That's a clever trick.
Make the medium you want to censor a private property than it's legal.
FCC regulation of TV broadcast comes close, but apparently obscenity isn't protected under the First Amendment (perhaps you can tell I'm not a lawyer, or for that matter an American).
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr...
The obscenity exception was largely non-controversial until the 20th century, because there was a broad societal consensus, among both popular and elite opinion, that obscenity and pornography did not deserve First Amendment protection. It was only in the 20th century that societal consensus broke down, and it was in that context the US Supreme Court decided to reduce the scope of that exception. (It still exists, and is still occasionally enforced.) The original authors and ratifiers of the First Amendment supported laws against obscenity, and didn't believe the First Amendment prohibited them.
Ultimately the courts have to decide what laws mean, even constitutional laws – but they could always have given them more guidance, by being more explicit in the text about which exceptions are valid and which are not
There is probably at least a little truth to each of those, although I think many of them are also effects of central causes (e.g., religious control over common people's lives declined because of increasing incomes, which increased due in part to advances in communications tech).
I think this evades the spirit of the legal protections here, at least.
Note: I'm not disagreeing with you, and don't really have a solution here. Just pointing out how the current situation feels like dangerous territory.
Or, more generally: given how subjective ideas about acceptable speech are, the only real solution is to break up giant gatekeepers like Google.
just because a lot of people rely on the google play store doesn't mean it's a public service in the legal sense. It's a very private piece of software that is NOT open source and is very obviously owned and managed by a single entity.
just like you get to choose who you let in your house. they get to choose how their software is used.
side note: monopoly is a separate issue.
The first instance is property rights. The second is copyright, a privilege granted by the government at the expense of others' property rights. When a private party leverages copyright to conduct censorship it's ultimately the government that is responsible for violating the victim's freedom of speech. Google certainly has the right to grant or deny access to their services as they please, but that is not the same as having a natural right to decide how the software they develop is used after it has already been released to the public.
If they have shown the ability to control speech on their platforms section 230 should be repealed and Google etc should be responsible for the content on their property like any other publisher.
If there's anything that is an indisputable fact, it's that no high-volume platform with user content can proactively police their platform 100%. I think that's a silly rationale to say that they should be prohibited from manually policing content that is brought to their attention afterwards.
There is no reason to give these censorious companies extra legal protections no other publisher has if they are censoring society. They have been protected by a regulation that is now causing intense centralizing of power in the hand of a few technocrats and it is actively harmful to the rest of society to so empower them over everyone else.
It is operationally impractical that society should be subject to Google's whims but Google not liable for Google's network content.
Yes, there is a very good reason.
Traditional publishers review 100% of content before they affirmatively publish it.
User content on most websites are published by automation, and are not reviewed by humans, like this comment.
So what? They choose to publish it. They can choose not to. Their own internal business practices don't require society to give them loopholes with which they get out of all liability and abuse the rights of others.
It's a good reason to the publisher, its not a good reason for the rest of society.
Who chose what, exactly?
In western legal systems, laws typically take into account the mens rea of the crime that has taken place.
It is not reasonable to make people guilty by proxy. Someone either did the crime, or they didn’t.
If you own a building, and someone writes a bomb threat on a bathroom stall, are you guilty of a bomb threat?
If there is no crime in publishing the content then overturning special protections in section 230 will have no effect.
>If you own a building, and someone writes a bomb threat on a bathroom stall, are you guilty of a bomb threat?
If you have a magazine, and publish letters to the editor that contain bomb threats, yes. A building isn't a publishing business, and these companies are in the business of publishing, but it turned into publishing on computers and suddenly they get a special exemption.
They choose what goes on their platform, who can go on it, what is said. They've demonstrated amply their ability to control speech and enforce policy. Let them have their platforms, let them have the liability like everyone else.
It's all just equal treatment under the law.
I think that’s precisely what’s starting to be discussed now at national levels, with investigations into Apple, Facebook and Google in the EU and the USA.
In many countries, utilities are commercial entities, but they can’t refuse to serve customers because of what they say. I can see a future where we think the same of the big players on the web: commercial, but still public utilities.
Problem of course is that many countries also fear a completely open internet. Providers already have to filter pornography, hate speech, etc. So, would we end up with commercial entities that cannot filter the content published on their platform to suit their norms, but must filter it to suit the norms of the government? If so, would that apply to all sites, including, say, Hacker News, or pro- or anti-abortus sites, or just to large ones? If so, what’s ‘large’?
