Social media companies harvest vast amounts of personal data and use it to push whatever will keep you engaged, even when that means prioritising attention over accuracy, safety, or wellbeing. This can result in mental health harms for all users, including increased levels of depression, anxiety and body image dissatisfaction. Everyone would benefit from reform that stops personal data being used to feed people content that captures attention at the expense of their wellbeing.
However, rather than address the root causes of this harm the Social Media Ban complicates the landscape and creates additional privacy risks for all of us.
This is your guide to how to navigate this new terrain.
Australians’ right to protest is eroded daily. Behind the scenes, digital surveillance is assisting this erosion, and AI has the potential to accelerate the damage. This is made possible by Australia’s weak privacy laws.
TL;DR: The political party exemption in the Privacy Act leaves the door open for political parties, their contractors, subcontractors, and volunteers to access your personal information without following the same rules as everyone else. That needs to change.
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A simple ban of young people from social media will harm them. Young people, especially those in a minority group or remote areas of Australia, depend on the internet and social media to reach “their people”. When we limit their ability to do so, there is no replacement. They will simply be cut-off from key parts of society. Instead of an outright ban, we should focus our efforts on better regulation of social media algorithms and the targeting of content to drive advertising revenue, which would make children safer without restricting their ability to participate in society.
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Digital Rights Watch (DRW) welcomes the opportunity to submit comments to the Productivity Commission in response to the interim report regarding the “Harnessing Data and Digital Technology” inquiry. DRW is excited for the possibilities digital technology brings to our lives. The Internet has done wonderful things for humanity and we can’t wait for the next wave of life-improving technology
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Climate change disinformation is pervasive, coordinated and highly damaging to democratic debate and urgent climate action. Disinformation creates confusion and splinters support for climate change action creating infighting and preventing meaningful support. Due to their business models, based around “engagement” and advertising, big tech companies are directly contributing to the proliferation of disinformation on their sites. This is enabling the erosion of citizens’ trust in legitimate climate science. Key vectors include astroturfing organisations, fossil-fuel-industry think-tanks, and privacy-invading social media algorithms, amplified by bots and generative AI.