The gist of the legislation is that it bans audio or video of abhorrent violent acts, which are defined roughly as: terrorist acts, murder, attempted murder, to

The gist of the legislation is that it bans audio or video of abhorrent violent acts, which are defined roughly as: terrorist acts, murder, attempted murder, torture, rape, or kidnapping.[1] It appears that there's an "esafety commissioner" who would send notices identifying abhorrent violent material, and then the hosting company must expeditiously remove it. Tech companies that are against this want to have their cake and eat it too. They're already doing the same thing voluntarily, and it would create a moat: small competitors don't have the resources to have their own censorship department. Big internet platforms should welcome this, for giving them legal cover for some of their censorship. Instead, they complain because heaven forbid anyone interfere with their internal operations and their profiting from attention-capturing content. The target is clearly things like the NZ shooter video, but it would also apply to things like ISIS videos, which are academically important and newsworthy. I would fully expect puritans to try to use this law against BDSM porn; there's always the claim that pornstars in that either aren't participating voluntarily, or the nature of the activity forecloses the possibility of valid consent. At least if a government mandates this social media censorship, there is (theoretically) public accountability for the censorship criteria, and legal recourse if it gets expanded out of control. Currently, social media bans things whimsically based on whether they view the material as bad PR, or based on how many reports/flags it's received. One might hope that with this kind of law, anything not legally banned would cease to be censored, and cease to be justification for being kicked off the platform; but I know that's probably not going to happen. Social media companies, even with this law, would keep up their extra-legal censorship. [1] Direct link to the legislation (good stuff starts on pdf page 7): https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bills/s1201_first-senate/toc_pdf/1908121.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/legislation/bi...