Australia Passes Law to Punish Social Media Companies for Violent Posts
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This isn’t just an issue for Australia, through the 5 eyes agreements, the encryption legislation is likely being used to assist other 5 eyes nations. And beyond that, other countries will be watching the results of this legislation.
I feel the global tech community needs to condemn this. And I think they should do so by raising concerns with employing of Australian tech workers, at least until the laws co-opting Australians to implement backdoors for the government are repealed or clarified. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19505880)
A federal election is about to be announced, which means there will be a vote in approximately 3 months. Technology will never be an election issue, but jobs & economy always are. If these laws can be shown to directly harm our economy, and the prospects for Australian tech works (jobs), it might actually get some traction.
The time is now. Keen to hear the community’s thoughts.
As an Australian tech worker... that would hurt. But I don't really see any other way to get them to listen either.
A tough sacrifice, but sometimes we must make sacrifices for our freedoms.
We have an election coming up. And given we have serious differences between the parties on critical issues e.g. climate change, inequality, health care I can't imagine this is going to factor in at all.
Not to mention that our IT sector is very limited compared to the UK, US, EU etc and so the impact will be negligible.
Not in Australia they don't. In a nation of 16 million voters the number of people working for a company that would lose its ability to operate due to this law likely number in the hundreds to perhaps a couple of thousand. Demands from that size/proportion of subsociety can be safely ignored by any government.
Additionally, most Australian tech companies deal in either B2B or other types of general management software. They won't be affected by this in the least.
>They just need get bigger balls
Facebook already has Australia by the balls. They don't need to do anything:
- If Australia blocks them, they instantly win because Australian society won't abide being denied access (especially the older segments who now suddenly have time to protest now that the website where they were spending most of their time is gone by government decree).
- If Australia has this law on the books, they win because it's harder for a homegrown Australian product to gain marketplace traction under these rules (while Facebook, not being subject to Australian law, doesn't need to obey them, and they're unblockable because of the earlier point- especially because HTTPS ensures that access to Facebook is an all-or-nothing affair).
And Australia can't develop a homegrown alternative either, because they simply lack have the skilled personnel to do it; the best ones already left for America, facilitated by a free-trade agreement between the two countries. The US Government has its policy levers to tweak if Australia wanted to renegotiate that deal to stem the bleeding from the brain drain their own policies and societal structure encourage (and they'd have to give up something else anyway).
We have nerdy then commercialised internet ... may not like but country level internet may be a reality one day.
As for job, as they have some kind of IT involved, some kind of job will be instead of export from USA.
I disagree entirely. There's enough energy in society to successfully push against this kind of abusive legislation.
We’re also notoriously politically anodyne. Pissing off technologists rarely results in the kind of political pain (protests, constant phone calls, constant questions at town halls, media blitzes and attack ads) that other constituents, including those supporting such laws, regularly rain down.
don't forget it's not just the workers too it's the end users
if they don't start making noise soon they better get used to operating environment of extremely heavy handed and reactionary legislation governing them ... no industry should want to be so politically vulnerable that in 5 days a parliament feels they can pass such imposing legislation without even effort to consult.
worse case scenarios politicans and major players in tech both feeel that they have reached point of growth that seeking comfortable protective and highly regulated legislative frameowrk to stem threat of competition from smaller entrants is beneficial and increase cost of entry new participants by such measures as this might be in self-interest. this is most dangerous scenario and why legislation that even let's assume has nothing but best intentions needs to be closely scrutinized and thorough industry and broader community consultation is a must.
If Australians are legally obliged to implement back-doors on behalf of the Australian government and not mention it to their employer, why would any of these tech companies want you?
You'd be a massive security liability to them.
I left Fastmail over the recent Oz decision with encryption. I was a paying customer since 2002. It pained me horribly to leave, but I had no choice over principle.
Other than diplomatic norms, once a person leaves a country, he is bound by the laws of the receiving country. I base this on common knowledge and also having lived in 5 countries myself.
Australia and New Zealand are rapidly becoming draconian. I have friends in both countries. They are thinking of leaving because of all of this. The entire knee-jerk reaction to guns in NZ is but the latest in a long line of stupidities the Kiwi and Aussie governments have been up to. For example, in NSW, if you have a knife painted green, you can go to jail because it's a "zombie knife". Think I'm joking? Look it up. The last "free" state in Oz is QLD. The rest of them are up to their necks in draconian stupidity.
