“Prime Minister Pauline Hanson” is no longer a punchline but a real prospect in contemporary Australia. So why are Labor and the Greens handing a potential One Nation/Coalition government an advanced censorship and surveillance apparatus?

One Nation says they are pro-free speech, but do you think that will hold if they take power? Just like Trump, after years of insults and humiliations, they’ll be out for revenge. And Progressives are giving them the toolkit to do it – the Digital Duty of Care.

Free speech used to be a Left-wing cause; today the Right monopolises it, making political hay in the process. Abandoning free speech turned out to be a big error in a post-October 7 world; now an increasing amount of censorship is directed at pro-Palestine activism.

The security and intelligence apparatus are among the bill’s main beneficiaries, which makes the eSafety Commissioner an enforcement body under the Privacy Act with increased powers to share information she collects with other departments. With the Five Eyes alliance, that also means potentially sharing data with the U.S. and other key allies. The bill allows her to create an unlimited number of fake identities (sock puppets) that can join groups, monitor, and record information. It’s warrantless mass surveillance under the guise of “care”.

Right now, progressives should be thinking about that very real prospect of how these powers might be used when they are out of power, and behave accordingly. Instead, Labor and the Greens are creating tools that mean the Right and the security establishment can surveil and crack down on digital dissent at a moment’s notice. And if you think this bill will be enough to keep them out of power, think again – across the world, right-populist parties only grow when they feel they are being censored. This will boost Hansonism, not stop it.

An array of government- and foundation-funded NGOs are fronting from the government’s bill, giving it a virtuous glow – how could “care” or “choice” be bad? But the bill isn’t about choosing your feeds; it’s about a vague definition of “harm” that a One Nation/Coalition government can change at any time to target its political enemies. Posts promoting gender affirming or LGBT advocacy harm teenagers, they will say. Climate change activism harms our coal industry and children’s mental health, and pro-Palestine activism harms the Jewish community.

The next time there is an attack on a parliamentarian by an alleged leftist, they’ll go all in; it will be the event they crave, and then you’ll wonder why you didn’t stop it when you had the chance.

If you think they are cynical enough to do it, don’t leave them the tools to make it a reality.

After pioneering the world’s first social media ban for under-16s, the Australian Government has now set its sights on a much grander ambition: Minority Report-style laws to protect citizens from online “harms” before they occur.

You may not be Australian, but with teen bans now enacted or under consideration in dozens of countries worldwide, this regulatory experiment may soon arrive in a jurisdiction near you.

On Thursday, Communications Minister Anika Wells introduced the Digital Duty of Care Bill to Parliament before fronting the National Press Club, where she placed the legislation in Australia’s long history of pioneering public safety laws.

“We were the first in the world to make seatbelts compulsory. First with random breath testing. First with plain packaging.”

Anika Wells, National Press Club.

Wells made safety regulation sound as Australian as Steve Irwin and a Bunnings sausage sizzle. But a big Aussie backlash to the Bill’s exposure draft, released last month, has forced the Albanese Government to retreat on several fronts.

The concessions are welcome, but the Bill’s central ambition remains, and the revised legislation introduces some troubling new provisions.

One extraordinary addition exempts public officials (read: politicians and senior bureaucrats) from the bill itself.

There are also carve-outs for groups such as “professional” news media and researchers, though the hoi polloi won’t enjoy the same privileges. Navigating such a list will be a nightmare for whoever is lumped with the task, but exemptions are exemptions nonetheless, so we’ll count it as a modest victory.

The most significant retreat concerns the Minister’s power to define online harm. Under the original proposal, she could expand the categories of “harmful” material through ministerial instruments, bypassing the need for new legislation. That power has now been removed, meaning any expansion of those categories must go through Parliament.

Another concession is the Bill’s sock puppet provisions. In our September investigation, we highlighted a little-noticed clause empowering Australia’s eSafety Commissioner to operate covert online accounts and generate AI material through them, “without limitation”.

The revelation drew significant media attention, including at the National Press Club address, where Wells was challenged on whether these powers could enable government propaganda. She flatly rejected the suggestion, insisting the power “does not exist; it’s not possible”.

This certainly wasn’t true of the older draft, but the provisions have been changed significantly:

The revised Bill removes the two controversial instances of “without limitation” from the sock-puppet provisions. It also narrows the express AI-generation power to testing whether services can produce material that would constitute a criminal offence, and introduces mandatory annual public reporting on the eSafety Commissioner’s covert-account activities.

