George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I don't think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies only judge to be 100 per cent true. I believe we should err on the side of greater expression. They're not my words; they're the words of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg from 2019. Moreover, he went on to say this little gem in a speech in front of Georgetown University students in 2019: 'I don't think it's right for a private company to censor politicians.' We had Jack Dorsey of Twitter, tweeting out to us that 'Twitter stands for freedom of expression'—that was in 2015. Oh how times have changed where we now have these big tech social media conglomerates that are censoring political speech all over their platforms. I for one do not think that is right. It is an attack on democracy itself. It is an attack on free speech.

If you can censor and deplatform the leader of the Free World, you can do it to anyone. There's an old saying, 'Whoever takes down the king, becomes the king.' These social media giants, these big tech corporations, are now way, way too powerful. They control the new town square, the new public forum, where political discussion, all sorts of discussion, goes on. Of course we should clamp down on speech that is harmful, defamatory, and illegal, and where the content is actual hate speech—not just speech that we hate, but actual hate speech; there is a difference. We should clamp down on all of those things that would not be allowed in a newspaper. But the problem is these big tech companies have gone far too far. They now are clamping down on political discussion, political commentary, political views, and they're also putting in these so-called fact checkers who give the impression that a fact you have posted is wrong when it is a fact and it is correct. They do that by saying it's missing context. Tell me which news story isn't missing some form of context! So this is a very, very big problem for democracy.

Unlike other speakers in this place, I do not wish to further censor these big tech companies. I do not wish to censor what people are saying on social media platforms. But I will concede this: they're actually now no longer platforms; they're publications. They're censoring speech that is lawful on what were once platforms and are now basically online publications. That is why, if these big tech companies don't bring themselves back to the point of being social media free speech platforms, as they were originally intended, then they probably should, as the member for Mallee has suggested, be liable for defamation. They've basically become publications now, publications which have editorial guidelines—they call them community standards, but now they're basically editorial guidelines. They're major publications which have a whole heap of volunteer contributors. If that's the model that they want, then that is what they're going to have to live with, and defamation and their liability for defamation are going to have to be part of their business as usual.

I wish though that they would just go back to what they were originally intended to be: platforms for free expression. I don't think we're going to see that, but I've got to say that, whether we make these social media giants go back to being platforms or whether we say, 'You're now acting like publications and so you should be liable for defamation,' they should be the focus of government. We shouldn't simply have legislation which makes these big tech companies pay big news companies. I don't want to see big tech corporations paying big news media corporations. What I want to see is legislation here protecting the little guy, protecting the average Australian, and that is what this motion is calling for.

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