You need a PR storm to gain political leverage comparable to what Rupert Murdoch can bring to bear.
Both major parties lost primary votes in NSW election last week despite winning. Whats to say it won't happen nationally? Despite the system allowing people to make sincere votes, the mainstream media are not talking about the policies of non major parties. So, it's up to us, 'tech workers' to inform others of alternative choices and let people know to not give a primary vote to the major parties.
There's at least one tech-oriented party that has been around since 2008, this is their policies platform https://pirateparty.org.au/wiki/Platform
Did you know a primary vote means money for that party? $2.75642 to be exact. Even if your vote did not lead your primary party to win, they would still get some money out of it.
The passage of this legislation has further closed the window for the big tech players to make the appropriate amount of noise about the anti-encryption legislation.
The opportunity was there a few months ago to blackout services to Australia with a heavily spun PR campaign about how if they can't serve Australians while respecting proper encryption, which has rightly become a major foundation of our digital communications, then they can't serve Australia at all.
The Australian govt. is mad if they think their usual "think of the children" schpeal tops the boomers generation's general ongoing emotional dependence on Facebook.com.
But we're far enough into the era of Big Tech now that the players with the most power don't give a fuck anymore about the internet's role as a potential enabler of The Good Parts of the western worldview (Facebook, being the outlier, never did and hardly pretended to).
Instead we have them being silent enough on anti-encryption legislation in Australia, and implementing censored search in China.
I think it's over.
But of course people like to complain but comes EU election the participation is small (and the distribution gets heavier with age)
Quick reminder for people to sign up and VOTE.
Now that the "evil" effects of social media have become painfully clear, frustrated governments around the world appear to be changing the law in hamfisted ways. The pendulum has swung in the other opposite extreme.
Perhaps now they'll start thinking about how they should be running their platforms. I don't feel any pity for the burden about to be dumped upon Facebook and Twitter. I believe freedom of speech will somehow prevail in the end, but it might take several painful years.
In principle, I'm quite okay with the scope of the censorship that's imposed by this legislation (which is quite narrow), and in general, I'm quite okay with the idea of holding social media platforms to account with the threat of massive penalties, when it comes to content that is obviously objectionable.
I think the fact that a pro-business Western government is willing to impose penalties of up to 10% of global revenue says something about the way we're beginning to view the place and the responsibilities of the big social media platforms.
I don't think I support this particular piece of legislation as a whole, but I am okay with much of the core idea behind it, and I wish they had done it properly and thoughtfully rather than rushing it. It's also clear that they're not going to do anything about improving regulation of problematic elements of the mainstream media.
(edit: I should add - I have given the text of the bill a skim read, and read some media commentary but not any serious expert or industry commentary on this. This is only a mildly-informed set of opinions.)
Totally agree. Hacker news should be punished for providing a platform for your obviously objectionable statements.
I am imagining that companies may come up with legal solution which uses technology in a way that puts this liability in the hands of the user (of course this would only happen if US follows a similar law).
This is nothing new. The internet was safe for a few decades because lawmakers hadn't caught up to it. Now it'll be just as fucked as everything else - or worse.
Also it is clearly fallacious to assume that the downward trend in violence is some kind of force of nature that won't be derailed by, for example, connecting a whole bunch of crazy people together across the world and helping them swallow their own perverse version of reality.
They're closer to a messenger than an accomplice.
> They are machines that optimise controlling your attention to show you ads so they can make money.
Who came up with that line? They definitely don't control my attention. Could it be that they just optimize capturing the attention of those who would otherwise consume other forms of digital media?
> Also it is clearly fallacious to assume that the downward trend in violence is some kind of force of nature that...
I never said it was, but a knee-jerk reaction to an anomalous event like this is obviously ignorant of trends. "Crazy people" (deemed by whatever "sane" minority) will always be connected/have the ability to connect provided they haven't already committed acts of violence and are locked away. Sure you can make it harder for them by enlisting private entities, but that undermines the market and places undue liability on the participants.
