Australia Bundles Censorship Into Its Online Safety Bill

Key Takeaways

• The Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 contains two measures: a requirement for platforms to offer chronological feed alternatives, and a vague "duty of care" enforced by the eSafety Commissioner.
• The chronological feed requirement is largely redundant — most platforms already offer this — but is being used to front the bill publicly.
• The duty of care provision would expose platforms to fines exceeding $100M if the eSafety Commissioner determines content is insufficiently moderated, with no precise definition of what that means.

Australia's Latest Online Safety Bill Is Two Things at Once

The Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 does two things, and the Australian government is talking about one of them. The first is a requirement for social media platforms to offer users a clear choice between an algorithmic feed and a chronological one showing only accounts they follow.

The second is a duty of care obligation enforced by the eSafety Commissioner, with fines exceeding $100M available for platforms the Commissioner determines have failed to adequately moderate content — including content deemed too misogynistic or mean.

The government's public messaging focuses almost entirely on the first measure. When pressed on censorship concerns, the Prime Minister has repeatedly returned to the algorithm-choice framing. That’s only half the story, and critics have pointed out that the bundling is deliberate — a popular, largely symbolic reform wrapped around a vague enforcement power that grants significant discretionary authority to a single regulator.

The Part the Government Is Not Talking About

The algorithm provision is, by most accounts, redundant. Most major platforms already offer chronological feed options. Requiring them to make the choice more visible is a minor usability improvement, not a structural reform. It's unlikely to face serious opposition, which is precisely why it's leading the bill.

The duty of care provision is different. It doesn’t define with any precision what content crosses the line, leaving that determination to the eSafety Commissioner. A regulator with the power to impose nine-figure fines based on vague content standards has effective authority to pressure platforms into over-moderating, since the cost of getting it wrong falls entirely on them. 

The practical result of that pressure is platforms removing content preemptively to avoid liability — which is censorship by incentive rather than by direct order, and harder to challenge.

Australia's recent record here matters. The 2024 misinformation and disinformation laws were dropped entirely after public backlash. The 2026 hate laws were significantly weakened under the same pressure. The current bill is, by the assessment of commentators covering it, a more politically sophisticated attempt — the censorship concern is harder to surface when the government can point to algorithm choice as the headline.

A Pattern Worth Recognizing

Australia has introduced a steady stream of online speech regulation over the past several years. Each proposal has been framed around safety. The specific targets shift — misinformation, hate speech, duty of care — but the underlying mechanism is consistent: grant a regulator broad, discretionary authority over online content, attach significant financial penalties, and let the vagueness do the work.

The bill is currently at the exposure draft stage, published by the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts on September 8th. Written feedback can be submitted to digitaldutyofcare@communications.gov.au until 12 pm on September 22nd — responses are capped at five pages, and the department has said it may use AI tools to summarize submissions. 

The outcome of the 2024 and 2026 efforts suggests that public pressure at the draft stage has been the most effective check on how far these proposals go. Whether the bundling strategy is enough to change that dynamic is the question the next week will start to answer.