Ed Coper, a political commentator and author of 'Angertainment: How Social Media Outrage Ruined Everything', has responded to critics of Australia's proposed digital duty of care bill, arguing that the true Orwellian machinery is the algorithms themselves, not the legislation designed to regulate them.
Coper, who is also the chief executive of communications agency Populares, wrote in a recent opinion piece that critics like Pauline Hanson are defending the right of platforms to promote harm over health, rage over reason, and fake over fact. Hanson, who previously called the reforms 'Orwellian machinery', posted on Facebook that 'Labor is copying the Chinese Communist Party's censorship playbook'—a platform that Coper notes is alleged to have compliantly adopted the Chinese Communist Party's censorship playbook to operate in China.
The Real Orwellian Machinery
Coper argues that the machinery at play is indeed Orwellian, but it is the algorithms that keep users under constant surveillance, bombard them with misinformation, and suppress corrective dissent. He contends that calling something 'Orwellian censorship' is a sure-fire way to get noticed by social media algorithms, which thrive on reductive arguments, emotive exaggeration, hysteria, outrage, and conflict.
In the online attention economy, extremism sells, and every grievance grifter and grandstanding grafter rushes to game the algorithm and send digital effluent cascading down feeds in the form of 'angertainment'. This leads to real-world harms, such as teenage boys being drawn to the manosphere, where the number of young men who think 'a woman's place is in the home' has grown by 400% in the last five years in some countries. It also leads teenage girls to eating disorders, with one poll of 730 Australian frontline eating disorder workers finding that every single respondent blamed social media.
What the Legislation Does
The federal government's proposed legislation allows Australians to choose whether they want their feeds to be censored or not. An 'opt out' pop-up will ask users who they want in charge of their feed: the platform and its personalised recommendations (which Coper describes as mining attention with harmful clickbait) or the user, who can instead see posts from accounts they choose to follow, akin to social media circa 2014. The only censorship to be suffered will be by big tech, who lose control of users' information diets.
The second change the legislation will bring is akin to making sure that diet doesn't kill you, in the same way the government 'censors' food companies by telling them they aren't allowed to sell yoghurt pouches laced with arsenic. This is the 'duty of care' the laws will impose on digital platforms to make products that are safe for human consumption, in the same way any other industry must already do.
A Duty of Care, Not Censorship
Coper argues that a duty of care is the best way to rein in the harms social media algorithms cause precisely because it is not censorship. Post-pandemic efforts that proscribed content to be removed, like anti-vaccination conspiracies, failed because they made the conversation about free speech. Shifting the responsibility to platforms to make their design safe changes the government's role to one of enforcer, not censor. It leaves outrage merchants free to shout into the ether but removes the rewards that amplify them.
Duties of care impose a legal responsibility to proactively avoid foreseeable harm, and the harms of these platform design choices are foreseeable. Coper concludes that Hanson and others' bad-faith grifting is merely one example of the harm caused by allowing algorithms to censor feeds, and it will continue as long as society allows it.
