The right is wrong about digital duty of care. It promises Australians more freedom, not less | Peter Lewis

Labor’s law would allow choice for social media users and build accountability into the internet rather than allow the tech industry to operate with impunity

W hen you hear them cry “freedom”, you know a culture war is brewing. And so it was last week that a bid to make tech companies address the harmful impacts of their products became a piece of political performance theatre.

The Coalition and One Nation tripped over each other to condemn the government’s long-awaited digital duty of care legislation. To Angus Taylor it is “ a blank cheque for political censorship ”; for Pauline Hanson it’s “ Communist China”. For their fracturing base, it’s another reason to hate on the government.

Let’s be clear what the political right is really saying: that in the name of “freedom” we reject laws that would hold the most powerful companies on Earth accountable for their products.

At its heart is the confused and contradictory binary of safety and freedom; a false trade-off that has actively fuelled the very toxic online world these laws seek to purify. Un-muddling this is critical if we are to build an internet that actually works for people.

We can partly explain this political response as a self-interested attempt to protect the very algorithms that are driving the rise of the populist right. But there is also a legitimate debate to be had over the degree to which the state exercises its control over us all.

In the 25 years since 9/11 , the powers the state has amassed over us have grown year on year until we have found ourselves living under a sophisticated surveillance apparatus created in the name of homeland security.

From building backdoors to monitor our phones and internet usage, to facial recognition cameras in public spaces , to sophisticated data-matching by companies such as Palantir , to the routine extension of police powers like the NSW government’s brazen bid to extract data from citizens’ phones without a warrant, our digital freedoms have eroded until they barely exist.

Over those 25 years, the right has been willing backers of this erosion of personal freedoms. Privacy became nostalgia, civil liberties conditional and the idea that our online activity could be captured and exploited normalised.

These capabilities were commercialised by the nascent social media companies. First Google and then Facebook developed models to render and extract our online activity into the personalised advertising models that Shoshana Zuboff dubbed “surveillance capitalism”. It is the real-world impact of this model, the companies it spawned and the capabilities it drove that the digital duty of care bill seeks to address.

This is not some academic argument – online harms are real: children are being exploited in horrendous ways, teenagers are taking their own lives, girls are driven to eating disorders, young men are being recruited into an exploitative sphere, communities are dividing and the common anchors of truth are being eroded.

The principle is simple: if you are offering an online product you need to be awake to its impact and take steps to make it safe.