This is all blame shifting anyway. Why isn't the government held accountable here for allowing "crazy people" to be on the streets? Just think of all the things that can be used as a weapon!
If you use them, your attention is on it. If your attention is on it, they can show ads to you, and make a profit. "Controlling" may not have been the right word for your case, and many others on this site, but it stands for the majority of users. And the main point still stands.
They can't be wedged on the national security issue weeks/months before an election.
“Stop the bytes!”
Don't really understand why people are conflating it with the encryption law though, which is an absolute shocker for so many obvious reasons. It has clear foreseen consequences for the Australian tech industry.
Australia isn't obsessed with free speech like the US. You would find very very few people here comfortable with not removing ISIS videos 'expeditiously'.
Also don't see an issue with going after higher management in companies in addition to the companies themselves. Should happen more often for corporate malfeasance.
I guess the counter argument is the 'slippery slope' - first they go after ISIS/white supremacist videos, next it's someone who posted a video of police brutality or something like that. I say - we managed to ban assault weapons and bring in a gun licensing system over 20 years ago. It hasn't gone any further since. There was no slippery slope in this case. Suspect this will be much the same.
On this:
> I say - we managed to ban assault weapons and bring in a gun licensing system over 20 years ago. It hasn't gone any further since.
This is not true, actually. Your government is currently obsessed with "rapid-fire lever action guns" that are "almost as fast as semi-auto", and actively trying to ban them. Which is exactly the kind of slippery slope that was predicted with your original ban.
For another example, your police has recently banned a straight-pull bolt action rifle from importation. Which also happens to be a good example of the fact that your current system permits arbitrary reclassification of firearms by the executive with no legislative oversight - i.e. it's optimized for slippery slope.
Let’s assume that this is another step on the slippery slope that leads to a totalitarian Australian government. What recourse do we (aus citizens) have? I have tried the political route, and my calls and emails have simply not been answered by my representatives; I have tried to raise awareness in my peers, and Australians are simply the most politically apathetic group in western civilisation.
I could move to another country, but it seems that among all developed countries we are or will be seeing the same trend. I could move to an undeveloped country, but would be making a sacrifice in quality of life.
I genuinely cannot see a way out of this system, am I self-deluding?
The A&A bill was rushed through parliament at breakneck speed, after the examining committee ignored over 300 recommendations condemning the law; a process that on the whole was kept extremely quiet, and had next to zero media presence.
There is law and order yes, but whose?
I admit that I do not know much about Australia, but AFAIK you are not on a strategically important location right next to a much more powerful aggressive neighbor, there is no major economic crisis (think "we cannot get enough food" type, not "we can afford slightly fewer iPhones" type)... do you really have enough reason to think about moving to another country? Did any rich and independent country in history just "slipp" to totalitarianism? I am not saying you should not be cautious... but this feels out of proportion. Just my $0.02.
Facebook, in particular seems to be a cesspit...in fact I spoke to a colleague who is mentally fragile, and gets worked up by looking at extremist Facebook pages...
Add the other issues caused by social media, and it might be a blessing in disguise if they shut down.
Society is made up of people, and a significant number of these people use Facebook. I imagine they wouldn't be particularly happy if it was taken away from them. How do you feel when somebody suddenly decides to take away something you like because they believe they know better than you about what's good for you?
>Facebook, in particular seems to be a cesspit...
Your experiences of Facebook are not representative of everybody's. The people in my circle of friends use Facebook to post jokes and memes, and keep in touch with extended family. I can't see how you'd accidentally come across extremist content unless either you're looking for it or your friends post it, in which case shouldn't your friends be the one you take issue with for sharing it?
>in fact I spoke to a colleague who is mentally fragile, and gets worked up by looking at extremist Facebook pages...
Mental illness is a tragic thing, but taking away Facebook won't solve it. Mentally ill people are distressed by many kinds of social interaction; would you suggest banning them all?
>Add the other issues caused by social media, and it might be a blessing in disguise if they shut down.
What other issues exactly? Trump being elected? Not everybody considers than an issue, e.g. the people who voted for him, and it's certainly not settled science that he wouldn't have been elected without it. Obama also made heavy use of social media in his election campaign; maybe he wouldn't have been elected without it.
