Twitter is a signatory and also released a report, which mainly covered the introduction of community notes in Australia last year, and the Twitter Blue subscription which it says is designed to “elevate quality conversations”. But this week the company withdrew from the equivalent European Union voluntary code, according to EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton.

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Yet Twitter will end up being bound to commitments on misinformation anyway, because the EU will introduce new laws in August that will make fighting disinformation a legal obligation. And Australia could follow suit.

In January of this year, the federal government announced that the Australian Communications and Media Authority will be given new powers to hold digital platforms to account, meaning it could impose a compulsory code for the whole industry if it considered the voluntary one wasn’t working. It’s due to consult on draft legislation in the first half of 2023.

“I hope it will be a step in the right direction. And one is needed, especially given that the stakes are going to get significantly higher with the advent of generative AI systems,” Gal said, pointing not only to AI-generated fakes but also AI-generated ads which could target political messages to individual users.

“You can do it automatically at scale. If you’re doing it right, you can send it out to thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of seconds. And it costs almost nothing. So the need for effective legislation to tackle this, I think is more urgent than ever.”

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DIGI managing director Sunita Bose said the current code made a difference in driving down the prevalence of mistruths, and pointed specifically to last year’s federal election which was the first since the code was introduced.

“We believe the code positively contributed to the Australian Electoral Commission’s determination that this election saw much lower levels of electoral mis- and disinformation than in other like-minded democratic elections across the globe,” she said.

“Transparency reporting helps create a culture of accountability, establishes benchmarks for future progress, and creates public resources that can provide researchers, civil society and governments in particular with insights into the scale and management of mis- and disinformation.”

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