Turning Point Australia has made a submission on the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 (Cth) (“the Bill”).
The Bill would provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with new regulatory powers to require digital communications platform providers to take steps to manage the risk that misinformation and disinformation on digital communications platforms poses in Australia. These would include obligations on providers to assess and report on risks relating to misinformation and disinformation, to publish their policy in relation to managing misinformation and disinformation, and develop and publish a media literacy plan.
As a third-party campaigner, Turning Point Australia is concerned that the Bill could directly impose burdens and restrictions on the freedom of political communication. Poorly defined terms and phrases used throughout the Bill place discretionary powers into the hands of the ACMA that can interfere with and limit political discourse.
Additionally, our first-hand experiences with fact-checking by third parties on social media have demonstrated a genuine potential for biased mislabelling of factual content as misinformation. In our view, this Bill will exacerbate this problem, creating a situation whereby scrutiny will likely not apply to certain political participants as it does to others.
Turning Point Australia launched a grassroots campaign seeking signatures on a petition to ask the Government to not proceed with this Bill. At the time of submission, the petition had been signed by over 11,000 of our supporters, expressing their opposition to this Bill in its current form. The number of signatures exceeded 15,000 in the days following.