Personally social media has improved my life immensely, making it possible to keep in touch with people I'd otherwise have lost contact with completely. I can't be the only one. But I imagine on a social network like Hackernews you won't get a representative sample of the broader population, as engineers are more introverted on average, and introverts may get less value out of large social networks, digital or otherwise.
The person in question doesn't have many friends, and spends hours going down rabbit holes on FB and YouTube. He expresses some extreme views for someone at the stage of life he's in, that mirror the opinions he sees on Facebook, and he repeatedly makes borderline violent threats. He lacks the nous to understand the difference between trolling and genuine comment. He isn't distressed by Facebook as much as he is emboldened by what he sees as a like-minded community. If Facebook didn't exist, he wouldn't seek such information out, since he isn't a particularly active consumer of information. It seems to encourage craziness, as someone else here pointed out, by allowing people who would otherwise be isolated from each other to congregate and reinforce extreme views.
What other issues exactly? Trump being elected? Not everybody considers than an issue, e.g. the people who voted for him, and it's certainly not settled science that he wouldn't have been elected without it. Obama also made heavy use of social media in his election campaign; maybe he wouldn't have been elected without it.
No, I was referring to the links between social media and depression. But you can add to the list FB leaking personal information to political campaigns.
Replacements and workarounds would pop up almost instantly. I can speak from personal experience that leaving Google and Facebook only hurts at first (because migrating emails to new addresses and domains is always a pain), then it's like they were never even there.
Software engineers are professionals and they should have ethics exams, a board, and licenses like other professions. Since companies don’t have any incentive to do it by themselves, a board for software engineers will help. The board will be able to represent all software engineers at the legislature level and not act as lobbyist for one particular company.
But for now, we reap what we sow.
But I definitely think there's some role for professional bodies, with ethical codes, certifications, PD and all that, which programmers have traditionally resisted.
Unfortunately, the existing professional bodies are not that. The Australian Computer Society, to give one example, is more representative of corporate IT executives than of programmers, and I don't know anyone who is a member apart from those whose employers pay for it.
Waterfall can be an entirely valid management approach. If you're working on a system that is too complex or ill-defined to be documented, maybe find someone who is better at systems design than you[1] or re-think the system boundaries and try to narrow its scope.
Agile & co are just as difficult to pull off correctly if you have poor systems culture in your organization.
[1] The impersonal you; I don't mean this as an attack
We never will be a true profession until we have those things. Calling ourselves professionals now, or pretending like we are comparable in credibility to something like a civil engineer or an architect is just jerking each other off.
Would that have been considered "abhorrent violent material" under this law?
An example that might illustrate what you are considering could be a police officer murdering a civilian. The footage captured by their body-cam would be unable to be shown or shared. In this example, whether it was murder or not would be (likely) up for debate, but perhaps during a protest you agreed with, some people were killed. This would be a challenging situation for the law.
I'm having a hard time understanding why the person filming it makes a difference, if the goal is to gain attention and spread a message of hate / fear. This legislation, and the recent media focus on the video rather than the actual act itself, makes me uneasy.
Tech companies that are against this want to have their cake and eat it too.
They're already doing the same thing voluntarily, and it would create a moat: small competitors don't have the resources to have their own censorship department. Big internet platforms should welcome this, for giving them legal cover for some of their censorship. Instead, they complain because heaven forbid anyone interfere with their internal operations and their profiting from attention-capturing content.
The target is clearly things like the NZ shooter video, but it would also apply to things like ISIS videos, which are academically important and newsworthy. I would fully expect puritans to try to use this law against BDSM porn; there's always the claim that pornstars in that either aren't participating voluntarily, or the nature of the activity forecloses the possibility of valid consent.
At least if a government mandates this social media censorship, there is (theoretically) public accountability for the censorship criteria, and legal recourse if it gets expanded out of control. Currently, social media bans things whimsically based on whether they view the material as bad PR, or based on how many reports/flags it's received.
One might hope that with this kind of law, anything not legally banned would cease to be censored, and cease to be justification for being kicked off the platform; but I know that's probably not going to happen. Social media companies, even with this law, would keep up their extra-legal censorship.
[1] Direct link to the legislation (good stuff starts on pdf page 7): https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...