>> The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses to both present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC's view—honest, equitable, and balanced. The FCC eliminated the policy in 1987 and removed the rule that implemented the policy from the Federal Register in August 2011.
But who decides what's true? And why should we let them? Majority consensus is an easy answer, but we'd need something else if we were to regulate truth at a level we could enforce on journalists.
I'm personally more worried about that question spiraling out of control than I am about offering equal air time.
What it means is not news, thats opinion.
Seems to me around the time that it was ended there were several other things going on.
The advent of cable news networks which gave a massive incentive to sensationalism and strong partisan ties as multiple players joined the space with a need to create a sustainable viewership.
Satellite feeds became common ensuring a single message instead of having a layer of abstraction in the form of a local or regional newscaster; instead of relaying facts, they can relay a highly opinionated version.
Local and independent news stations were being purchased and consolidated into national telecom companies with their own partisan editorial bends, a la Nexstar and Sinclair.
I have to believe that all of the above had a much greater influence on news discourse in the past few decades than the elimination of the fairness doctrine. Furthermore, if you give government the power to regulate anything; always expect the current party in power to use that regulation as a weapon. Can you imagine what our leaders would do given even more power to control and manipulate the media narrative? Ending this was a good decision.
On TV or radio, you can only have so many stations. But with the internet, people can make a new web site and publish there, they're not limited by the available spectrum. Therefore, the kind of regulation that was needed in a constrained environment (broadcasted TV/Radio), does not really make sense when those constraints are lifted.
As for alternatives, I think we just need people to collectively decide that some other platform (ideally a decentralized one) is better than the incumbent. Facebook depends on its inertia. Suppose every Facebook use went cold turkey and switched to something else instead (let's say Mastodon for the sake of argument). In a year, nobody would be talking about Facebook's monopoly.
Where I think things get sticky right now, though, and I'll even say -the- reason we haven't seen innovation in social media, is that incumbents on the scale of Facebook have the capital sufficient to either buy or sue any plausible competition into the ground before the competition has a chance at taking their market share. Imagine a world where Facebook had been blocked from burying Instagram and WhatsApp with money!
I think I would be in favor of greater regulation against these winner-takes-all tactics on a more economic level, although exactly how that regulation would work in a way that was both fair and non-trivial to evade I don't know.
There is only profit. The moment you become unprofitable for whatever reason you will lose everything. If tomorrow 51% of the world decided they hated left-handed people they would all find their accounts disabled, their website registrations suspended, their entire online presence forced into secrecy.
So far that's only happened, to my knowledge, to terrorists and white supremacists, but there is absolutely no legal reason why it can't happen to anyone else.
speaking of shutting off water, this is happening in meatspace too: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/los-angeles-mayor-eric-g...
The real world contains public spaces. It contains within it the recognition that some part of all of this around us, belongs to everyone.
And while that has been the center of much of the rhetoric about the internet since its inception, that rhetoric has never actually been true IN FACT. It's a mishmash of private entities controlling their piece of the puzzle.
I think, as another poster mentioned, if democracy is to survive, the concept of "some part of the internet and its services are a public good" must take hold.
Now, that's a scary-ass thing to say because unlike a piece of land, or drinking water, these things don't just "exist". They exist only as long as some entity pays for them, which means that such a statement implies things about who pays (government? subsidies? you pay but it isn't yours? special kinds of taxes?).
And yet I think avoiding dystopia requires going that way. I have no idea what it would look like.
Of course, there's an alternative.
Google/Twitter/FB/etc. can agree that they don't censor anyone unless that person breaks the law. That puts the discussion right back where it should have been in the first place: In the public, political sphere, where The People have the ability to influence the outcome.
But then, why would Google etc. do that? Too enticing, all that power.
Private companies can't censor "bad opinions"
But private companies can also arbitrarily refuse service for say, making a "gay wedding cake"
How is this disconnect rationalized?
couldn't agree more. it's so frustrating seeing this everywhere online. this isn't twitter, you can write as much as you want. I read comments online to try and understand other viewpoints, and I can't do that without substance.