But the reporting requirement is extremely weak. The Commissioner needs only to summarise these activities “in general terms”, with no obligation to disclose how many fake accounts were operated, how many users they interacted with or what those interactions involved, what conversations were recorded or what material was posted.

eSafety-approved researchers exercising similar covert powers are exempt from this reporting requirement altogether. Our investigations have exposed extraordinarily close ties between government and these researchers. Government-allied NGOs like Reset.Tech have already produced questionable studies using sock-puppets that were used to promote the Digital Duty of Care.

Even under these revised provisions, eSafety and its approved researchers can still operate undisclosed fake accounts, with no explicit limit on how many they can run. They can covertly join online communities, observe, download and record material. They can also interact with real users as needed to keep their accounts open, while enjoying immunity from civil proceedings for actions taken in good faith under these powers.

The September exposure draft required platforms to weigh proposed safety measures against their financial cost and their impact on users’ privacy. Both considerations have now disappeared from the revised document.

In a strangely combative reversal, the new Bill expressly forbids platforms from taking financial costs into account. Section 26A(3) states:

“the cost of the action or measures must not be taken into account.”

Digital Duty of Care Bill, Section 26A(3)

But the removal of the privacy consideration is particularly concerning, given that preventing online harms will require platforms to monitor user behaviour and collect sensitive information.

Separately, the revised Bill removes an explicit safeguard preventing the eSafety Commissioner from publishing personal information or material protected by confidentiality obligations in transparency reports.

As we reported in our coverage of the exposure draft, the Bill designates eSafety an “enforcement body” under the Privacy Act, expanding its ability to access personal information. It also grants the body broader powers to share information across government.

Taken together, all these provisions create an online safety regime that can obtain and share personal information widely throughout government, while removing explicit safeguards against privacy intrusions and unauthorised disclosure.

The Government’s My Feed My Way initiative has finally been fleshed out. The much-touted promise of algorithmic choice arrived in a separate draft ministerial instrument rather than the Bill itself. Platforms like X, Instagram and TikTok already offer follow-only feeds. The new rules mainly change how that choice is presented to users and whether their preferences are retained. A modest reform, yet one that continues to do most of the heavy lifting in the Digital Duty of Care’s PR campaign.

Overall, some of the sting has been taken out of the Bill, but its central thrust remains. The Minority Report mission of preventing harms before they occur has survived, as have the sock-puppet provisions and eSafety’s sweeping new investigative and surveillance powers.

At the National Press Club, Anika Wells delivered a polished, if condescending, defence of the new safety measures, invoking internet horror stories and the reassuring precedents of seatbelt laws and anti-smoking campaigns. But amid the assurances came what sounded like a Freudian slip:

“We are controlling … we are not controlling free speech, we are not conducting covert surveillance.”

Anika Wells, National Press Club.

The Bill now faces a five-week Senate committee inquiry, due to report by 20 November. The Albanese Government seems determined to end the year with another censorship notch on its belt, gift-wrap the legislation for Christmas, then export it around the world. But the growing backlash may yet leave controlling the Australian internet on its list of New Year’s resolutions.

When Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese unveiled his proposed Digital Duty of Care Bill, he stood before bereaved parents and online safety advocates and credited them with driving the reforms. He declared the new legislation was “change from the bottom-up”.

Among the groups present was Teach Us Consent, which has occupied much Australian media coverage for the Bill’s supposed cornerstone reform, algorithmic choice.

Teach Us Consent wasted no time claiming victory. “We did it,” they announced, circulating a celebratory video portraying the proposed reforms as the hard-won achievement of a campaign led by its CEO, Chanel Contos.

That victory lap may have been premature, as news begins circulating that the government may be backing down on key parts of the bill.

But as we dug into the evidence, three inconvenient questions emerged. Who was funding these supposedly “bottom-up” campaigners? Where had the reform really come from? And what was the Government actually putting into law?

Government grassroots

Since its founding in 2021, Teach Us Consent has undergone an extraordinary financial transformation, fuelled by its close relationship with the Albanese Government. In 2023, the organisation reported just $14,643 of income. The following year, the Albanese Government awarded it a nearly $3.6 million grant. In June 2026, it secured another $4.4 million.

Documents released under freedom-of-information law show the government awarded the first grant through a closed, non-competitive process, with no other organisation invited to apply.

