Millions of dollars in fines to punish online misinformation under new draft bill
Millions of dollars in fines to punish online misinformation under new draft bill
Online platforms spreading misinformation and disinformation could face millions of dollars in penalties under new proposed federal government legislation that bolsters the power of Australia's media watchdog.
![Millions of dollars in fines to punish online misinformation under new [Australian] draft bill](https://lemmit.online/pictrs/image/3824d946-aa5d-4de2-99cd-ef09a085b629.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)
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Who gets to decide what is true?
It will work like this :
The Department of Communication, or anyone else will make a complaint to ACMA, and they will then make a ruling on it and pass it to the Dept of Communication.
Regardless of the ruling, the minister for Communication will then issue fines if he/she considers that it is "misinformation".
The recipient can ask for a court ruling, but the court can only rule on whether the minister has complied with the law, not whether it is misinformation.
BTW, the ABC has started with a lie ; the law will apply not only to social media, but also search engines, websites and BBSes.
@[email protected] , @[email protected]
The ACMA would also be able to request the industry to develop a "code of practice" covering measures to combat misinformation. Violating the code could result in penalties up to $2.75 million dollars or 2 per cent of global turnover — whichever is greater.
And lastly, the ACMA would be empowered to create and enforce its own industry standard. Penalties for breaching the standards could see companies paying up to $6.8 million or 5 per cent of their global turnover.
Read the actual draft bill here
This is actually pretty reasonable (with regard to the corporate players). All it says is the industry has to develop a code of best practice and try to follow it, and keep records of what they're doing to follow the industry code when ACMA come asking. ACMA may make a standard if the industry fail to create a code, or if the code is insufficient.
ACMA wont be dealing in individual cases here. They're trying to put the onus on the industry to do all the work. Apart from possibly annual reporting, ACMA are only going to take action if somewhere becomes a cesspool of misinformation.
What is worrying is that this will apply to Lemmy too. @lodion Thoughts? We'll probably fly under the radar as we're (currently) fairly inconsequential. But will this still be worth it to you if you have to keep to a code of practice, records, etc that he big players get to write.
I don't see how it wouldn't apply to Lemmy, since the exposure draft expressly includes 'content aggregation services.'
What's not clear is who would be liable for potential breaches. All the liability seems to fall on the 'digital platform provider' meaning ' a person who provides a digital platform service.' That's easy to determine for a centralised corporate entity like Reddit or Twitter, but who is providing Lemmy? Is it the person who owns the server? It doesn't seem broad enough to include mods.
Definitely apply to Lemmy. But Lemmy isn’t a website itself. It’s more like a protocol. So each server owner will be responsible. I didn’t think to look and too late at night for me now, but I wonder how the law would work with federation. Is Aussie.zone only responsible for the local communities or is each site responsible for their All streams. I suppose that’s a benefit of being able to defederate. And the mainline Lemmy communities seem really good in this regard.
I’d more worry about keeping to the industry code of practice and the record keeping aspects and being in breach that way.
Excellent question!
https://www.acma.gov.au/ would have the power to go after an organisation for publishing it, so effectively them.
I don't have a problem with this in principle, I would just want there to be some caveats in it.
Conspiracy theories spreading on Facebook are a problem that Facebook needs to step up and help address, but that doesn't mean I think they should be held liable every time a cooker posts nonsense.The most important question of all. If you look at all the massive corruption scandals that FriendlyJordies has exposed on youtube over the last 5 years, it's not hard to see that this will be immediately misused to silence the voices of people like him who are out there shining light on government corruption and political wrongdoing.
It's effectively a ministry of truth on our own shores: they decide what is true and what is untrue on any given day. I realise we've had massive issues here being infiltrated by hard-right whackjob 'not news' services spreading rubbish, but any time you try to legislate an arbitrator of 'truth', you are just opening the door to thought control and potentially hiding dirty deeds that should be brought to light.
I am not in favour of this at all. I'd rather deal with my relatives becoming Qanon'd than have the government decide on consensus reality. They can't even understand an issue as simple as vaping.