The first hypocrisy is the defense of the right of a business to make arbitrary decisions w.r.t. service (not bake the cake), while simultaneously demanding that the business not have the power to refuse service (condemning private censorship).
The reverse position is not hypocritical in the same way, because condemning discrimination against customers on LGBT grounds is not at odds with censoring discriminatory speech - in fact, the two positions are aligned.
You could try to argue that private censorship is itself a form of discrimination, but most people who hold the second position would not concede that the people who practice hate speech are a minority worthy of protection - so for them, no discrimination is occurring.
If [large social media platform] doesn't want that kind of content, it's not unreasonable to simply make one to soak up that "ignored" market segment. Reddit can't shut you down for hosting your own internet forum for instance
I get why one might want to do that, but I don’t think it’s the right precedent to set.
I've thought about this statement for about a half hour now. What does it mean? That punishing individuals for ignoring public health mandates is a precedent we don't want? Or is it just the 'utility' being used that is problematic for you?
I don't get it.
It would be cruel and unusual to deprive a prisoner of water because they have no other means of attaining it when you withhold it. Turning off city water service to a property is different. The property owner has other options they can take to get the water they need to stay alive.
This also strikes me as abuse of power, one must not suffer arbitrary and random punishments. Whats bext, we will start cutting internet access to everyone who swears on the street, disabling electriciry to anyone who protests?
he's ineffective with the power he has, can't get the homeless off the streets, can't build housing or make it affordable, can't improve educational outcomes, can't reduce unemployment and underemployment, has no real empathy for regular people (despite his emotion-laden language, and spanish!), and yet he wants to reach into our private lives and coerce behavior at the margin (saying this despite wholly agreeing that house parties are a terrible idea right now, but let's persuade, not force, and have a dialogue).
the irony is that angelenos have been an exceedingly compliant group to his orders, adhering to both lockdown and _outdoor_ mask mandates at upwards of 95%. even if some of that is social signaling, that's startlingly high, making any a dictator proud. and yet he wants more.
This is true enough for Reddit. It's far less true of the Play Store, because the platform (controlled by the same people as the store) throws up scary warnings if you try to install any other store so that almost nobody uses them, and on the only other major phone platform third party stores are prohibited outright. Which means to get your users to follow you, you don't just have to get them to visit a different website, you have to get them to replace their phone with one from a different hardware vendor, switch operating systems, and replace all of their other apps -- if that's even possible for them.
And what when the only two platforms both do the same thing? It's obviously not feasible for an individual app developer to create their own phone platform and hardware and get everyone to switch to it.
The basic thesis of my analogy was "you want 'free speech' forced upon private companies, but also want to allow them the freedom to dictate what content they allow under their 'brand'"
Hypocrites are not limited to specific groups, they're universal.
The difference is in the legal definition of protected class. It is illegal to discriminate against someone based on their membership of a protected class -- ethnicity or disability for instance.
Removing an opinion or banning a user based on violation of an agreed upon term of service is not the same thing. Having an opinion does not make you a member of a protected class, and a private corporation is free to allow you or disallow you from use of their services to broadcast that opinion. Newspapers have been doing this since the dawn of print. Google could not, for example, ban someone for being Jewish.
You can argue about whether sexual orientation deserves status as a protected class, but it is disingenuous to claim that the two are the same thing under the law. It is a false equivalency.
Let's maybe spell out separately whether or not these two situations are equivalent or not a) legally, b) ethically, c) in principle.
a) As I stated in the argument about the difference between discrimination against protected classes versus hosting content on a private server, I'd say that legally, these are not equivalent.
b) Ethically is an interesting question. Since the ethics of denying someone service based on their sexual orientation is largely viewed as reprehensible, maybe a better question would be whether or not (freed from questions of protected class) the baker would decorate a Nazi themed cake versus allowing federated apps that are largely used for the dissemination of white supremacist ideology to be hosted?
c) In principle, I'd say they are not equivalent for the following reason: selling and decorating a cake is a business transaction between two entities. The cake (decorated or not) ownership moves from producer to consumer. The consumer is purchasing a physical cake. If the cake is ever made public, it is at the behest of the purchasers of the cake, and any consequences of that public display will be suffered by the purchaser. Essentially, the baker's name is not on the cake, and no one needs to know.
