The Australian government is pushing yet another layer of control over the internet with the proposed Digital Duty of Care. Sold as a sensible measure to protect users from "harm," this legislation would empower regulators; most likely the already notorious eSafety Commissioner or an entirely new censorship bureaucracy, to force digital platforms to actively police content, redesign features, and suppress anything deemed harmful. This is not protection. It is the expansion of an already tyrannical framework that treats adult citizens as fragile children and hands unelected officials sweeping power over speech, association, and information flow.
What "Duty of Care" Actually Means
Under the proposal, tech companies would face legal obligations to:
Proactively identify and mitigate "harms" (a term so vague it can encompass misinformation, "hate speech," political dissent, or even robust debate).
Implement age verification, content filtering, algorithmic changes, and user reporting systems on demand.
Face massive fines, feature bans, or outright service restrictions for non-compliance.
Report regularly to government overseers on their compliance efforts.
The eSafety Commissioner already wields extraordinary powers, from ordering the removal of content to demanding global de-indexing. A formal Digital Duty of Care would supercharge this, turning private platforms into extensions of the state's speech police.
The Tyranny Already in Place
Australia has been sliding down this path for years. We have:
World-leading content takedown powers.
"Misinformation" bills that chill legitimate speech.
The eSafety Commissioner's repeated attempts to control what Australians can see and say online.
Two-tiered enforcement where certain viewpoints receive aggressive action while others are ignored; basically, Leftists can say what they want; not so for the conservative Right.
The Digital Duty of Care doesn't fix problems: it institutionalises the worst impulses of bureaucratic overreach. "Harm" is subjective. What one activist calls dangerous misinformation, another sees as uncomfortable truth. Governments and their favoured regulators inevitably define harm in ways that protect their own narratives on immigration, climate, gender, elections, and public health.
Who Decides What "Harm" Is?
This is the core danger. Once regulators gain a "duty of care" mandate:
Dissent on mass migration, crime statistics, or cultural change can be labelled "harmful."
Gender-critical views or biological reality can be suppressed as "hate."
Criticism of government policy during crises can be treated as public danger.
Parental concerns about content aimed at children can be overridden by activist definitions of inclusion.
History shows regulators expand their remit. What starts as stopping CSAM or terrorism quickly morphs into policing "wrongthink." Britain's Online Safety Act and similar European efforts already demonstrate how "safety" becomes a blank cheque for censorship. Australia is eager to follow.
The Real Targets: Free Speech and Accountability
Tech companies are imperfect: profit-driven, sometimes biased, occasionally negligent. But handing coercive power to politicians and bureaucrats is worse. Private platforms can be pressured by users, markets, and competition. Government regulators answer to politics, ideology, and institutional self-preservation.
A Digital Duty of Care flips the relationship: instead of users holding platforms accountable, the state holds platforms hostage to enforce its preferred version of reality. This is digital authoritarianism dressed in caring language. It infantilises adults, undermines resilience, and creates a chilling effect where people self-censor to avoid trouble.
Genuine online safety doesn't require new regulatory empires. It requires:
Strong enforcement of existing criminal laws.
Parental tools and transparency, not state mandates.
Cultural pushback against degeneracy and addiction (especially for minors).
Competition and decentralisation rather than centralised control.
Rejection of the idea that government officials are wiser than citizens about what constitutes harm.
Adults have agency. Societies thrive when people learn to navigate disagreement, discomfort, and even offensive ideas, not when the state curates their information diet.
Enough Expansion of Tyranny!
The Digital Duty of Care is not compassionate governance. It is the logical next step in a pattern of ever-increasing control over what Australians can read, watch, and say. The eSafety Commissioner and its successors should not become the arbiters of truth and harm. That power belongs to free citizens in an open society.
Australians must reject this expansion. Demand transparency, push back against vague "harm" standards, and defend the principle that the default in a free country is liberty: not permission from regulators. Once the state claims a duty of care over your mind and your speech, the iron cage door closes quietly but firmly.
No more. The Digital Duty of Care is duty to the state, not to the people. It must be opposed!
https://reclaimthenet.org/australias-top-censor-wants-power-over-the-ratio
Australia's eSafety Commissioner wants legal power to order social media companies to shield favored users from criticism and to suspend everyone piling on against them. Julie Inman Grant made the pitch on July 2, testifying to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, the government probe set up after the Bondi Beach terror attack.
She calls the tool a "notification power." What it does is let her office tell a platform that a particular Australian account is under heavy criticism and demand that the platform punish the accounts responsible.
Her own description of the trigger runs to "insulting" and "ugly" comments stacking up beneath someone's posts. "If there's a pile-on, if there's a brigade, if it's meant to be an avalanche of online hate, we put the onus back on the platform to say, this Australian is being targeted," she told the commission.
"We expect you to protect their account and take action against all of those people that you can see… whether it's you just suspend them or you take them away."
She wants the power to reach across platforms, too. The current adult cyber-abuse rules frustrate her because they force her office to "look at that specific tweet" rather than the whole swarm of replies beneath it. The fix she wants hands platforms a standing order to police disapproval on her behalf.
Grant does not think of this as censorship, of course. Asked about companies that frame their resistance as free speech, she said "it's easy to slip a censorship label on just about anything," and offered a softer account of her own work. "What we're trying to do is minimize harm. Encourage as much speech as possible, but when it veers into the lane of hurting individuals, hurting communities, hurting society and undermining democracy, I think we all need to band together and take more of a stand."
The regulator asking for authority to suspend users in bulk says her goal is more speech.
Who defines the harm that flips speech from protected to punishable? She does. Phrases like "hurting communities" and "undermining democracy" stretch far enough to cover most heated political argument, and the office reaching for them writes the definition.
Much of her testimony was a complaint that the companies keep winning. eSafety has eight cases running against X Corp, and Grant said six of them were "led by X." She cast the legal pushback as commercial greed dressed up in principle, accusing platforms of fighting "to be able to serve, share and monetize horrific content."
Asked whether she had actually seen platforms fight to monetize such material, she answered "I can't imagine any other reason they would want to put it up there."
The clearest example she offered cuts against her. After the Wakely church stabbing of Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, eSafety sent formal removal notices to Meta and X. "Meta applied within the hour, and then of course, X Corp said, 'We're not taking it down, we'll see you in court,'" Grant said.
X won the legal challenge. And the bishop whose stabbing she cited as the reason to censor went on to back Elon Musk and defend free speech from the pulpit in his first sermon after surviving the attack.
The person eSafety said it was protecting did not want her protection.
Grant wants more than the notification power. She told the commission her authority to tackle cyber abuse against adults sits at a "very high threshold" that holds her office back.
She called for an online hate code that would push responsibility onto the platforms, something she said "we know they could roll that out tomorrow." She warned of a world where "we've got the most powerful technology in the world, owned by the richest, wealthiest technologists in the world, but we've never had looser guardrails. That, to me, is a recipe for disaster."
Loose guardrails, in this telling, mean a regulator who has to convince an independent board before deleting a video, and companies willing to make her prove her case in court. The process worked, and she lost. Her fix is to ask for powers that route around it.