As is common in political shenanigans, the draft bill has a euphemistic label ('algorithmic opt-out') - what it actually does is allow unspecified bureaucrats such as the Minister for Communications to designate any individual piece of content as 'harmful' and have it banished from the internet.
As an Australian who just wants relatively free access to information (and the ability to freely/easily discuss it), it's frustrating.
And it's not the first time the Australian government has done this; last year they banned U16 from social media, several weeks later everyone was alerted to Bondi by... social media.. so they could get the heck out of there, but U16... they were left clueless and unable to get updates (news sites ran 30+ minutes behind real-time events and official sites like NSW Police took 70+ minutes to even announce there was a shooter).
Thanks. Reading it at first seemed like “the people” here is you know, end users, people toggle some settings on their devices, not a government employee deciding. It turns out a government employee doing it. Yeah, just because US government is goofy doesn’t somehow make others sane or good.
Can you elaborate how this might be different than laws in Germany that disallow certain speech around white supremacy? Or laws that disallow violent rhetoric?
Not everyone wants to live in a society where the American form of limited free speech is the accepted societal norm. Australia can choose its own views, so can France, and Britain, and Turkey, and China. It's not a colony of the us.
It should be no problem to call things by their name (censorship) then.
Censorship is the government suppressing information. If people actually believe that this is how things should be, let the government introduce official “censorship bills” and call publicly for “additional censorship measures”.
The fact that they aren’t doing that demonstrates that they feel the need to hide what they are really doing, which speaks of an inherent wrongness that has nothing to do with a US/non-US culture divide.
"Disingenuous" implies someone is doing something on purpose. Anyone calling a Minister an unelected bureaucrat is just mistaken - obviously a minister isn't an unelected bureaucrat. They're an elected bureaucrat.
That said, whoever this Anika Wells woman is the law looks like a bad idea and it is nice that the US has found it in their interests to say something helpful.
Yeah, nah, the Australian right has been casting pro-Palestinian speech as anti-semitic.
In the States, the right has been supportive of government suppression of speech, including the communications agency (FCC) threatening broadcasters into cancelling an interview with a politician in the opposition party. The right's free speech record is far worse in the US and Australia.
Admittedly, neither side of the aisle have good free speech practices in most of the rest of the world.
Because being “pro-plaestine” is the wrong attitude when it comes to middle eastern conflict. You need to be anti-war”.
Being “Pro Palestine” would mean a reverse “genocide” because it would mean Jews would have to be removed from their homes in the area, using violence, which means mass numbers of innocent people being affected. Not sure why people struggle to understand that it’s not a football game wheee you “pick a side”?
Not all people who live in Israel are bad people with genocidal tendencies ?
It’s precisely my point. Those people will have to learn to live side, and it’s not going to happen when people are taking sides, buying into propaganda etc.
Like I said, it’s not a football game where you run around Sydney with your face painted screaming “from the river to the sea” it will solve nothing.
The Right/Republicans have always touted free speech. They love getting their hate out.
The Left have always been a bit more 'censory', generally because of their bleeding hearts on behalf of the minorities that are the targets of the Right's exercising of their free speech.
Such is my understanding. I don't really mind either stance, with the caveat that anything 'censory' has a chance of having it's definitions expanded (and admittedly, this is succumbing to the slippery slope fallacy).
> The Right/Republicans have always touted free speech.
> The Left have always been a bit more 'censory'
Not "always", and not even now. It's always contingent and situational. Same goes for nearly every clause in the Bill of Rights.
At various points the left has been associated with the fights against obscenity laws, against Cold War loyalty oaths, against blacklisting, against bans of books.
At various points the right has been associated with the fights against desecration of the American flag, against the teaching of human evolution in schools, against depictions of sex in media, against anti-war demonstrations.
... right wing freedom of speech is defined with a simple rule.
you're allowed to say anything you want as long as bari weiss determines that you are sufficiently zionist and wont say anything that isnt zionist enough
You got exactly what you voted for. The left is pro censorship now. From political correctness to deplatforming, to right speech to labeling things misinformation to forgetting my body my choice when Covid came along. This is the natural end of wokism.
