The Weekly Cybers #17
Australia versus The Socials! eSafety vs X Corp in the federal Court, vice versa in the AAT, Meta vs All The News, and yet another inquiry into social media. That and more in the final week before the Budget.
Welcome
What a week for social media in Australia!
As The Saturday Paper’s newsletter Post listed today, X faced the eSafety Commissioner in the Federal Court, X launched a counterattack in the AAT, Meta pulled out of the News Media Bargaining Code and there was much sookage, and the government announced yet another inquiry into the social media platforms.
There’s plenty more, but having held back this edition until I could report on the end of today’s Federal Court hearing, let’s just get on with it.
Australia vs The Socials 1: X faces the eSafety Commissioner in the Federal Court
Federal Court judge Justice Geoffrey Kennett spent the day hearing arguments in eSafety Commissioner vs X Corp, in which commissioner Julie Inman Grant hopes to enforce her takedown orders against Elon Musk’s platform in relation to 65 posts containing the video of last month’s Wakeley church stabbing.
To refresh your memory, please see the background I provided two weeks ago. The current injunction against X was due to expire at 5pm AEST today, 10 May.
I’ve been listening to the hearing throughout the day, but my erstwhile colleague Josh Taylor has summarised the morning’s action for the Guardian:
eSafety’s barrister, Tim Begbie KC, has framed the case not as one about free speech but one about protecting the Australian public from what is deemed “class one” material under the Australian classification code — which the video was deemed by eSafety to be because it depicted what was classed as a terrorist attack by the police.
X disagrees. As the afternoon unfolded their barrister Bret Walker SC took a forensic journey through Australia’s content classification and online safety regime to challenge the validity of classification and of the takedown orders.
At the close of play, the existing injunction against X (“despite its imperfections,” as Justice Kennett put it), was extended to 5pm AEST this coming Monday 13 May. A decision on what happens after that will be handed down at 10am that morning, and we’ll likely discover the dates of the main hearing.
More detailed analyses of today’s action are bound to appear across the weekend, so watch out for those. I’ll link to a selection of the best next Friday.
Australia vs The Socials 2: X launches its own case against eSafety in the AAT
Meanwhile, X has launched a case in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) testing the merits of the eSafety Commissioner’s takedown orders as a piece of government administration.
As The Age ($) reports:
X Corp will use its separate tribunal case to argue Musk’s view that by blocking the video to all Australians — including those using networks that obscure their location — the watchdog is effectively seeking a global ban outside its jurisdiction and that Inman Grant’s decision was made without a proper basis.
Given the massive backlog of cases at the AAT, and given that on 1 July it’s due to transform itself into the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), we probably won’t see any action here for quite a while.
Australia vs The Socials 3: Meta dumps news but might be forced to reinstate it — and pay for it
We’ve known for some time that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, would be bailing out of the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), meaning that it wouldn’t be paying news outlets for their news being posted on the platforms — either by regular users or the news outlets themselves.
Well as the Guardian put it, ‘News on Facebook is dead’: memes replace Australian media posts as Meta turns off the tap. Their analysis, which is well worth reading, says that user engagement with news is at an all-time low.
Meta has argued that news makes up just 3% of what people engage with on its services. An analysis by Guardian Australia has determined that this appears to be by design, with Meta turning off the tap for news in the past few years.
That Facebook’s news ban would actually happen was predicted last month by Professor Axel Bruns, head of the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT, in a piece which provides all the background you’ll need.
Australia’s NMBC was essentially the first legislation of this type in the world, and subsequently copied by Canada — which also meant that Meta responded to the NMBC in the way it did (with a deliberately overreaching news ban) in order to warn off other governments from trying the same. Canada clearly didn’t get that message, and as a result they’ve now lived with a Facebook news ban for half a year or so. I’m convinced that Meta will continue to use Australia as a test case for calibrating its response to similar policies elsewhere in the world — and that the Australian experience (of short-term negative PR from the 2021 news ban, but apparently very limited long-term consequences in terms of user attitudes or behaviours) has emboldened it to reduce the circulation of news on its platforms world-wide.
Earlier this week the communications minister Michelle Rowland said the NMBC could be strengthened to force the platforms to run news and pay for it, although no decision has been made. Watch this space.
Australia vs The Socials 4: Let’s have yet another parliamentary inquiry, yeah?
Labor is launching yet another inquiry into social media. “Parliament needs to understand how social media companies dial up and down the content that supports healthy democracies, as well as the anti-social content that undermines public safety,” said communications minister Michelle Rowland.
