Digital Duty of Care Explained
Australia’s new Digital Duty of Care. In conversation with Michael Arbon, Reality Check Radio.
Australia is proposing a new Digital Duty of Care that would require online platforms to anticipate and prevent foreseeable harms. But what happens when governments and regulators are given increasing power to determine what constitutes “harm”?
Michael Arbon and I discuss the proposal through the lens of engineering and safety systems:
How risk is managed, why false positives matter, and what can happen when systems designed to protect people become increasingly interventionist.
We also explore Australia’s social-media restrictions for under-16s, age verification, censorship and political speech, and what the recent Secret Harbour by-election may tell us about declining trust in established institutions.
At the heart of the conversation is a simple idea: Good intentions are not a safeguard against bad systems.
When we build new technological or regulatory infrastructure, we need to ask not only how today's government intends to use it, but what we're enabling governments to do 10 or 20 years from now.
“We have to be very careful about what we build, because we can't predict how that will be used in the future.”
— Paul G. Conlon
Beyond Digital Duty of Care.
Digital Duty of Care raises a broader question: how much responsibility should we transfer to institutions and technological systems in exchange for safety?
That tension runs through much of my work—from online regulation and digital identity to the changing relationship between individuals, technology and the state.
My book, Citizen One, explores that relationship in greater depth, and asks what preserving individual agency might require as the systems around us become increasingly capable of making decisions on our behalf.