The government cited Teach Us Consent’s “expertise in advocacy” and social media reach among the reasons for selecting it. Under the agreement, the organisation had to follow an approved plan and submit its content strategy to the Department of Social Services for approval. Teach Us Consent was effectively a government contractor getting special treatment, not an independent non-profit. In the 2024/25 financial year, almost 90% of Teach Us Consent’s funding came from the Australian taxpayer.

Teach Us Consent’s claim to victory was about as thin as Albanese’s story of “change from the bottom up”.

Where credit is due

Not only that, it seems “credit” for the legislation belongs more to Reset.Tech Australia, the local arm of a much larger digital advocacy non-profit established by PayPal billionaire Pierre Omidyar foundation.

Reset.Tech has been gunning for preventative regulation of social media platforms and their algorithms since at least 2022. In May of 2024, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland amended the Basic Online Safety Expectations under the Online Safety Act to encourage algorithmic opt-outs and alternative feeds, without making them mandatory.

In November, independent MP Zoe Daniel took it a step further, introducing her own Digital Duty of Care Bill, which would require platforms to let users switch off engagement-based recommender systems. In her speech to Parliament, Daniel named Reset.Tech among the organisations that had joined her in Canberra to back the reforms. Reset.Tech later confirmed that her Bill drew on its policy proposals.

Teach Us Consent came late to the party in December 2025, launching Fix Our Feeds with a more demanding proposal for personalised algorithmic feeds to be switched off by default and users instead forced to see a feed of everyone they follow – I guess that way you can stay in your bubble. Freedom-of-information documents reveal that in March 2026, Teach Us Consent joined Reset.Tech Australia and Digital Rights Watch to lobby the government privately for the default-off model.

The Government rejected that approach in favour of what Communications Minister Anika Wells called a “neutral choice” model. Instead of switching algorithms off by default, platforms would show a pop-up prompting users to choose. A much more empowering option, in fact.

Flawed studies

More important, however, was the moral urgency Contos gave the Digital Duty of Care by linking algorithmic feeds to her broader campaign against sexual violence.

But the evidence for the causal effect doesn’t stack up when you review the main evidence she cites: Dublin City University’s Recommending Toxicity study. The campaign used it to argue that social media algorithms were feeding boys and young men misogynistic content regardless of their viewing preferences, and that this was contributing to violence against women.

The study built on earlier research by Reset.Tech Australia and its authors thanked the advocacy organisation for advice and guidance on the study’s design. It involved no actual teenagers and recorded no evidence of attitudinal change.

The researchers gathered data using just ten sock puppet accounts designed to mimic teenage boys and young men. Rather than passively collecting data on what the algorithms recommended, their method involved deliberately watching and liking content they considered problematic, effectively training the algorithms to serve more extreme content. They explicitly searched for “Andrew Tate”. The results of two control accounts that did not perform such searches were not outlined.

The researchers also grouped overt misogyny with any opposition to feminism and “rigid” masculine ideals involving discipline, wealth and emotional stoicism. Based on the research, Teach Us Consent pushed the “23 minutes” meme throughout, as did Australian government ministers.

Choice as a cover for censorship

But centring feed choice in the campaign itself was a ruse. The media release that accompanied the Bill’s launch was titled My Feed, My Way rather than Digital Duty of Care, suggesting that algorithmic choice sits at the heart of the legislation.

But when we searched for the concrete policy in the exposure draft, we couldn’t find it. What we did find was a vague provision giving the Minister broad powers to compel platforms to introduce unspecified “user empowerment tools” at a later date. The only explicit reference is fourteen words buried in subsection 26(6).

“by providing control over the kind of content that is recommended for the user.”

Digital Duty of Care Exposure Draft

That’s it. Fourteen vague words in a Bill containing more than fourteen thousand. Most major social media platforms already offer some capacity to opt out of personalised feeds. But even if they didn’t, they would still be compliant on feed choice if the Bill passed tomorrow.

The Digital Duty of Care’s real substance lies in the other 99 per cent of the document, which gives the Minister and the eSafety Commissioner sweeping powers to create a Minority Report-style system of preventing “harm” before it occurs. The model is called “safety by design”. Yet the Bill definition of “harm” is incredibly broad. Thankfully, the Minister’s ability to unilaterally decide what “harm” is appears to be getting walked back.

The bill also significantly expands eSafety’s investigative and surveillance powers, allowing the regulator to operate covert “sock puppet” accounts and generate content using AI, a story we brought to public attention two weeks ago.

Since its launch, backlash over the Bill’s fine print has mounted, and Albanese has repeatedly fallen back on his “It’s not about censorship. It’s about giving people control” defence. But for anyone who has actually read the Bill, he’s started to look like a toddler playing hide-and-seek, convinced a lampshade makes him invisible.