Wow, no, actually the complete opposite. Algorithms are free speech but not fair speech. They let those with money or otherwise control over the algorithm to speak far louder than anyone else, giving them an unfair speech advantage, or even taking away the free speech of others by drowning them out.
We need free and fair speech, not just free speech. Everyone should have an equal voice. That means no algorithms. You get one voice, people choose to listen to your or not.
This article is conflating two things. The US response to the Digital Duty of Care law and the US response to the algorithm opt-out provision.
The US did criticize the opt out provision.
But when the US says this, its about a different provision in DDC, which says platforms need to proactively remove harmful content.
>"We ask that Australia clarify how exactly 'harm' and 'risks' shall be determined... ensuring these definitions do not encroach on protected speech," the US said in its submission.
> "We ask that Australia clarify how exactly 'harm' and 'risks' shall be determined... ensuring these definitions do not encroach on protected speech," the US said in its submission.
Australia should put this submission in the circular file. The US government's opinion about any of this shouldn't matter to Australia, especially when the intent is to allow users to elect to use the natural state of no-algorithm time-based-ordering presentation of the content. This is like saying that an impact study needs to be done to determine if walking to the end of the block is safe enough to be allowed rather than blasting people out of a cannon towards the end of the block. Or saying that people should not be able to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in that order if they choose to.
> Another worry was that the proposed laws could affect Australia's "reputation as a jurisdiction that enables innovation," the submission said.
How magnanimous of the US to be concerned about this for Australia.
Australia and the United States have mutual interests and investments in the Pacific. Underlying this is a sense of shared cultural values and shared legacy as former British colonies.
To act as if the United States is sticking its nose in Australia as if it's Venezuela or something shows a rather pedestrian understanding of Australian history and geopolitics.
If the United States retreats from the world the Australian people will be among those who suffer the most. The interest in each other is mutual.
What is an "algorithm"? Showing the 20 most recent posts is an algorithm, but I doubt that's what they're targeting with the law.
I'm not just trying to find a technical gotcha here. I think it's worth identifying what exactly about an "algorithm" causes it to cross the line and become harmful.
When does an algorithm become harmful?
When it is designed and optimized to maximize the amount of time it engages the user?
What about an algorithm that was optimized the present the user with content they would find interesting? That doesn't sound so bad on the surface.
What about an algorithm that maximizes the amount of ads people see? Or the amount of money that the company makes?
Most Australians dislike social media. We are underrepresented on it, and it shovels the US’s issues down our throat. The current algorithms mainly send us US political propaganda and things that are supposed to make us hate nearby Asian powers like China.
> What about an algorithm that was optimized the present the user with content they would find interesting? That doesn't sound so bad on the surface.
If only we had 20+ years of scientific and societal evidence to show that regardless of what you think is "on the surface", the effects are catastrophic to mental health, democracy, the concept of truth, and everything else.
I'm sure the final law will outline the specific details. But the intent of the law is not algorithms in a computer science definition, but modern recommendation engines.
Showing a chronological feed of accounts you have followed in this case would be non algorithmic. This is how all social media worked before the modern hellscape we are in.
It’s a good question, and it’s not well defined. I am hoping that it allows us to customise feeds more. If I have problems with body image, don’t show me topless photos. Same goes with alcohol and gambling, which some platforms do have. The answer must not be either be subjected to content you don’t want to see or don’t use social media at all.
I think the line for algorithms is anything machine learning or neural network based, not simple ordering.
Side note: When iterating on male avatars, ChatGPT incrementally increases muscular features without being prompted to do so. There are biases in these machine-learned algorithms.
To you and me it's a very wide category, and there may be hundreds or thousands or even millions involved in me simply typing this, it being saved somewhere and the served back to you.
For lay-people though, it's become a term which means "The thing which measures your preferences and usage patterns then decides what to show you". So for lay-people to want to turn off the algorithm, they tend to mean going back to "just what your friends posted, in order"
> When does an algorithm become harmful?
