Australia's federal government has been pushing for new ‘anti-trolling legislation’ that would see defamation liability shift from owners of social media pages onto social media platforms as it believes the legislative changes would go a long way towards reducing online harm, but the Labor party...
This week, the Internet and its governance experienced a significant accountability failure. This failure had two faces: the first one concerned the Australian government’s choice to put pressure on tech companies to strike a deal with traditional publishers. The second one was Facebook’s drastic...
Dylan Voller, the Aboriginal man who was shown restrained and wearing a spit hood at age 17 in shocking CCTV footage from an adult prison, has been given the green light to sue media companies over Facebook comments written by their readers. From BuzzFeed News.
Australia has adopted a law that would penalize platforms and their executives for a failure to control what it calls “abhorrent violent material.” The law is deeply problematic, as was the extraordinarily compressed timeframe for its adoption (basically two days). The Special Rapporteur on Counter...
Since the tragic attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand earlier this month, Australian leaders have raised concerns that social media platforms have become facilitators, if not full-on enablers, of the spread of terrorist ideas and content. From AccessNow.
Facebook has warned that “unprecedented” proposals by Australia’s competition watchdog aimed at protecting publishers from digital disruption would hurt consumers and advertisers, while doing nothing to make journalism more sustainable. From Financial Times.
The Australian Parliament passed a contentious encryption bill on Thursday to require technology companies to provide law enforcement and security agencies with access to encrypted communications. From The New York Times.
After a prolonged battle through every stage of the Austrian legal system, the Supreme Court has now ruled that local ISPs must prevent their subscribers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The case, filed by a collecting society representing around 3,000 artists, also involves top 10 torrent site 1337x...
Facebook has an unusual request for Australian users who think they may be victims of revenge porn. It wants them to send their intimate photos through its Messenger app -- to themselves -- as part of a new pilot program to crack down on the problem. From CNN.
In a long-awaited decision, a majority of the Full Court of the South Australian Supreme Court has dismissed Google's appeal against a decision that it defamed an individual, Dr Janice Duffy, by publishing defamatory material about her in its search results: Google Inc v Duffy [2017] SASCFC 130...