The government is trolling us with its anti-troll bill – The Sydney Morning Herald

The Prime Minister pitched a new Social Media (Anti-Trolling) Bill 2021 as a way to keep people safe online. The bill that has been proposed will do little to achieve that. It isnt about safety at all. It is about defamation law.

In some dramatic respects, it undermines the ability of people who have their reputation harmed to get a positive outcome through defamation law.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, rebranding as Meta.Credit:AP

For one thing, it would undo the High Courts judgment in the case of Dylan Voller, which found that media companies were the publishers of defamatory material posted to their social media pages by members of the public and so potentially liable for damages. A by-product of the Voller case was that media companies now needed to take a more active role in moderating comments, or turning them off, to avoid defamation liability. It made social media safer for the people being trolled. This new law would undo that.

It would also undo the ability to sue an online platform, such as Facebook, to prevent it profiteering from a business model that harms reputation. Under current law, platforms can be sued but have defences if they are unaware of the content. Those defences would be replaced with effective immunity under the proposed law.

Why is the government gifting American multinationals rights that arent enjoyed by other Australians? If you publish someone elses defamation, you wont have immunity.

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The introduction of a complaints resolution process for social media is a good thing, and a long time coming. (Academic Kim Gould argued for small-claims dispute resolution for defamation in 2018.) Increasingly, as a UTS report showed in 2017, defamation litigation is between normal people rather than public figures or media companies. A complaints-resolution process would encourage regular punters who dont want to spend money on lawyers to solve fights themselves. That part of the legislation could be salvaged while other parts should be thrown in the bin.

It could be fairly argued that compelling individuals to reveal their identities online, as proposed this legislation, would lead to censorship and oppression of minority voices. It may have a chilling effect on reports of corporate and government misconduct, and allegations of a #MeToo nature, if the people raising the alarm are forced to identify themselves. Perhaps that was the point.

A weird part of the legislation is the ability to obtain unmasking orders from the Federal Court to identify the real humans behind complaints. We can already seek to unmask trolls by various court orders, in some cases subpoenas and, in others, a special kind of injunction called a Norwich Pharmacal order. The weirdness of the proposal is also reflected in its undermining of a law-reform process led by the states that had been running for years. I attended a roundtable meeting led by the NSW government on this very issue just months ago. The experts have seemingly been ignored, except for those lobbying for Facebook et al and Newscorp.

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The government is trolling us with its anti-troll bill - The Sydney Morning Herald