I think this is a research subject. AFAICT it's pretty certain now that social media 'algorithms' have been optimised for addictiveness, which is likely to overlap somewhat with what users find interesting, but also cover things they find mildly titillating and/or outrageous.
The harms come in a bunch of forms. The never-ending scrolling of bite-sized videos seems massively destructive to attention span, and people seem to get addicted to it and may neglect other parts of their life. The platforms also seem really keen to send men and boys off to pretty hateful 'manosphere' content which is apparently making life hell for women (including teachers of teenage boys). Then we have all the body-image and anxiety issues caused in teenagers constantly exposed to influencers showing off their (faked) wealth, beauty etc.
Switching off the "shoving this all in your face" part of social media seems to me to be a win. When it was actually a way to keep in touch with friends and family it was a different game.
> The thing which measures your preferences and usage patterns then decides what to show you
That (plus a clause that exempts algorithms with user controls with full informedness and ability to confidently and reliably predict the outcome = old good filters and such) is the thing that should be in the legislation’s definitions section.
But then in the actual law it’s worse than “algorithm”, they’re actually banning broad over generalizations and design patterns instead, stuff like this:
> recommender features – content selected and displayed based on information associated with the user’s account;
> endless-feed features – continuous feeds of end-user content;
Country that is the reason that globally we can't have breasts on social media, even in completely non-sexual contexts, complains about "censorship" from a country that wants to avoid melting its childrens' brains.
Some doubt, actually. From the Guardian's reporting:
> Under the plan – dubbed “my feed, my way” – users opting out of the algorithm will see content only from individuals and groups they have actively chosen to follow.
> Users would be asked what they want their default feed to be through a pop-up message provided on their platform of choice.
So I should look forward to the day I see my Reddit feed free of r/Fauxmoi propaganda? Or does Reddit get a free pass like it has with age verification? Because we're still able to browse Reddit without an account, for starters. They had a popup that it required an account to browse for about a week, then they reverted back to allowing everyone to browse without one because they lost too many viewers.
Australia doesn't have protected speech. We're starting to see the dam break where rules that were left unexplored because it would go against the US driven view of globalization is starting to wane due to the US's loss (self destruction?) of its soft power.
Here is a law I wish we had for social media. Let's just align incentives.
If you are working on a social media platform, and your total comp is >= 500k, your children must use your platform for the average amount of time that children of that age range use your platform nationwide.
Brilliant move by the Australian Government to combine the algorithm opt-out with other restrictions. All the headlines are just about opt-out, and the assumption is the US is complaining about opt-out and claiming it is censorship. I suspect the actual claim of censorship is about putting the "onus on platforms to stop harmful content, such as illegal pornography and videos promoting disordered eating, from being shared" (from another BBC article, and similar in AU news sources). I expect manosphere stuff and maybe Nazi will end up in there too, or added later once laws are in place.
>In a rare submission to the proposed laws, the US embassy in Canberra said it had "serious concerns[...] "We ask that Australia clarify how exactly 'harm' and 'risks' shall be determined"
is this like one of those "isn't there someone you forgot to ask" memes? Why is the US embassy making submissions to proposed laws in Australia? The day cannot come soon enough when the last country tells the US to voice its concerns somewhere else
"You're censoring our billionaires' freedom to addict your people, psychologically damage your children, promote climate skepticism, spread lies, motivate people to lynch others"
From my cursory look at this last night, the US doesn't like that the definition of "harm" is so poorly defined. They either don't care about the broader concept of opting out of an algorithmic feed or aren't willing to criticise it.
I've been disappointed by the coverage because none of it has helped me understand the legal context behind why they don't like this one specific thing.
The other day I opened my instagram and was presented with a few frames of a big hairy vagina in my explore feed.
I don’t find this “harmful” but it’s not what I expect the algorithm to show me when I literally open instagram to find out about local events and sudden changes in cafe open hours in my area.
I really hate the way meta and other social media companies have injected themselves into our communities and then sent us all insane and set us against each other using algorithms.
As an Australian who just wants relatively free access to information (and the ability to freely/easily discuss it), it's frustrating.
