Australia to impose digital duty of care on tech companies to reduce online harm

From the article:

Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland explained why the government was planning to introduce a digital duty of care: "What’s required is a shift away from reacting to harms by relying on content regulation alone, and moving towards systems-based prevention, accompanied by a broadening of our perspective of what online harms are."

This is a positive step forward and one aligned with other jurisdictions around the world. [..]

The digital duty of care will require tech companies to regularly conduct risk assessments to proactively identify harmful content. This assessment must consider what Rowland called “enduring categories of harm”, which will also be legislated. Rowland said these categories could include: -harms to young people, -harms to mental wellbeing, -the instruction and promotion of harmful practices, -other illegal content, conduct and activity.

So extremely broad and open-ended requirements that will allow the government to punish any speech platform they don't like, force them to install government-approved apparatchiks to key positions, and this of course gets nothing but glowing praise by the article.

Speaking of apparatchiks, the article is written by Lisa M. Given, Professor of Information Sciences & Director, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform, RMIT University. Such a highly-credentialed expert could not bring herself to mention a single drawback of the proposed vague and far-reaching censorship framework. In fact the article doesn't include a single instance of the word "free speech" or "censor". Because censorship is bad, but "preventing harm" is good.