Glad we continue to support the competitive free market with forward-thinking legislation such as this. If Facebook wants to shut down my independent Australian social network by secretly paying people to spread violent propaganda on my platform until the government shuts me down in a war of attrition, that's their God-given right.
This hour lapse is why the video was so widely shared. In the Australian publics mind, as the perp was our citizen, we have a lot to answer for.
The livestream was purely to broadcast to his own people (see how he had the names of similar assaulters on the weapon), so the concept here is removing the platform that provides an incentive - in this situation - to do the deed.
Since the guy thrives on being noticed, NZ has actually barered photographs of him unpixalted from the 1st appearance in court. Today they announced total bans on photos and videos until further notice of him at the trial.
Bit of a long winded answer, but this is the link that a lot of the foreign commentary is missing. While the reach is wide of the legislation, there is no 'what about before the internet existed?' claims on how this tech makes things better. It was also considered when people used facebook live for suicide broadcasting.
Those names were actually the names of terrorist victims in recent attacks. I thought that was the case but I'm not 100% sure though, can't really check or find any source.
Given the amount of content posted on FB, 30 minutes from being reported to being reviewed doesn't strike me as unreasonably long. I mean, it's comparable to police response times, and in those cases, minutes can literally mean human lives.
There is an element of best of both worlds here. We want the tech to be able to distinguish a unique horror and prevent in ASAP but everything else should be OK. I totally get the counter arguments why people are strongly dissenting of this law and everything it stands for.
The best counter argument I heard yesterday was media. Why can TV show graphic details with a warning, but essentially now online journalism will only be able to write up text articles until someone takes the time to fine tune this legislation. There are so many unintended consequences being raised because it was a 3 day hatchet job of legislation and the process of doing this needs to stop.
Edit: I want to add, I personally believed this was a reining in the internet type of bill that had been speculated with recently. Now that I have heard industry bodies domestically speak about it, the intention of the law I still kind of agree with to an extent. The way it is written (and the gaps it has), how it is solidified and the way it came about is totally not OK.
legislation like this will force tech and give legal basis be more invasive on individual user privacy in order prevent, predict or minimize risk of costly 'offensive' content being posted. spill-over effect from more invasive privacy measures only benefit ad-tech.
> The legislation criminalizes “abhorrent violent material,” which it defines as videos that show terrorist attacks, murders, rape or kidnapping.
The title isn't semantically accurate. They mean material that depicts violence.
This is pretty ironic given Zuckerberg's recent request for more government involvement in regulating content on social media.
Anyway, I think this is a positive move. The government should start with an extreme policy, anything less and nothing will change. Social media businesses basically do whatever they like, and have monetised human attention and outrage without any regards to the consequences. Brexit, kids getting measles, what happened in Christchurch... it is pointless to run counterfactuals, but the probability that social media contributed to these events significantly is certainly not zero. Society needs to defend itself against these entities which don't have our best interests at heart.
Is it a well thought out legislation? Sure doesn't look like it. But then we aren't regulating schools or fresh air or hospitals, are we?
worse thing you can do is have your anger misdirected in thinking this legislation will serve to improve the situation. this is about control. this is not about addressing root cause of problems like brexit, trump, brazil, etc.
"What blame did I attribute to the victims? I said nothing of the sort," he told the Senate.
"I issued a media statement condemning the shooting and the shooter in the strongest possible terms.
"However, after putting the immediate blame where it belonged, I looked for contributing causes. I identified that immigration program that allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand was a key enabler of community violence.
"The claim that this somehow blames the victims is absurd, Mr President.
The hypocrisy and blind discrimination on display by an elected politician at the highest levels of Australian Government is a far more scary and far-reaching issue as far as I'm concerned. If a politician says those kinds of things it makes it OK for the communities that they represent to normalise that attitude.
In this instance the terrorist was an Australian. Allowing an Australian fanatic into New Zealand was the cause. If New Zealand was to have a knee-jerk reaction to this incident it should be to put greater restrictions and tighter background checks on Australians coming into the country, not muslims.
Good on the Senate for censuring his comments, but if laws need to be changed for social media responsibility then laws are well overdue for the responsibility of what politicians say in public and the anti-social attitudes they encourage.
You really cant run from human ignorance.