ACMA's new powers

Misinformation will never be solved by trying to eradicate untruths, however harmful they may be, and nor should we try. The focus should instead be on improving the online environment as a whole. This includes making digital platforms accountable for the nature of the environment that their platforms enable.

On 20 January, communications minister Michelle Rowland announced an intention to provide ACMA with new powers to ‘hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation in Australia’. The powers parallel those announced by Paul Fletcher before the election, and are likely to include the authority to request information and impose record-keeping rules, to enforce industry codes, and to make standards where codes prove inadequate. This includes imposing regulation on platforms that have not signed on to the existing voluntary code of practice.

The new powers come in response to ACMA’s report on the effectiveness of the code, provided to government in June 2021 but not released until March last year. Rowland’s announcement provides welcome clarity on Labor’s approach to misinformation, with the inaugural review of the code launched in July with some doubt over where the new government stood.

The revised code, released just before Christmas, improves on the old code in several respects. There’s a lower threshold for action against misinformation, from content which poses ‘an imminent and serious threat’ to that which poses ‘a credible and serious threat’. Serious harms resulting from the cumulative effect of dis- and misinformation are therefore now within scope. This imposes greater responsibility on signatories to improve the broader information environment on their platforms. This will also be aided by a new commitment to provide users with information about the use of recommender systems (i.e. algorithms) and options ‘relating to’ these systems.

Even with these improvements, however, the revised code has ignored several key issues common to many submissions to the review. Messaging services continue to be excluded, for example, despite most submissions recommending inclusion. Accountability mechanisms remain weak, with no real commitment to develop industry-wide performance measures or provide transparency over the full range of platform actions. It thus seems likely that, once granted new powers, ACMA will move to strengthen the code.

We should welcome this, but with caution. Government oversight of media is a fraught area of policy that requires a principled framework, pragmatically applied. Labor indicates the new regulation will focus on systemic issues rather than individual pieces of content. This is essential, both in principle and in practice.

Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow