If there’s a competition for the year’s best book title, I nominate Character Limit. The title adorns a new book by two New York Times journalists about Elon Musk and X. The book’s subtitle is ‘How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter’. While Twitter once had a limit of 140 characters, there's seemingly no limit to the questions being asked about Musk's character.
The book is withering, says journalist and academic Margaret Simons: ‘The authors have gained extraordinary access, and the results are devastating to Musk’s reputation, and to [Jack] Dorsey’s.’ Simons herself doesn’t hold back about all the ‘men-children’ who invented social media: ‘They seemed idealistic about the public conversation, but their naivety meant that their idealism didn’t survive encounters with reality.’
That naivety created major global challenges, to put it mildly. After a long lag, however, regulators, legislators and judges are mobilising. In Australia, the PM is talking about a social media ban for anyone under 18. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation last week requiring tech companies to make posts on teens’ social media accounts appear by default in chronological order, rather than allowing algorithms to maximise engagement; the bill also prohibits notifications during school hours and sleep hours. And in X’s Brazilian standoff, Elon Musk has capitulated, as Tamara details below.
Also in today’s newsletter, Alana explores how the Paralympics mounted a campaign on TikTok, showing that it’s important also to recall social media’s upsides, including that it can bust stereotypes as it fosters diversity and inclusivity. And Alexia unveils the CMT’s latest podcast, which covers the vexing challenges faced by Indian journalists in an age of misinformation.
In the face of these challenges, policymakers are changing their approach. As Sydney University scholars Jo Gray, Jonathon Hutchinson, Milica Stilinovic and Nadia Tjahja write, ‘For many years, Internet policy was mainly a technocratic pursuit largely restricted to those with computational “expertise” … During this period, there was an explicit commitment to multistakeholder governance models. However, as the Internet's capabilities, reach and impact around the world have grown, multistakeholderism has been challenged …’
Updated approaches are needed, because today’s media policy challenges are vast, straddling media new and old. Privacy is a particular concern. Recently we learned Facebook was scraping the data of Australian users (and non-users, presumably) to train its AI; and in the background data brokers keep buying and selling our data with contemptuous disregard for consent, as the ANU’s Priya Dev wrote in a sobering piece published this week in The Conversation.
In Australia, privacy law has been under review since 2020. Two weeks ago, the government presented a bill to Parliament including provisions for the introduction of a tort for serious invasions of privacy. This is a no-brainer, as the Australian Law Reform Commission argued so forcefully 10 years ago. Unfortunately, though, journalism will be exempt, just as it is exempt from the Privacy Act. The justification for this exemption is that journalism is held accountable under professional standards schemes enforced by bodies such as the Australian Media and Communications Authority and the Australian Press Council.
Unfortunately, as we’ve previously argued, these schemes are inconsistent and inadequate, leaving Australian news media shockingly unaccountable. For now, it seems, the most effective journalistic oversight regularly comes from the ABC’s Media Watch (for which media consultant Hal Crawford has some interesting advice). The privacy bill is currently before the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, which is accepting submissions until October 11. If you want a say, now’s your chance.
Look, it’s a start, and we can always improve it. As Gray et al write, ‘Good policymaking is a journey rather than a destination - good policy is never truly complete, it requires constant review and adjustments.’ Just like character.
Sacha Molitorisz, Senior Lecturer - UTS Law