Hosting apps or other contents affects the reputation of the hosting company, and damages to their business reputation fall on it. Think about Facebook being recognized as a conduit for foreign interference in U.S. elections, or whether or not the New York Times will accept ad content from an adult video company. The name on the masthead is the entity that suffers the damage first.
Have you ever heard the term "strawman"?
People were fine when they were deleting spam and had a limited content restriction policies against things like directly promoting violence or posting gore/cp and other obvious tier stuff.
I haven't heard many people pushing for governments to force Google et al to not be able to delete things from their platforms either - outside of some tiny fringes who don't understand how the internet works.
Which is therefore still consistently pro-freedom. Likewise compelled speech + censorship of an arbitrary and ever expanding list of wrongthink is consistently authoritarian.
I really don't see the contradiction in either of these worldviews.
It's the classic centralized top-down puppet-mastery of individuals choices vs embracing the chaos of freedom of individual choice (within some limited boundaries). This battle has been waged for as long as society has been around and is a natural side-effect of power structures.
Both situations boil down to freedom of speech. Both have extra, specific laws that deal with their situations. Without a well thought out justification, a mismatch between the position on those is likely hypocritical, no matter which you are for or against. A well thought out positions may not be, but I don't think most people actually have a well thought out opinion on the intricacies of how these intersect, and what it means, and instead fall back on what they would like to be able to do in that situation, or on their impression based on the way it was presented to them (I think it far more likely contextual presentation is to blame for some of this than actual reasoning). It does little good to point out the hypocrisy of some group on a specific issue when that form of hypocrisy is widespread and rampant. We should also point out the cause of the hypocrisy itself.
The cake example specifically is more subtle (legally), since there's an argument that the cake is custom. I think this gets very tricky legally, but on the broader point, it isn't hypocritical to say censorship based on concept is okay, but based on speaker is not.
I don't know. I think that depends on how acceptable you think it is to censor based on the Islamic religion, or the idea of homosexuality, even if you think censoring Muslims and homosexuality is not. At what point does censoring discussing about homosexuality become censoring homosexuals? I'm sure some people would say immediately, and to them, there's no difference between censorship based on show they are and what they feel or believe?
That's why I say it requires a very well thought out argument. I can be convinced that it isn't hypocritical to distinguish these (I'm exploring my thoughts on this subject, I don't have extremely held opinions on it, other than that it's complicated), but nobody has to be satisfaction yet.
Let me give you an example: It is acceptable to enforce the rule that laws cannot favor Islam. It is not acceptable to enforce that Muslim individuals cannot hold positions in government.
The first is discrimination based on content, the second is discrimination based on, let's call it character.
> It is acceptable to enforce the rule that laws cannot favor Islam.
That's not even about censorship, so I'm not sure how it applies.
Again, this is why I think it's important to have a well thought out argument, otherwise it may be hypocritical. I'm not even pushing a different side, I'm just trying to get you to articulate specifically why these two things are different, and pointing to examples doesn't do that at all. It's just a list of value judgements that you assume someone else will agree with without providing the rational behind those judgements (presumably believing it's self evident).
If someone cannot distinguish why two separate situations are different but states as fact that they are, then they are being hypocritical, whether those situation are different or not. Nobody should be stating things as fact that they can't explain. Being hypocritical has nothing to do with the truth, it has to do with knowledge, actions and beliefs.
I'd argue that political action is a form of speech, so laws that prevent certain kinds of political action are speech. How do you draw the distinction between a law, which you're arguing isn't speech, and political donations which are, at least under the law today, a form of speech. I'm claiming these are all the same thing, because you can't draw a non-arbitrary line between a congressperson addressing congress and a congressperson drafting a bill and me asking a congressperson to draft a bill. They're all speech. You're free to disagree with that framing, but that is how I view speech. It's for this reason that I also don't agree with the common-in-the US excuse of "it's just speech so it can't hurt anyone", or similar. The only difference between your "just speech" and a law is who is willing to listen to the speaker.
Now, you can claim that we're talking about government representatives, so things are different, which may or may not be true, but I'll accept that. Perhaps people who have more authority should be given less freedom, an interesting tradeoff. But let's ignore the government entirely and just discuss what makes the two situations distinct.
