Duty of Careful What You Wish For

Mike, we are a global podcast.

We've got to start with the global story of the week, which I think is about what's going on in Australia.

How familiar or how closely have you been following what's going on in Norse over the last few months?

Yeah, I mean, definitely very closely.

Australia...

I used to joke Australia was the place where good internet regulations went to die.

It just seemed like they were quite literally the upside down land in terms of their thinking on internet regulation as opposed to elsewhere.

And I think that has maybe only continued.

But that also means that there's sort of an ongoing work in progress case study that we can look at and observe their efforts in progress and see, well, you know, look, maybe I'm wrong and maybe they will one day magically be successful.

We've certainly talked about their leading the world in banning social media in some form for those under 16, which I would argue has been a pretty dismal failure.

And they're sort of, instead of maybe going back and looking at why that was a bad idea, they're just sort of charging forward and saying, and the next thing.

Yeah.

And so what they've now announced is specifically this duty of care concept, which has certainly been talked about elsewhere.

It's part of the debate over COSA in the US.

It's part of the debate in the UK and in the EU and lots of other places, this idea of implementing a duty of care.

And so Australia is moving forward with that, including COVID.

Well, we'll get into the issues with duty of care in a second.

But the sort of big headline that is getting lots of attention is that they want to include this.

It's not quite algorithmic choice feature, but this algorithmic rejection feature, which is that they want to force all social media to give users the option to turn off the algorithm and only get a chronological feed.

And that's sort of like the big headline.

And in fact, the announcement from the Australian government was literally titled My Feed, My Way, which sounds very grand and very exciting.

But I think there are a lot of questions around this.

And so let me dive into a couple of the issues and then we can go deeper in whichever direction you'd like.

So the broad duty of care is one of these things that I think, and this comes up a lot in a lot of the discussions that we have, it sounds good, right? Like who doesn't want a duty of care? And who doesn't want these companies to take these issues seriously? And who doesn't want them to be thinking about their users and protecting their users and keeping their users safe? Obviously, all of that is good.

In practice, what a duty of care is, is really a censorship regime because it is a sort of vague standard, right? which is saying like, you have to put in place things to protect your users while they're using your platform such that nothing bad happens to them.