With any luck, the bill will be ground into dust before the year is out, but there is still some way to go.

Australia continues to lead the world in online safety regulation, recently releasing a proposed Digital Duty of Care (DDoC) that would require social media platforms to preempt and prevent harm and give users greater control over their feeds.

It’s the latest expansion of Australia’s already ambitious online-safety regime, following the world-first under-16s social media ban introduced to great international fanfare and now facing serious questions about how well it works.

It comes as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spruiks the new laws this week at the UN General Assembly and an Atlantic Council gathering of A-listers where he received a “Global Citizen Award”. Perhaps not incidentally, the Atlantic Council is among the world’s most aggressive advocates of digital censorship through its Digital Forensics Research Lab.

On its face, Australia’s proposed Digital Duty of Care (DDoC) is an easy sell: protect children from harmful material and give adults greater control over what appears in their feeds.

But beneath the pub-test-friendly promises is a massive expansion of regulatory power. The draft broadens eSafety’s investigative and data-collection abilities, authorises the use of covert online identities, allows open-ended changes through delegated legislation, and reaches into the systems and design features that determine what information Australians see online.

The new DDoC Bill is largely a package of amendments to the Online Safety Act of 2021. As we worked through the many tweaks and additions, what emerged was a case study in how protection can become a pretext for surveillance and control. In its full context, even the promised increase in user choice begins to look like a Faustian bargain, where Australians are asked to grant open-ended ministerial powers in exchange for a feature that some platforms already offer.

Among the measures that have so far escaped much public scrutiny are those expanding eSafety’s surveillance and data-collection powers. Greater access to what is happening on social media may be sold as research, but research can quickly become surveillance, and some of the Bill’s most concerning provisions sit right at that boundary.

The Bill expressly allows the government to create what it calls “sock puppet identities”. These are accounts operated under false identities that can observe and record material and, in some circumstances, interact with users.

More strikingly, the provision allows these state-created accounts to generate material using artificial intelligence:

This particular clause moves well beyond passive observation and into active influence. Nowhere is the government clear about what it intends to do with these new powers, and the lack of clear limitations on potential uses leaves this as an open-ended question.

The Bill also makes significant changes to the Privacy Act 1988. It would designate the eSafety Commissioner as an “enforcement body”, bringing its activities within provisions dealing with surveillance, intelligence gathering and the collection of sensitive information without consent.

Another amendment widens the range of government bodies that are allowed to receive information obtained by eSafety.

Taken together, the changes mark an ominous development for Australians’ privacy. The online-safety regulator would gain broader powers to collect sensitive personal information without consent and share it widely across government.

Then there are moves to broaden regulatory power over lawful speech – the core ambition of the Albanese government’s earlier defeated ‘misinformation bill’, prompting accusations from some quarters that the DDoC is a means to smuggle the rejected misinformation bill back through the Parliament.

Much of what the legislation categorises as “harmful” is legal content, if often unsavoury. Platforms would be placed under preventative duties to create a “safe online environment” around these categories. The result is a new regulatory class of speech. It’s not illegal enough for Parliament to prohibit, but it’s considered harmful enough for the state to pressure platforms over how it’s distributed.

One proposed category that applies to Australians under 16 covers material or conduct that “encourages or promotes hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality”. Neither “hostile attitudes” nor “gender equality” creates anything like a clean boundary between objectively harmful conduct and political or cultural disagreement. It is also certainly not illegal.

This area is rife with live political disputes. A gender-critical argument about self-identification, a feminist argument about pornography, a religious sermon, a men’s-rights argument about family court, a traditional view of sex roles or even a stand-up routine could all conceivably be characterised as hostile by someone.

Once lawful disagreement sits inside a regulatory concept of “harm”, the question becomes who gets to decide where disagreement ends, and harm begins. Predictably, that power is intended to sit with the Minister, in consultation with eSafety.

The new machinery isn’t even tightly confined to children. The Bill would impose obligations around providing a “safe online environment” for all Australians with regard to “seriously harmful” material. While the current list captures content that is already illegal in Australia (e.g., child abuse, sexual violence, encouraging suicide), the Minister would have the power to add further categories of seriously harmful material through legislative instruments.

In basic terms, Parliament gives the Minister broad rule-making power now, and the details can be filled in later without passing a new law. The regime’s practical boundaries can therefore shift without another full legislative battle. Parliament can disallow new rules, but the process moves into a faster, lower-scrutiny channel with far less democratic oversight.