So, it clearly isn't okay to censor Muslims, because that rule cannot be fair/equally applied. It will, by definition, be discriminatory against individuals, which seems to be the bad thing we want to avoid (or maybe I'm wrong and you're okay with discriminating against individuals?). However, censoring certain topics may be done without discriminating against individuals. It applies equally, for example, to a Muslim person wanting to extoll Islam and to a Christian wanting to demonize it.
If we bring this full circle: preventing Muslims from speaking ensures that they will not be represented [in the discourse, in the government, whatever]. This can, realistically, only be harmful to them. Banning discussion of Islam certainly has the capacity to be harmful to them, but also has the capacity to not be harmful to them (for example if the discourse is full of demonization of Islam, perhaps banning discussion of Islam is a net-gain for individual Muslim people).
Obviously this requires, like, an actual fair moderator, and it raises a bunch of tricky questions (like is the meta-discussion of whether it should be acceptable to discuss Islam, itself an acceptable discussion?), but it isn't, call it, implicitly harmful.
tl;dr: Removing people from discourse cannot be beneficial to those people. Removing concepts from discourse depends.
> How do you draw the distinction between a law, which you're arguing isn't speech, and political donations which are, at least under the law today, a form of speech.
No, it's not about censorship because it's not preventing speech, it's about ensuring equality. It's fundamentally different in the same way a law that gives a right is different than a law that prevents an action. There's a fundamental difference between reduction of something (or the increase of other things to match) and the elimination of something.
> discriminatory against individuals, which seems to be the bad thing we want to avoid (or maybe I'm wrong and you're okay with discriminating against individuals?).
Well, I did just say in the prior comment "We can agree it's not okay to censor based on an individual", so I'm not sure why it needs to be a question...
> However, censoring certain topics may be done without discriminating against individuals.
And censoring the types of cake you make may not affect individuals either, if it's over something like your dislike for dogs. Let's assume both cases affect individuals. If you think it fundamentally changes what the argument is to restrict the web services side to items that affect individuals, then that points towards some ambiguity in the phrasing of the things being compared on one or both sides. That's progress.
> for example if the discourse is full of demonization of Islam, perhaps banning discussion of Islam is a net-gain for individual Muslim people
I think we're on shakier ground if we're justifying specific actions based on perceived public opinion and actions, because that's extremely subjective. What one person views as fair and rational discourse on a topic another views as lies and slander (dog whistles are a thing, as is being accused of dog whistling when honestly requesting information).
> Obviously this requires, like, an actual fair moderator
That doesn't exist. By the nature of the items we're discussing, I think there's a good chance it might be impossible to exist. The fair moderator of today is the one seen as blatantly biased in the discussions of tomorrow. Social mores change.
> tl;dr: Removing people from discourse cannot be beneficial to those people. Removing concepts from discourse depends.
Does it? What's a concept that being removed from discourse is beneficial? I think this is a very subjective point, and can't be taken at face value. There are some people that believe no concept should be entirely taboo. Those people actually wrote our Bill of Rights.
While I agree that removing a subgroup of people from discourse is generally not beneficial to those people, I will note it's generally agreed that it's sometimes beneficial for society. That's what we do with criminals. It may be that it being okay for some groups and not others means the way you group (the attributes that make the protected classes) matters most here.
Why would you ever want to ignore Google in this situation? Unless you don't want to earnestly debate the real topic?
Their size, control, and the fact they run massive platforms for publishers to post content, whose consumers often can post their own content, with multiple centrally controlled areas for control for hundreds of millions of people at any moment, makes it pointless to ignore such important context and semantics.
Debating the role of these major gatekeepers at a cultural, rational, and moral level - in the context of the position which they actually hold in society - is an entirely valid, and essential to any useful arguments.
Just because there are some weak analogies to governmental constitutions, or small business's/independent publisher's/individuals website's freedom to choose what people post directly on their site/app, doesn't mean it's a useful position to judge what self-imposed limitations should be employed by major monopolistic companies who run entire portions of the internet.
Great power requires great responsibility.
The difference here is basic common sense.
The fact people keep resorting to these reductionist analogies, ignoring critical context and arguing from positions of fundamentally different levels of power/responsibility, in order to push some pro-censorship and expansive moderation of speech, shows the weakness in these arguments.
If you need to ignore significant amounts of context to make your points then you're being deceitful, whether intentionally or not.
I'd go even further to argue this intentional ignorance of context and semantics is a fundamental tactic used by pro-censorship activists - despite the fact context and intention are fundamental to almost all human communication, verbal or otherwise.
