Australians could be given the right to sue big tech companies for compensation under proposed Greens amendments to the federal government’s digital duty of care laws.
The legislation, due to be introduced to parliament this week, is intended to force platforms including Meta and X to take greater responsibility for harmful online content. Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said the measures should go further by allowing individuals to pursue companies in court when they believe they have been harmed online.
“To meaningfully change the behaviour of big tech companies, the digital duty of care laws must include the right for Australians who have been harmed online to be able to take legal action and seek compensation for the damage done,” she said.
Under the government’s draft laws, the eSafety Commissioner would be responsible for taking action against technology companies. Firms could face fines of up to 109.2 million Australian dollars if they failed to protect Australians from specified online harms.
Hanson-Young said enforcement could not be left solely to the commissioner. The Greens are also seeking tougher safeguards around addictive algorithms and penalties calculated as a proportion of a technology company’s global revenue.
“To really put Australians’ online safety at the heart of this reform, individuals and the community need to have the right to take on Big Tech through a private right of action,” she said.
The proposed protections would require social media companies to screen out harmful material for under-18s, including pornography, content promoting eating disorders and websites that encourage hostility towards women.
The package would also introduce a “my feed, my way” option, allowing Australians to reject algorithmically recommended material and instead view posts chronologically from accounts they already follow.
Digital duty of care laws face opposition
The Coalition and One Nation have criticised the plans as censorship, and both appear unwilling at present to support the legislation. Sarah Henderson, the opposition communications spokeswoman, called the proposal “dangerous and undemocratic”.
“Labor must scrap its proposed digital duty of care and go back to the drawing board,” Henderson said. “This is a blank cheque for political censorship by a government desperate to shut down its political opponents.”
The government is preparing to remove ministerial discretion to designate new harms under the legislation. Critics from the Coalition, One Nation and the Greens have argued that the existing provision would give Communications Minister Anika Wells too much power.
Allowing private lawsuits could also bring the Albanese government into conflict with Donald Trump’s administration, which has opposed the digital duty of care laws. White House economics spokesman Kush Desai said the US president had warned trading partners against imposing “digital services taxes, fines, and other forms of extortion on America’s leading technology sector”.
Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, recently agreed to an 18 billion US dollar settlement with some US states and territories over claims that the company had harmed children.
Wells is due to address the National Press Club on Thursday about the draft digital laws. The legislation will be considered alongside government proposals on gas prices and the taxation of discretionary trusts.