As if to demonstrate in real time the potential for this new regulatory machinery to be leveraged for political ends, Greens Senator David Shoebridge suggested at a recent press conference that the Bill was needed so political messages from Pauline Hanson and the Coalition, which he regarded as hateful, would not be amplified to children.

“We need digital duty of care so that those messages aren’t amplified and they don’t become the content that kids are digesting.”

Whatever you think of Hanson, the Coalition or Shoebridge, that should clarify what’s at stake here. Politicians are already thinking about this framework in relation to lawful political messages they interpret as socially harmful, a power neither side of politics would want in the hands of opponents with very different ideas about what constitutes harm.

Progressives would do well to think more than one step ahead and imagine what these laws might look like under a Right-populist government. They might decide that LGBT or trans content was harmful to children and decide to censor that. With One Nation currently leading in many polls, this is far from an impossibility.

Another part of the bill would give approved researchers employed by Australian universities mandated access to platform data, while keeping independent researchers out of the privileged access loop.

We find this seemingly benign move concerning because research is one of the core mechanisms through which a regulatory system justifies itself. Researchers collect and frame the data, regulators respond, researchers evaluate those responses, and their findings are cited as evidence for the next regulatory expansion.

That screeching sound you hear is the receiver mic of research getting too close to the speaker system of government. When privileged access to the underlying data is concentrated within a narrow institutional class, the government risks creating a closed knowledge loop.

We’ve seen this problem before. liber-net documented how US federal funding flowed into academic and nonprofit work on misinformation and content controls. Over time, government agencies, universities, NGOs, and tech companies coalesced into a biased ecosystem sometimes described as the “censorship-industrial complex”.

This is clearly the direction the DDoC is taking the country. A breach of the Digital Duty of Care carries a maximum civil penalty of 60,000 penalty units, currently up to $109.2 million for a corporation. Separate amendments also cut certain removal-notice windows from 48 to 24 hours, while imposing no equivalent penalty on platforms for suppressing lawful material.

Block first and ask questions later becomes the commercially safer choice.

For an Albanese government whose support has fallen sharply in recent polling, selling the package through child safety and consumer choice was the obvious play. But the sales pitch has started to unravel as Australians scrutinise the fine print and realise the Bill asks them to grant wide-ranging, open-ended powers now and just trust they’ll be used wisely later.

Albanese also let some of his broader political anxiety surrounding the policy show through in New York this week. While talking about the DDoC and giving Australians control over their feeds, he invoked misinformation and disinformation and warned that people were moving “away from the centre” towards the political extremes.

Germany’s regional elections this month offer a warning about where the instinct to suppress the political fringes can lead. Government overreach into the digital domain has proved no answer to populism and likely fuels the forces it attempts to contain. If people no longer trust the institutions governing them, giving those institutions more power over what they can see and say is an extraordinarily short-sighted response.

The problem isn’t the public’s perception of their government, but the reality of their government’s compounding failures. The sooner the digital nannies grok that and focus on managing material issues rather than public perceptions, the better for all of us.

If you would like more of the detail, you can read liber-net’s full submission here: https://liber-net.org/liber-net-submission-on-the-online-safety-amendment-digital-duty-of-care-bill-2026/

Large-scale political discontent broke loose in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt last weekend, where the Right-populist Alternative für Deutschland achieved almost 44% of the vote, giving it 39 of the 42 seats necessary to govern.

The result is driven by a host of issues, among them mass migration, unpopular wars, cost of living, and economic decline. Tone-deaf legacy institutions that have treated citizens less as democratic participants than as problems to be managed were also key in the sweeping victory. Germany’s political establishment has been handed a message it can no longer plausibly dismiss, though it will likely attempt to do so.

The kingmakers in this scenario are the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), a left-populist party which has the votes to decide the final result. I was in Brussels this summer to appear on BSW co-leader MEP Fabio de Masi’s podcast to discuss the censorship network in Germany and across the West. That episode was released just the other week (see above).

​In our recent investigation into Germany’s censorship network, we found an extensive ecosystem of national and supranational organizations, foundations, NGOs, and academic centres that monitor, police, and restrict political speech. This wide-scale censorship is another component of the populist backlash that is occurring in Germany and the West more broadly. Rather than taming populism, it inflames it.

​Whatever one thinks of the AfD, this German state election should force a reckoning. Germany’s establishment cannot censor its way out of a crisis of legitimacy, though plenty will die trying.