-Committee "to resolve complaints about possible breaches by signatories of their code commitments". A portal on the DIGI site will give the public the chance to complain about those breaches.
The committee's members are all suitably eminent persons and will "work with signatories, through an Administration Sub-Committee, to oversee the various actions taken by signatories to meet their obligations under the code".
Australia's Attorney-General, meanwhile, is in discussions with the nation's states and territories to reform defamation law.
[9]
And as readers may recall, in September 2021 [10]Australia's High Court ruled that Australian publishers are liable for defamatory comments posted alongside links to their content on Facebook.
Relevant ministers welcomed that ruling. Publishers did not: CNN disabled its Facebook page in Australia to avoid liability.
That chilling effect seems not to have worried Joyce, Morrison, or Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher who, in a weekend television interview, pointed out that Australia has successfully passed laws that [11]require Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for the right to share links to their content, and led global efforts to [12]prevent live-streaming of violent acts.
[13]Australian government fights Facebook news ban by threatening 0.01% of Zuck's ad revenue
[14]Microsoft sides with media groups, together they urge Europe to follow Australia's lead, make Google, Facebook pay for news article links
[15]Indian MP calls for Australian-style pay for news laws
[16]Facebook and Australia do a deal: The Social Network™ will restore news down under and even start paying for it
Senior Australian government figures seem to think they can again change big tech's behaviour.
The pay-for-news plan, however, came about after a long consultation period. The live-streaming blocks were inspired by a racially-motivated mass killing in New Zealand. The idea of making Facebook and Twitter liable for defamation committed by users has appeared from nowhere, and is out of step with global law. It's also unclear if Australia's states and territories – each of which has its own defamation statutes – will adopt the Feds' preferred position.
Big Tech will also fight – hard – to stop it. With a lot more than a new sub-committee. ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.smh.com.au/national/my-daughter-is-but-one-victim-of-malicious-online-lies-it-s-time-the-social-media-giants-were-held-liable-20211007-p58y4b.html
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YWVc0JoYz3ijmw1yfwg9JwAAABY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YWVc0JoYz3ijmw1yfwg9JwAAABY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YWVc0JoYz3ijmw1yfwg9JwAAABY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/12/microsoft_biden_google/
[6] https://digi.org.au/about/
[7] https://digi.org.au/disinformation-code/
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YWVc0JoYz3ijmw1yfwg9JwAAABY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/legal&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YWVc0JoYz3ijmw1yfwg9JwAAABY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/08/australia_facebook_comments_liability_ruling/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/16/news_corp_facebook_deal_australia/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2019/03/22/facebook_ai_rubbish/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/22/australia_to_stop_buying_facebook_ads/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/23/microsoft_eu_publishers/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/19/india_pay_for_news_plan/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/23/facebook_and_australia_do_a_deal/
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Postal
The problem isn't private messages, it is posts and comments that are made in public.
Re: Postal
Only the analogy breaks down when you realise that your local postie doesn't open and read all of the messages they deliver, enlarge the font on sentences they think are important, and offer to deliver you copies of similar letters they think you'll find interesting, based on the content of the letters that you've received and sent.
Faecebook quit Australia in 2020 rather than pay authors of news for linking to their content, albeit for about 12 hours. Best 12 hours all year, in my opinion. Imagine how many toys they'll throw out of the pram when the law requires them to behave like adults and moderate their content.
I say their content, because they have a world full of opinion to choose from and then select content to match the eyes looking at it. The act of selection, free of any obligation to fact, becomes authorship with that power in your hands.
Re: Postal
I think an advertising company - pasting a message onto a billboard - is a better one.
Indeed. I note that the controllers of antisocial media block news they disagree with, regardless of its sources. So they have a dilemma. Allow the rabid unrestricted along with the very unfashionable or if they pick and choose, accept that they are publishers. The phone system analogy holds up here.
No. They don't " block news they disagree with ". There are plenty of views FB disagree with on their platform.
They block news which violates their community standards, if and when they notice it. And, sure, they make mistakes.
As technologists we all know that moderation at scale is really hard and will always be incomplete and even inconsistent. If you try to automate it, the algorithms will probably be wrong more than they are right (like blocking the famous Vietnam war picture as child abuse). And if you make it human-based it doesn't scale and it is inconsistent (one man's "relevant historical facts", can be another man's "racist stereotypes").
dunno
whitelisting only works if recipient has a small known number of senders. As the recent and continuing SMS spam deluge demonstrates, it wastes much time blocking the multitude of fake numbers, even if Google do claim to help
The problem with social media is anonymity - enforce person-user relationship and lots of these problems go away.
^^ THIS ^^
As opposed to...
I can't tell the comments of Facebook and twitter apart from the vitriol that spews forth from Sky News. No chance that he would ever go after his mate Rupet.
"The platform must be held liable. If they enable the vice, they pay the price,"
This feels like a totalitarian in the making. Even a catchy jingle to sing while they protect you from all the enemies they told you about.
Unintended consequences
If they made FB liable for defamation in user posts, I might be persuaded to sign up. Just for the occasional bit of FB profit reduction now and then when I got bored. You could even start making "you-defame-me-and-I'll-defame-you" agreements with other people and both pocket the cash.
Re: Unintended consequences
You're obviously an idiot.
Your turn :)
One small step ...
My defamation is your truth ...
The press was on this publishing merry-go-round some years ago and it's a dangerous 'freedom of speech' tightrope to walk ...
One great problem is the lack of attribution to or acceptance of responibility by an individual or the company.
Perhaps if Facebook (for instance) split into carrier and publisher, the responsibility for individual posts could fall back onto defined individuals (where it should be), and extraeous 'published' material would be the responsibility of FB. Any untruths posted could be sorted out in court targetting the correct source. If nothing else decisions of law should be made by the court, not decided by a media company.
Re: One small step ...
1) It doesn't scale.
2) I don't want the courts interfering in my discussions with my friends.
The real problem is that FB & T have turned "chats down the pub" into "global opinion wars" by disseminating posts widely and pretty indiscriminately.
Postal
I guess the postal service is a good analogy, ‘we just deliver what folk post’. You don’t sign the letter - you’re anonymous. There are laws governing the letter contents, idk if they are the same as a fb message. But sending letters requires effort and FB trolls are a whimsical bunch, for a start you have to know what to put on the envelope. Perhaps it’s the financial cost of posting letters that puts people off, also probably more so it’s the effort and delay.
Anyway, this specific problem is trivially easy to solve - whitelist(allow list) corespondents: ‘you have a message from a new corespondent: ‘Anon Meanie’ would you like a preview of the message (it likely contains unfriendly content)? Or shall I bin it?’.