Australian Representative Anne Webster is lobbying senior ministers to bring forward legislation that would force Facebook and other platforms to assume editorial responsibility for the content they publish, in an effort to combat proliferating misinformation.
Webster launched defamation proceedings against Australian Karen Brewer over a series of posts on Facebook in April.
The posts, which were shared hundreds of times, including on accounts associated with Mildura, Webster’s home town, accused Webster of being “a member of a secretive pedophile network” who had been “parachuted into parliament to protect a past generation of pedophiles.”
Brewer said that a charity founded by Webster and her husband to help single mothers in Mildura access education was “a cover for the supply of young teenage mothers to a secretive pedophilia network.”
Brewer was ultimately ordered to pay A$875,000 (US$649,689) in damages after a federal court judge described the claims as “disgraceful and inexplicable.”
Webster said that she is pressing the Australian government to take remedial action.
“I am pushing that we do have legislation that calls Facebook and whatever platforms to account as publishers,” Brewer said in an interview. “I’m not saying that holding these platforms to account as publishers is the only answer, but it is the clearest answer that I can think of.”
“If anyone has a better answer, then fine, let’s do that, but at the moment I see these platforms really get away with far too much and are not being held to account — so I think that’s got to stop,” she said.
Facebook last month apologized to Webster over months-long delays in responding to reports of abuse she received from Brewer.
Webster said that remedial action was too long in coming.
The National Party member is contemplating pursuing a private member’s bill if she cannot persuade the government to take on the platforms and require them to take editorial responsibility for defamatory content and bullying.
“I’m not going to be sitting down waiting for somebody else to do something because this is incredibly important and it affects many, many lives,” she said.
Webster said that senior government ministers are resisting the idea that platforms be deemed publishers with the same editorial responsibilities that mainstream media publishers have.
The platforms have also resisted that categorization.
In an interview with Guardian Australia’s politics podcast last year, Australian Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher said that Facebook’s argument that it was not a traditional publisher was “an appropriate point for them to make, because they don’t hold themselves out” as that.
“I don’t think we can dismiss reality — a digital platform is a different kind of business to a traditional media organization that has editorial obligations,” Fletcher said.
Webster said that the current resistance to meaningful change “involves several ministers,” but she does not intend to be deterred.
“I think we need to pursue it,” she said.
The problem is that the regulatory environment lags behind the take-up of technology, she said.
Webster likens the societal impact of the technological disruption to washing up in a “strange land.”
“It’s as though — when we are talking about social media platforms and in fact digital information technology generally — that we, 20 years ago, landed on this unknown environment and we have to learn to breathe, we have to learn to perhaps walk differently — like the moon, there may be different gravitational pulls,” she said.
“There are just different effects that happen, whether it’s speed — whether it’s the ability of thousands of people to comment instantaneously,” she said.
“We have a new environment, and I think that politically we have a responsibility to make sure policy addresses that different environment, and I don’t think we’ve done it well,” Webster said.
Since details of her ordeal with Brewer have come to light, she said that she has been overwhelmed by expressions of support from the community and from fellow parliamentarians, some of whom had have endured similar experiences.
It might be possible to build cross-party support for legislative change because misinformation online goes beyond vicious attacks on people in public life — people in the community are also battling terrible experiences of bullying and misinformation of social platforms, she said.
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