Wrapping up 2024

Welcome to our final newsletter for 2024. It’s been a busy year for the Centre, with several major research reports and many submissions to government inquiries and consultations.

One area of particular attention for us has been the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, which was abandoned by the government the day before the senate committee was due to report on the bill. This came as little surprise. In our submissions and evidence to the committee, we raised concerns about the bill’s structure and provisions, many of which are reflected in comments from the committee members.

The abandonment of the bill raises the question about what might come next. Taking an optimistic view, we see this as an opportunity to consider whether a broad-based approach to platform regulation, focused on transparency and holding platforms to account for their systems, processes and decision-making, would provide a more fruitful outcome.

Some of the dissenting comments in the committee’s report point towards this possibility. Senator David Pocock, for example, states that ‘Privacy Act changes should be implemented to create a stronger base for all other legislative changes we make to our digital ecosystem. From there, we can take a systems approach to regulating platforms rather than trying to address individual issues one by one.’ The Greens argued that ‘The Government must now turn its mind to comprehensive reforms that put responsibility on digital giants to make their platforms safe for all users, including when it comes to mis and disinformation.’ And the Nationals recommend that the government adopt the recommendations of the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media, the first of which calls for all large social media platforms operating in Australia to meet a minimum set of transparency requirements.

Sacha Molitorisz and I argue for a broad-based regulatory approach to platform accountability in a paper that we presented last week at the Australia and New Zealand Communications Association annual conference. Of course, moving forward with a new approach requires a fair amount of political will, but it is likely to garner more support than the narrow focus of the failed bill. While Michelle Rowland has indicated that the government will seek to impose a statutory duty on digital platforms, the scope of that duty is yet to be articulated and it is unclear whether it would cover misinformation.

At the conference, I also presented some findings from our project on the implications of generative AI for Wikipedia and the open knowledge ecosystem. This is also, in part, the topic of our latest Double Take podcast – in which I had the pleasure of interviewing Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. More on that from Alexia below.

Also, this week Monica presents CMT’s latest report – the final of three reports in our Regional Journalism project in which we’ve been examining the flow of regional news and information into metropolitan news markets, and Kieran reports on CMT’s participation in a major public event at UTS – the  latest instalment of the Global Game Changers series on information integrity, AI and the law.

Read it in full here.

Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow