Opinion
There are entire generations of Australians who have never known life without the internet. Basically, anyone born from the mid-’80s onwards. For most of us, the normal state of affairs is to live between two interconnected worlds, the online and the offline, each governed by wildly divergent and often contradictory rules and norms. Nowhere has this schizophrenic duality been starker than when applied to freedom of speech.
What’s become standard speech in online spaces would be seen as shockingly rude offline, punishable perhaps by social ostracism or public shaming. The routine comments of now-ubiquitous trolls, say of a racist, misogynistic or defamatory nature, could constitute a criminal offence in the analogue world, yet most of us have accepted this as the price of being online. Stop for a moment to consider how deeply weird that is.
In ordinary life you might call your lawyer, or the police, or at the very least put physical distance between yourself and anyone hurling abuse. Online however, we’re given to believe that nothing can be done. Everyone from Pauline Hanson to Elon Musk will tell you that regulating the internet is an unacceptable infringement on freedom of speech.
Keep this in mind as we watch politicians and commentators, following the shocking attack on MP Helen Haines, once again implore each other to bring the temperature down. While the sentiment is noble, they are kidding themselves if they think the language used on the ABC or during Question Time has any real impact here. We all know what is driving the inflammatory, siloised, zero-sum atmosphere of our public debate. What politicians have to say to each other in parliament or via legacy media outlets has very little to do with it.
The sense I got from listening to much of the punditry about the attack on Haines was that there was almost a perception of inevitability about the incident – our political environment had become so febrile that it was only a matter of time. There is also an all-pervading defeatism. Security can be strengthened, political discourse can be made more civil, but we are mostly powerless to change the online trends driving the avalanche of abuse and hate.
Offshore tech bros preside over empires in the online world, governed by shadowy algorithms designed to hack human psychology to radicalise and addict in the pursuit of profits. We had thought that the Australian government was the highest power in this land, but it turns out that it is only the highest power in the offline world. Freedom of speech is being used as a straw man to keep it this way.
The idea that free speech is under attack whenever a government attempts even the most benign and ineffective of online regulations is disingenuous nonsense. We’ve seen One Nation advance this recently in response to the government’s proposed Digital Duty of Care Act. Such arguments appear to be anchored in a vision of the internet as some sort of libertarian utopia, common perhaps in the early noughties. Before algorithms, before AI. Back when we could assume that anonymous trolls were real, actual people just being nasty.
Today, in 2026, when arguing for total freedom of speech online, you are more often than not defending the right of authoritarian foreign governments to sponsor disinformation ops that erode trust in our democracy. You are enabling bot farms in Russia, China or Iran to surveil and attack dissidents and democracy advocates. You are protecting the rights of platforms like Meta to host AI-generated advertising targeting vulnerable users with increasingly sophisticated and personalised scams.
The Digital Duty of Care Act – which would require those responsible for an online service to take reasonable steps to prevent serious online harms and provide a safe environment “so far as is reasonably practicable” – is a baby step in the right direction. However, it doesn’t adequately address the fundamental disconnect between the laws and norms that apply offline and the profit-driven Wild West of online spaces. The first Australian class action against a social media giant for harming children is also long overdue, but we shouldn’t be waiting to address harms after they have been caused.
It is technically possible to litigate online offences in the offline world in some circumstances. However, the reality is that only the wealthiest and most privileged among us can afford to sue someone over a tweet or pursue foreign companies for ripping off our likeness for nefarious ends. The rest of us just have to suck it up.
The irony here is that at the same time governments are telling us there is little they can do to regulate speech in the online environment, they seem increasingly intent on curtailing it offline. In recent years we have seen numerous restrictions introduced on the right to protest, including the banning of certain slogans and phrases which, while distasteful, arguably amount to protected political communication. Australians can go to prison for blocking major roads or protesting at ports or other infrastructure. We famously have some of the most draconian defamation laws in the world, which I have directly experienced during my time writing columns for this newspaper. This has a chilling effect on public-interest journalism. Online, you are still free to anonymously defame away with impunity.
It’s almost as though we (and Putin, and the bots) have too much freedom of speech online, and not enough of it offline. It appears that state and federal governments’ sense of impotence in applying our laws to the online world has led them to largely ignore the internet-enabled deluge of anger, abuse and disinformation and instead focus on what remains in their control: offline speech. This is like plugging the kitchen sink when your house is flooding.
It’s becoming clear that the stability of Western democracies is in trouble, and that the rot that starts online doesn’t remain there. The rise of AI has already made the internet unrecognisable to just a few short years ago – bots now generate more traffic than human users do. We need a radical rethink of sovereignty and freedom of speech online. It is critical that we redesign internet regulation to accommodate and complement the laws and norms that human societies have spent millennia fine-tuning. This inevitably means making big tech, and big AI, subservient to our elected, offline governments.
Kylie Moore-Gilbert is a writer, academic and a regular columnist.
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