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Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus is set to introduce anti-doxxing legislation as Communications Minister Michelle Rowland proposes new powers to fight disinformation.
The practice of doxxing – maliciously sharing someone’s personal address or phone number for the purpose of promoting harassment – could soon be illegal and carry a prison sentence of up to seven years.
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus is expected to introduce the new laws to Parliament today, 12 September.
Under the laws, the crime would carry a base sentence of six years, while that increases to seven if the doxxing is found to be inspired by discrimination based on sexual orientation, religion, or race.
The new laws are part of a wider push to protect the privacy of Australians, Dreyfus said ahead of introducing the legislation.
“Australians have a right to have their privacy respected, and when they are asked to hand over their personal data, they have a right to expect it will be protected,” Dreyfus said.
The leaking of chat logs belonging to 600 Jewish members of a group on WhatsApp in February inspired the government to take action on doxxing legislation.
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland is also introducing a bill today granting the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) new powers designed to curb the spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media.
The new powers would give the ACMA more powers to introduce standards and gather and monitor information to hold social media companies accountable. Platforms that fail to comply would face a range of penalties, including being fined up to 5 per cent of their global revenue.
For reference, Facebook’s owner Meta’s 2023 revenue was US$134 billion.
Minister Rowland told the ABC that to be deemed as disinformation or misinformation under the new laws, content would need to be both “seriously harmful and verifiably false”.
“It is a very high threshold for what constitutes serious harm,” Minister Rowland said.
“We are also talking about harms to democracy, and we know that disinformation, in particular, when spread by rogue states or foreign actors, has the potential to undermine our democracy.”
Minister Rowland added that the new powers would not, however, allow the ACMA to remove individual posts.
“This is not about individual pieces of content; it’s not about the regulator being able to act on those – it’s about the platforms doing what they said they’ll do,” Minister Rowland said.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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