Digital rights and privacy advocates have vented their frustration at the federal Government’s slow progress in reining in social media companies amid harms such as disinformation, radicalisation and the decline of public interest journalism. Source: Canberra Times.
“Only hard laws can achieve accountability in a digital platforms market,” Reset Tech Australia executive director Alice Dawkins told a parliamentary inquiry hearing on Wednesday.
“Social media companies have some of the best lawyers and lobbyists in the world and have done a brilliant job at creating a state of exception from the ordinary reach of laws.”
Peter Lewis, founder of Per Capita’s Centre of the Public Square, told the joint select committee on social media and Australian society that ministerial and department responsibility for tech platforms was too fragmented.
He called for one senior minister to be given “overriding responsibility [to] protect platform accountability, or at least more coordinated internal process to look at these reforms as a package”.
Mr Lewis said he was fed up with the slow progress on reform, five years after the ACCC Digital Platforms Inquiry.
Most of the ACCC’s 23 recommendations designed to “address the monopoly power of these businesses” had been left to gather dust, he said.
In the meantime, he said, harm from social media companies had escalated, questioning their ongoing role in public discourse.
FULL STORY
Advocates vent frustration at ‘fractured’ govt response to wrangling social media (By Dana Daniel, The Canberra Times)
