Mushrooms in the dark
Albanese's Online Safety Amendment Bill is a digital Iron Curtain that will protect legacy narratives more than it will young Australians.
Labor’s Online Safety Amendment Bill is an attack on basic freedoms in an oppressive Australian legacy media atmosphere. The Albanese government has finally made real its under-sixteen ban on social media, but the PM’s words conflicted with government efforts to shape narratives along the legacy media, at a time of national upheaval, and may also be designed to censor young Australians and keep them from independent information that it might be considered damaging to a bipartisan agenda in Canberra.
The bill claims to “reduce the risk of harm to age-restricted users from certain kinds of social media platforms” by restricting access to underage users, but the ban has met with contested reception in the media and sections of the Australian community. There has been wholesale support for the ban in the major parties, and in big media, but independent politicians and experts in the country point to it as an alarming crackdown on public freedoms—ineffective in its stated aims and acting instead as a cudgel that ultimately denies access to independent information for a section of the Australian population.
Banning TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) for the youth population that’ll be finding ways to break through this with their internet savvy for years to come does little to address the problems the government claims to be addressing. Young Australians denied access to regulated social media platforms will gravitate to unregulated platforms like 4chan and worse; and with the enormous challenge of policing such a piece of legislation and the ethical debate about its legality swarming at its inception, a multitude of complex issues compound the bill from day one. This war on access to electronic information being decreed in Canberra also sits oddly when our elected leaders leave in place the second most highly concentrated and arguably harmful media apparatus on the planet—led by the Murdoch juggernaut.
It was only a few years ago that Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull had a crowdfunded campaign to call for a Murdoch royal commission regarding the gross misinformation it peddled during the pandemic, floods and national bushfires—with hundreds of thousands of signatures. Today, the same PM who gives Whitlam a shoutout on the 50th anniversary of his sacking bestows championship on the concentrated corporate media titans in their very own television studios. Alongside oligarchic press juggernaut Kerry Stokes, the Prime Minister decreed this week, “A strong independent media is vital to a democracy and for helping keep Australians informed and engaged”—from a recently opened Channel 7 parliamentary studio in Canberra.
The mainstream press isn’t keeping Australians informed and engaged; it’s openly manipulating the national conversation to achieve its ends, from sovereign transfers to preserving the oligarchical stranglehold over our economy. And just because the Albanese government has managed to compromise with the corporate media class that has spent the last decade waging war against it (and will do so again as soon as it’s expedient) doesn’t make Kerry Stokes and Seven West the paragons of the independent free press just because it suits the political survivalism of a disappointing political party.
In a country where for two years straight the national newspaper front pages have primarily been about supporting a Zionist genocide, in which the broadsheet analysts strike fear about fanciful imminent wars with China, and the talking heads treat any whisper of economic reform akin to some form of brutal totalitarian communism, social media has been one of the only ways for Australians to access and discern a media balance. Now there’s a steely awareness and utility to social media among Aussies alive to the media enshittification enveloping our info landscape.
It doesn’t look good keeping young Australians like mushrooms on poo, in the dark, like second-class citizens—a marked generation to be denied media access and freedom of imagination like no other before—all for what seems to be a blatant government effort to social-engineer our youth into acquiescing to ideas like war with China, accepting endless untaxed resource extraction for foreign multinationals, and allowing the handover of our sovereign agency, while asking them to marinate in the bain-marie, Soylent Green-like slop of modern end-stage neoliberalism.
Young Australians are living below the Henderson poverty line; one in six of the children being denied access to social media also lives in poverty; and millions denied access to cheap and affordable housing and reasonably priced food; the youth of Australia are looking at median property values that are orders of magnitude more inflated than anything their parents or even their older siblings could imagine, and live in a society heaving from decades of private-government partnerships championed by this very Labor Party, from the NDIS to build-to-rent housing schemes to the childcare disaster that sees children abused in the care of another government initiative.
And they are saying TikTok is toxic?
A 15-year-old student of politics can purchase The Australian and read Greg Sheridan’s praise for Netanyahu’s genocide. They can be fed AUKUS propaganda in STEM classes and slick ADF pitches on the merits of joining the armed forces. Our precious kids can watch the vapid, sexualised and emotionally nihilistic reality television programs that dominate our commercial networks, or binge the vacuous, dead-minded television series that call on Australians to be petty and ordinary and to do nothing but submit to the unsustainable status quo—the one they are trapped within. Young Australians are expected to live somewhere on a scale between abject poverty and the working poor—and to be seen and not heard in the public debate run by an entitled class of spoilt, cradle-to-grave boomers—but they can’t watch a YouTube video that challenges all these orthodoxies and explores alternate possibilities?
This week our PM obligatorily salutes Gough Whitlam on the 50th anniversary, sidestepping all the dangerous bits (being compared poorly to Whitlam’s legacy), to boast about all the nice things that Labor cherry-picks to fill its ethical, moral and creative gaps. It would be great if his government was as altruistic as its ancient ancestor, if the social media ban was modelled on true national and public interest—but it’s not. And while a broken clock may be right twice a day, and the ban may have some social benefit, it is couched in the building blocks of oppression; in a country with the second-most concentrated media industry in the world, this entire policy seems to be designed to combat diversity of thought among youth in a pre-war environment, rather than a genuine effort to help them navigate a dangerous online environment in the age of AI.
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The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 doesn’t cover porn or gambling sites, 4chan or the dark web; it only narrowly targets “age-restricted social media platforms” that enable social interaction, user linking, material posting, and that are accessible in Australia (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, YouTube, Reddit). It’s hard to let ‘kids be kids’ when they are bombarded with gambling advertisements, AI-generated deepfakes, constant talk of war and militarisation in the press, knowledge of a 25-month genocide against mostly children, while also being helpless victims of state-sanctioned corporate greed. Rather than offering education to assist young people in navigating a changing world, our leaders are condemning them to a second tier of society, for all the wrong reasons.
There is an uneasy scurry among the bipartisan political class and their legacy media supplicants, who see their grip on the narrative slipping—and being replaced by indies, many on social media. A disingenuous government—that can’t even mention providing poor Australian children with a livable level of welfare or a roof over their head, that won’t even take a single definitive action on a nation that has massacred hundreds of thousands of kids in Gaza—talks about the safety of our children with utter hypocrisy to a youth that is switched on to issues and prepared to engage in them. It’s not a recipe for social cohesion, or future votes, but an invitation to discord.
One of your best among plenty.