Australian Human Rights Commission
Human Rights in the Digital Age: Additional Material Submitted to the UN Global Digital Compact, 30 April 2023
maintenance and protection of human rights for all people including
children, young people, elderly people, indigenous people, people with
disability and people without access to technology or internet.
Recommendation 16: The Compact must ensure that all people can reap
the benefits of new technologies – while also having their human rights
promoted and protected.
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Introducing accountability criteria for
discrimination and misleading content
85. The Commission questions how discriminatory and misleading content can
be effectively countered online. Combatting such content implicitly
requires a right of reply – which does not automatically exist on digital
platforms given their private ownership. The time it takes to disprove
misleading content is also too long when compared to how quickly, and
efficiently, such misleading content can be created and circulated.
6.1
Model of regulation
86. The Human Rights Law Centre’s recent submission to the inquiry into the
influence of international digital platforms notes the role that social media
platforms play in driving the spread of disinformation and hate speech.
87. Although Australia has been a world leader in establishing the e-Safety
Commissioner (which is Australia’s independent regulator for online safety
and is the world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people
safer online),55 Australia and other countries lag in regulating
discrimination, hate speech and misleading content on digital platforms.
88. One of the recommendations of the Human Rights Law Centre’s
submission to the inquiry into the influence of international digital
platforms was a move away from self-regulatory and co-regulatory models
for digital platforms, by replacing existing co-regulatory codes and ensuring
new regulations are written by legislators or regulators.
89. The submission further noted that:
In the EU, the introduction of the Digital Services Act was driven by
growing recognition that self- and co-regulatory models are
inadequate and ineffective. … Regulator-drafted industry standards
should be the norm. … It is essential that the regulation of digital
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