At a more local level it's commonplace for these activists to ignore the obvious intention and context of the speaker, and critically the tastes and tolerances of the specific audience itself - who are entirely voluntary consumers. Making whole words, phrases, and concepts totally off limits, regardless if it was used in intentionally and rationally derogatory or offensive ways.
It's basically intentionally missing the forest for the trees. All for some vague greater good. No matter how many false-positives, unintended side-effects, misunderstandings, or wasteful side-shows it creates.
Because presumably Google isn't special and doesn't lave laws and ethics that apply only to them? I'm trying to distill the issue to its essence.
> The fact people keep resorting to these reductionist analogies, ignoring critical context and arguing from positions of fundamentally different levels of power/responsibility, in order to push some pro-censorship and expansive moderation of speech, shows the weakness in these arguments.
If you think I'm doing that then you're making a lot of assumptions about what I was trying to communicate and why I commented, and you're way off base.
I'll make it clear, just because I pointed out a fault I see in a position doesn't mean I subscribe to the traditionally opposed opinion, it just means I'm willing to point out faults as I see them.
Additionally, hypocrisy doesn't care how correct one argument is over another. It's entirely possibly for someone to be a hypocrite and correct. We have a situation where some people believe A is okay and B is not, and some people believe A is not okay but B is okay. Unless they can actually distinguish why A and B are different, both groups of people are hypocrites, because they're either regurgitating someone else's opinion, or they're speaking before they understand what they're talking about. Whether one side or the other is "right" doesn't matter, hypocrisy isn't about correctness, it's about using the same knowledge and convictions to come to the same desired outcome with similar facts. Without the knowledge to distinguish between situations, how can someone be so sure that they differ?
And that's before we even go to the fact that there's actually four possible combinations of those attributes, not the two that have been presented so far (both negatively), and that the "right" way to view this is one of those.
A social liberal could argue on the point of protecting the rights of a marginalized minority. By censoring (for example) calls for violence, social liberals are protecting the safety of the targeted group. By requiring a cake shop to serve gay couples (or interracial couples, to throw in another example), social liberals are protecting a marginalized minority's access to services.
Now, I'd boycott the hell out of such an establishment, but as an abstract argument, I think compelled expression is a bad idea. It's really not that huge a step from compelled expression to re-education camps.
Twitter's service isn't that they write 140 character prose for you, and YouTube's service isn't that they create videos to your specification. It would be hypocritical to demand that YouTube be forced to create a custom video to your specifications (or a ghost writer forced to write a book for someone with whom they disagree) and yet the cake shop shouldn't be forced to write two same-gendered names on a cake. These people arguing against forced cake lettering aren't arguing for forced book creation or forced video creation.
Once again, refusing to make a gay wedding cake makes you a jerk and worthy of boycotting, but there is a consistent argument to be made simultaneously against forced expression and against forced silence.
Are we talking normal wedding cakes, that you can buy from nearly any baker, with some ordinary decorations, that just have two men's names instead of one men's name and one woman's name after the "Congratulations", and have two mass-produced little plastic men on top instead of one little plastic man and one little plastic woman?
Or are we talking something you'd get from a baker like Duff Goldman, which is a custom designed and made unique work of art specifically for you that captures the artist's interpretation of your wedding, and inherently is an act of speech on the part of the artist?
I don't believe he has a problem selling cakes to anyone, just that he refused to design cakes with themes.
Allowing speech on your speech platform is not the same thing as compelling others to speech.
Likewise, if you say you're a webhost, you host websites.
If there's a legal issue, you report it. That's it.
Google is arguably in a monopolist situation. If they block your app or opinion, you're silenced.
The constitution doesn't apply to a location or a medium, it applies to an actor: the US government (and state/local subdivisions). The US government has to follow it everywhere, and nobody else has to follow it anywhere.
Americans do tend to run around quoting their first amendment rights like the whole world has them. As you say, it's strictly a US government thing.
While Australia for the most part enjoys free speech, it is not enshrined in the (AU) constitution. The government will occasionally order censorship[1], usually around whistle-blowing, investigations and court cases.
There was a protest in the major Australian papers last year about the erosion of press freedoms[2].
[1]:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/world/australia/australia... [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50119559