The right is wrong about digital duty of care. It promises Australians more freedom, not less | Peter Lewis

When you hear them cry “freedom”, you know a culture war is brewing. And so it was last week that a bid to make tech companies address the harmful impacts of their products became a piece of political performance theatre.

The Coalition and One Nation tripped over each other to condemn the government’s long-awaited digital duty of care legislation. To Angus Taylor it is “a blank cheque for political censorship”; for Pauline Hanson it’s “Communist China”. For their fracturing base, it’s another reason to hate on the government.

Let’s be clear what the political right is really saying: that in the name of “freedom” we reject laws that would hold the most powerful companies on Earth accountable for their products.

At its heart is the confused and contradictory binary of safety and freedom; a false trade-off that has actively fuelled the very toxic online world these laws seek to purify. Un-muddling this is critical if we are to build an internet that actually works for people.

We can partly explain this political response as a self-interested attempt to protect the very algorithms that are driving the rise of the populist right. But there is also a legitimate debate to be had over the degree to which the state exercises its control over us all.

In the 25 years since 9/11, the powers the state has amassed over us have grown year on year until we have found ourselves living under a sophisticated surveillance apparatus created in the name of homeland security.

From building backdoors to monitor our phones and internet usage, to facial recognition cameras in public spaces, to sophisticated data-matching by companies such as Palantir, to the routine extension of police powers like the NSW government’s brazen bid to extract data from citizens’ phones without a warrant, our digital freedoms have eroded until they barely exist.

Over those 25 years, the right has been willing backers of this erosion of personal freedoms. Privacy became nostalgia, civil liberties conditional and the idea that our online activity could be captured and exploited normalised.

These capabilities were commercialised by the nascent social media companies. First Google and then Facebook developed models to render and extract our online activity into the personalised advertising models that Shoshana Zuboff dubbed “surveillance capitalism”. It is the real-world impact of this model, the companies it spawned and the capabilities it drove that the digital duty of care bill seeks to address.

This is not some academic argument – online harms are real: children are being exploited in horrendous ways, teenagers are taking their own lives, girls are driven to eating disorders, young men are being recruited into an exploitative sphere, communities are dividing and the common anchors of truth are being eroded.

The principle is simple: if you are offering an online product you need to be awake to its impact and take steps to make it safe. Whether you are producing a car, a financial service or a toy, that’s what is expected of you in the real world: that it will be safe.

At the tip of the legislative spear is the right for us to choose how our feeds operate, whether we want our feed full of paid recommendations or to simply to follow our friends and chosen interests. This seems the very expression of freedom of choice.

The focus of the freedom warriors’ outrage appears to be the codification of specific harms covered by the laws and the minister’s discretion to add rapidly emerging risks (think nudify apps) to a list of specific areas where the duty of care should apply. This has been conflated into a government grab for power.

If attempting to codify these limits of government power has the perverse effect of giving the freedom warriors a focal point to attack, a better approach might be to establish a more general duty of care to be shaped by the courts reflecting evolving community expectations.

A general duty of care is not a novel concept; it underpins workplace safety laws. All employers must take reasonable and practicable steps to provide a safe place of work, which is why fewer people die on the job.

This has also driven broader public health advances; the reason we don’t have smoking indoors is not a legislative prohibition (cry freedom!) but an enforcement of the employer’s safety obligations to co-workers and public-facing staff.

So where to from here? Rather than being forced into this phoney freedom war, maybe it is time to reset the discussion by starting with what we all should be able to agree on.

Should we do all we can to keep kids safe? Yes. Should the laws of the land apply in digital spaces? Yes. Should people have control over their feeds? Yes. Should there be lines of accountability for damage caused by a commercial product? Well, it happens in the offline world so why would it be different?

If we can agree on the basic principle that online services should carry the onus of making their products safe then we can have a sensible debate about not if but how these platforms should be held to account.

Because that’s what these laws are actually about: not safety or freedom or any crude trade-offs but our sovereign freedom as a nation to build accountability into the internet rather than continuing to allow the tech industry to operate with impunity.

Alongside privacy laws also before parliament, this is significant structural reform to reset the way the internet works: enforceable standards on the collection of your data (fair and reasonable) and how it is used and deployed against us (digital duty of care).

Embedding these rights for Australian citizens doesn’t solve everything about the toxic environment these corporations have created but it could give us a fighting chance to make the internet great again. That’s a culture war worth waging.