How Barnaby Joyce sent the ‘fear of God’ through Big Tech

Here’s a puzzle. On Wednesday, the Minister for Communications, Paul Fletcher, appeared at the National Press Club in Canberra. He took the national media spotlight to talk about his new booklet, Governing in the Age of the Internet. It’s a vast and urgent problem. But he had nothing new to say on the topic.

Fletcher didn’t so much as utter the words “social media” in his speech. Yet on Thursday, the very next day, Prime Minister Scott Morrison made news on Fletcher’s chosen topic when he damned the big social media companies that Fletcher is supposed to be in charge of regulating:

Illustration: John Shakespeare Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald

“Social media has become a coward’s palace where people can just go on there, not say who they are, destroy people’s lives and say the most foul and offensive things,” Morrison said at a press conference, signalling a crackdown. This made news not only in Australia but around the world. The global newsagency Reuters made it their “quote of the day”.

Morrison went further. It was “not a free country” where people could destroy lives with impunity. “So people should be responsible for what they say, in a country that believes in free speech. I think that’s very important … we intend to set the pace because we value our free society and in a free society, you can’t be a coward and attack people and expect not to be held accountable for it.”

So what changed in between the minister’s anodyne address and the Prime Minister’s unscripted denunciation? Two things. One was the appearance of the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen before a committee of the US Congress. The other was Barnaby Joyce.

Haugen’s testimony to the US Senate Commerce Committee was the culmination of a systematic three-week media campaign she’d waged, supplying tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook files to The Wall Street Journal for a blockbuster series known as the Facebook Files.

She was motivated to act, she said, because she’d lost a friend to online radicalisation. Now she was trying to coach the American legislature in how to do what it has never done – tame the tech monsters: “During my time at Facebook, first working as the lead product manager for civic misinformation, and later on counterespionage, I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolve these conflicts in favour of its own profits.”

Among the many, the most powerful single disclosure Haugen made was the leaking of a March 2020 slide presentation posted to Facebook’s internal message board. It cited internal research at the company’s Instagram business: “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.”

Another slide said: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

Among teenagers who reported suicidal thoughts, 13 per cent of British users and six per cent of American traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, according to the internal Facebook research.

Barnaby Joyce was stunned this week to find that his daughter was being insulted and abused by anonymous internet voices.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Now Haugen told the Congress: “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people. Congressional action is needed. They won’t solve this crisis without your help.”

She told the senators: “When we realised the extent of the damage caused by the tobacco industry, the government stepped in. When we realised cars were safer with seat belts, the government stepped in.” It was now the responsibility of legislators to act against the damage wrought by Facebook. “I implore you to do the same here.”

At the same time Haugen was holding the attention of the US political and media worlds, Barnaby Joyce was getting alarming messages of commiseration from friends abroad.

They were very sad and sorry to see the horrible things being said about his eldest daughter, Bridgette, on social media. A mystified Nationals leader went to search social media sites and was stunned to find that his daughter was being insulted and abused by anonymous internet voices, supposedly for being in a relationship with John Barilaro, the NSW Nationals leader who this week announced his retirement from NSW Parliament.

Bridgette Joyce had worked on Barilaro’s staff, but it was a “devastating lie” that they’d been in a relationship, Barnaby Joyce said. It was not only a lie, it was being seized upon by hateful grubs and internet bottom-feeders anonymously to heap vilification and abuse on the young woman. In other words, just another day’s entertainment for the Twitter trolls.

Joyce, fuming and frustrated, acted as any concerned father would to try to find a solution. But as Deputy Prime Minister, he had more tools at his disposal.

Among other things, he phoned the Prime Minister on Thursday morning and demanded that the government act to impose accountability on the US social media corporations. The government already had work under way to try to advance the accountability agenda, but Joyce insisted it move faster and, if need be, unilaterally. Joyce says he told Morrison: “This is enough.”

A Morrison trademark is his close supervision and control of his ministers. But Joyce, the leader of the Nationals and a force of nature, is beyond his control. So when Morrison gave his press conference that afternoon, he was primed. When a reporter asked him about the government’s work program, Morrison took the opportunity to “pick up and add my voice to Barnaby’s”.

Next, Joyce went public to denounce the rumours as “utter rubbish” and called for the social media companies to end the endless, anonymous “character assassinations” on their platforms.

Then he wrote an opinion piece for Friday’s issue of the Herald and Age: “Twitter, it is not the trolls that inspire the devastating mental health issues. The trolls don’t have a voice unless you give them one, and you do!” And: “The public has reasonable grounds to ask that these companies, supporting the lifestyles of billionaires, do not make their money by dropping character bricks on the heads of innocent private individuals.”

Joyce tells me that he wants the Commonwealth unilaterally to legislate to make Twitter, Facebook and the rest held liable for any defamatory material published on any of their platforms available in Australia. His ministerial colleague, Attorney-General Michaelia Cash, had already written to the states to consider this area of law, but Joyce is pushing her to act faster and unilaterally if necessary. He wants legislation passed before Parliament is prorogued for the election due by May next year.

And while he’d like to work with the US Congress on reforms, “don’t wait for them”, he adds. He promises that it’s not just a moment of catharsis: “I’m not going to just drop this.”

And Joyce takes up the car metaphor: “In a car, if I run over a person I go to jail, seatbelt or not. Online, I’m apparently indemnified. What’s the difference – breaking a leg or breaking a mind? We spend billions on mental health while they make billions in profits. I want to put the fear of God in them.”

And when Twitter and Facebook make the inevitable threats to withdraw from Australia in response? “I will say great, problem solved. I’ll say, hurry up!”

Paul Fletcher and the e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who works in his portfolio, are working on an ambitious, world-leading online safety code. It’s careful and painstaking work.

The Office of e-Safety already has a sound record of getting the US tech firms to remove harmful material on a voluntary basis. The new code would make it mandatory. This work, says Inman Grant, aims to stop serious cyber abuse, and could possibly intersect with Joyce’s agenda. She says it’s a world first and “we need to show restraint and use it for the most serious and harmful cases”.

This code could intersect with Joyce’s agenda, but it’s not at all clear whether Joyce’s unilateral law to hold Big Tech accountable for defamation would help or hinder.

Joyce is in a tearing hurry and he doesn’t seem to care whether others, even in his own government, can keep up. He had a phone call from Facebook’s Australian operation about 4pm on Friday, offering to work with the Deputy Prime Minister to help solve the problem. According to Joyce, he told the Facebook executive: “Your time is over. We are going to do something.

“How many opportunities do you need? Why are we going through this charade? It’s over.”

On the contrary, it’s just beginning.

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