And it's not the first time the Australian government has done this; last year they banned U16 from social media, several weeks later everyone was alerted to Bondi by... social media.. so they could get the heck out of there, but U16... they were left clueless and unable to get updates (news sites ran 30+ minutes behind real-time events and official sites like NSW Police took 70+ minutes to even announce there was a shooter).
Those laws explicitly declare what they ban. This one doesn't.
A big concern with these (and other associated laws) being pushed through is it grants the eSafety Commissioner powers to edict what’s allowed.
That position is appointed, not elected.
Not everyone wants to live in a society where the American form of limited free speech is the accepted societal norm. Australia can choose its own views, so can France, and Britain, and Turkey, and China. It's not a colony of the us.
Censorship is the government suppressing information. If people actually believe that this is how things should be, let the government introduce official “censorship bills” and call publicly for “additional censorship measures”.
The fact that they aren’t doing that demonstrates that they feel the need to hide what they are really doing, which speaks of an inherent wrongness that has nothing to do with a US/non-US culture divide.
That said, whoever this Anika Wells woman is the law looks like a bad idea and it is nice that the US has found it in their interests to say something helpful.
In the States, the right has been supportive of government suppression of speech, including the communications agency (FCC) threatening broadcasters into cancelling an interview with a politician in the opposition party. The right's free speech record is far worse in the US and Australia.
Admittedly, neither side of the aisle have good free speech practices in most of the rest of the world.
Being “Pro Palestine” would mean a reverse “genocide” because it would mean Jews would have to be removed from their homes in the area, using violence, which means mass numbers of innocent people being affected. Not sure why people struggle to understand that it’s not a football game wheee you “pick a side”?
Not all people who live in Israel are bad people with genocidal tendencies ?
Like I said, it’s not a football game where you run around Sydney with your face painted screaming “from the river to the sea” it will solve nothing.
It's okay to be pro-Palestine if you want to promote peace. Likud certainly isn't making any headway on rapprochement.
I’m not saying there is a right side. I’m saying both sides have issues. Hence my point about being anti-war being a better option.
Unless you think all of Israel would cease to exist or something, but that's not the stakes here at all.
The Left have always been a bit more 'censory', generally because of their bleeding hearts on behalf of the minorities that are the targets of the Right's exercising of their free speech.
Such is my understanding. I don't really mind either stance, with the caveat that anything 'censory' has a chance of having it's definitions expanded (and admittedly, this is succumbing to the slippery slope fallacy).
> The Left have always been a bit more 'censory'
Not "always", and not even now. It's always contingent and situational. Same goes for nearly every clause in the Bill of Rights.
At various points the left has been associated with the fights against obscenity laws, against Cold War loyalty oaths, against blacklisting, against bans of books.
At various points the right has been associated with the fights against desecration of the American flag, against the teaching of human evolution in schools, against depictions of sex in media, against anti-war demonstrations.
you're allowed to say anything you want as long as bari weiss determines that you are sufficiently zionist and wont say anything that isnt zionist enough
We need free and fair speech, not just free speech. Everyone should have an equal voice. That means no algorithms. You get one voice, people choose to listen to your or not.
The US did criticize the opt out provision.
But when the US says this, its about a different provision in DDC, which says platforms need to proactively remove harmful content.
>"We ask that Australia clarify how exactly 'harm' and 'risks' shall be determined... ensuring these definitions do not encroach on protected speech," the US said in its submission.
Australia should put this submission in the circular file. The US government's opinion about any of this shouldn't matter to Australia, especially when the intent is to allow users to elect to use the natural state of no-algorithm time-based-ordering presentation of the content. This is like saying that an impact study needs to be done to determine if walking to the end of the block is safe enough to be allowed rather than blasting people out of a cannon towards the end of the block. Or saying that people should not be able to eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in that order if they choose to.
> Another worry was that the proposed laws could affect Australia's "reputation as a jurisdiction that enables innovation," the submission said.
How magnanimous of the US to be concerned about this for Australia.
To act as if the United States is sticking its nose in Australia as if it's Venezuela or something shows a rather pedestrian understanding of Australian history and geopolitics.
