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. 6 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 20