Among other things, the inquiry will look at:
- The decision of Meta to abandon deals under the News Media Bargaining Code;
- The important role of Australian journalism, news and public interest media in countering mis and disinformation on digital platforms;
- The algorithms, recommender systems and corporate decision making of digital platforms in influencing what Australians see, and the impacts of this on mental health; and
- Other issues in relation to harmful or illegal content disseminated over social media, including scams, age-restricted content, child sexual abuse and violent extremist material.
The Government will consult with parliament on the final terms of reference, and expects to formally set up the committee next week.
To wrap this section, I’ll link to an explainer from the Guardian from last weekend: The Australian government wants to stop online harm fuelling violence and division. What can it do?.
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Also in the news
- Australian joined the US and UK when it sanctioned alleged Russian cybercriminal Dmitry Yuryevich Khoroshev, believed to be behind the LockBit ransomware group. The US also “published the numbers of Khoroshev’s two Russian passports, his tax identification number, digital currency address, email addresses, date of birth and aliases”.
- It’s been confirmed that the Privacy Act reforms being introduced in August will indeed be all the things that have been in the pipeline for four years. At least for some value of “all”. Will it include recommendations that were merely agreed to “in principle”, for example? A recommendation to bring political parties into the Privacy Act regime has already been rejected.
- “Meta’s oversight board upheld a decision to remove two Facebook posts calling for Australians to vote multiple times in an indigenous rights referendum, but noted the social media giant had not adequately explained its ban on encouraging voter fraud,” reports iTnews.
- Flawed immigration detention risk assessment tool can’t be upgraded as ABF data ‘riddled with errors’, reports the Guardian. “One detainee [was] recorded as being involved in ‘over 3,000 incidents’ in a year — an ‘incredibly unfeasible’ scenario, FOI documents say.”
- It’s been a year since Australia and New Zealand’s privacy commissioners launched an investigation into the Latitude dats breach, but so far little information has emerged.
- The Productivity Commission reckons Australia would save around $6.5 billion per year if we made more use of digital health technology, including My Health Record.
- “The Albanese government has successfully suppressed details of the effectiveness of electronic monitoring, arguing that transparency could encourage former immigration detainees to breach ankle bracelet visa conditions,” reports the Guardian. So I guess those bracelets work really well?
- AUSTRAC will get $166.4 million in the Budget next week to “help affected professions abide by the new laws” on money laundering through real estate transactions. Love that phrase.
Inquiries of note
- The Senate inquiry into the Optus Network Outage has been had its reporting deadline extended to 11 September.
- We also have the newly-announced inquiry into social media platforms, as mentioned above, but there’s nothing else to link to yet.
Elsewhere
- “Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’.”
- “Google has released a new tool that enables Australian users to easily find search results containing their personal information and request its removal.” Access it through a browser, or in the Google app.
- Meanwhile, the government will provide $11 million in the Budget for a mobile app and website notify Australians when their credentials are used and block them if they’ve been misused.
- “Telstra will push back the planned closure of its 3G network by two months to the end of August to give customers more time to upgrade devices.”
- Optus is appointing Stephen Rue as its new CEO, starting in November. Rue is currently the CEO of nbn co, as they insist in styling it, which I guess means he’s got six months to get some conflicts of interest happening. As Mumbrella noted, “Rue is currently the highest-paid public servant in the country — earning over $3 million, including short-term bonuses, during the last financial year.”
- NBN Co falls short of reporting standards.
- The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has an interesting piece on the importance of tech diplomacy.
- Melbourne driver who blamed her Tesla for pedestrian hit-and-run jailed for nine months.
- On Thursday I did the ABC RN Drive “Big Tech” spot, New AI model developed to predict behaviour of human molecules. So yeah we talked about how AlphaFold3 could accelerate efforts to understand the human body and fight disease, Jack Dorsey quits Bluesky board and urges users to stay on Elon Musk’s X, and Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX says it will be able to repay creditors full $11bn.
What’s next?
Parliament returns on Tuesday 14 May for the ritual that is Budget Night.
We already have the week’s draft legislation program for the House of Reps. As expected this includes the resumption of debate on the Digital ID Bill and its companion, which have already been passed by the Senate, as well as the Communications Legislation Amendment (Prominence and Anti-siphoning) Bill.
We also have the Senate program. They’ll be picking up the Communications Legislation Amendment (Prominence and Anti-siphoning) Bill, as well as debating the Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (Enhancing Consumer Safeguards and Other Measures) Bill 2023.
Any questions or comments? Just reply to this email. Cheers.
The Weekly Cybers is a personal look at what the Australian government has been saying and doing in the digital and cyber realms, on various adjacent topics, and whatever else interests me, Stilgherrian, published every Friday afternoon (nearly).
If I’ve missed anything, or if there’s any specific items you’d like me to follow, please let me know.
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This is not specifically a cyber *security* newsletter. For that that I recommend Risky Biz News and Cyber Daily, among others.