If the United States retreats from the world the Australian people will be among those who suffer the most. The interest in each other is mutual.
I'm not just trying to find a technical gotcha here. I think it's worth identifying what exactly about an "algorithm" causes it to cross the line and become harmful.
When does an algorithm become harmful?
When it is designed and optimized to maximize the amount of time it engages the user?
What about an algorithm that was optimized the present the user with content they would find interesting? That doesn't sound so bad on the surface.
What about an algorithm that maximizes the amount of ads people see? Or the amount of money that the company makes?
Most Australians dislike social media. We are underrepresented on it, and it shovels the US’s issues down our throat. The current algorithms mainly send us US political propaganda and things that are supposed to make us hate nearby Asian powers like China.
If only we had 20+ years of scientific and societal evidence to show that regardless of what you think is "on the surface", the effects are catastrophic to mental health, democracy, the concept of truth, and everything else.
Showing a chronological feed of accounts you have followed in this case would be non algorithmic. This is how all social media worked before the modern hellscape we are in.
I think the line for algorithms is anything machine learning or neural network based, not simple ordering.
Side note: When iterating on male avatars, ChatGPT incrementally increases muscular features without being prompted to do so. There are biases in these machine-learned algorithms.
To you and me it's a very wide category, and there may be hundreds or thousands or even millions involved in me simply typing this, it being saved somewhere and the served back to you.
For lay-people though, it's become a term which means "The thing which measures your preferences and usage patterns then decides what to show you". So for lay-people to want to turn off the algorithm, they tend to mean going back to "just what your friends posted, in order"
> When does an algorithm become harmful?
I think this is a research subject. AFAICT it's pretty certain now that social media 'algorithms' have been optimised for addictiveness, which is likely to overlap somewhat with what users find interesting, but also cover things they find mildly titillating and/or outrageous.
The harms come in a bunch of forms. The never-ending scrolling of bite-sized videos seems massively destructive to attention span, and people seem to get addicted to it and may neglect other parts of their life. The platforms also seem really keen to send men and boys off to pretty hateful 'manosphere' content which is apparently making life hell for women (including teachers of teenage boys). Then we have all the body-image and anxiety issues caused in teenagers constantly exposed to influencers showing off their (faked) wealth, beauty etc.
Switching off the "shoving this all in your face" part of social media seems to me to be a win. When it was actually a way to keep in touch with friends and family it was a different game.
That (plus a clause that exempts algorithms with user controls with full informedness and ability to confidently and reliably predict the outcome = old good filters and such) is the thing that should be in the legislation’s definitions section.
But then in the actual law it’s worse than “algorithm”, they’re actually banning broad over generalizations and design patterns instead, stuff like this:
> recommender features – content selected and displayed based on information associated with the user’s account;
> endless-feed features – continuous feeds of end-user content;
Me: I want chrono timelines!
Australia: I want chrono timelines!
Trump: I DON'T!
Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?
> Under the plan – dubbed “my feed, my way” – users opting out of the algorithm will see content only from individuals and groups they have actively chosen to follow.
> Users would be asked what they want their default feed to be through a pop-up message provided on their platform of choice.
Also, I’m not proud of this but Australia has no explicit constitutional right to free speech, and no bill of rights at the federal level AFAIK.
If you are working on a social media platform, and your total comp is >= 500k, your children must use your platform for the average amount of time that children of that age range use your platform nationwide.
Which would play into all sorts of agendas.
is this like one of those "isn't there someone you forgot to ask" memes? Why is the US embassy making submissions to proposed laws in Australia? The day cannot come soon enough when the last country tells the US to voice its concerns somewhere else
Serious violation!
I've been disappointed by the coverage because none of it has helped me understand the legal context behind why they don't like this one specific thing.
I don’t find this “harmful” but it’s not what I expect the algorithm to show me when I literally open instagram to find out about local events and sudden changes in cafe open hours in my area.
I really hate the way meta and other social media companies have injected themselves into our communities and then sent us all insane and set us against each other using algorithms.