United States Is Displeased with Australia’s Proposed Digital Duty of Care

The Trump administration says Albanese’s plan to protect Australians from “seriously harmful material and conduct” is a “blank cheque for political censorship”.

In a supreme act of foreign interference, the US Embassy and Consulates in Australia provided the US response to the release of the exposure draft of the Albanese government’s Digital Duty of Care Bill, which ultimately rejects the restrictions it proposes to the online environment as censorship, as have the local grassroots white nationalist movement, One Nation and the federal Coalition.

Released on 8 September 2026, the exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 serves to overhaul the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth) (the Act) to establish a three-pronged digital duty of care, which would serve to protect all people from “seriously harmful material and conduct” online, and further provide children with an extra layer of protection.

The key gripe that critics of the digital duty have are that ultimately, the Australian communications minister will be able to determine new categories of “serious harm” that need to be censored without any oversight. And the Liberals have condemned this ability as “a blank cheque for political censorship”, which leaves the public having to trust that the minister won’t abuse this power.

The digital duty of care framework further requires digital platforms and online service providers to proactively ensure that users can avoid harmful content. This is via a mechanism that allows users to opt out of default personalised algorithms that control their feeds, so that only nonharmful content related to their friends and the pages they follow are being fielded to their feed.

The Digital Duty of Care Bill, which mirrors laws first proposed by the Greens in April, comes on the back of the Albanese government’s 2025-imposed restriction on social media for teens under 16, and both this age limit block and the proposed duty of care are posing an afront to US president Donald Trump and his Silicon Valley coterie, who are on a no-holds-barred technological advancement drive.

“My feed, My Way”

“The Albanese government is taking the next step following its world leading social media age ban to ensure Australians have more choice online, with draft legislation for the Digital Duty of Care released today for targeted consultation,” the Albanese government set out in its 8 September My Feed, My Way presser, on the same day that the exposure draft was released.

“These new laws will put the onus on digital service providers to provide a safe online environment, setting minimum standards for the features and tools they use,” federal Labor continued. “This will include an Australian first, ‘My Feed, My Way’, initiative which will give Australians control over their social media algorithms.”

The initiative, the press release goes on to explain, will provide that Australian social media users will be given the capability to opt out of the personalised algorithm a social media platform develops for them. Further, other online platforms, like online gaming, apps and AI chatbots, will be required to a modify certain design features that carry negative impacts, so that children will not be harmed.

The Online Safety Act currently permits the eSafety commissioner to issue removal notices to online content service providers to remove content deemed harmful, with refusal to do so within 24 hours resulting in fines of up to $182,000. The legislation specifies that reasons for issuing notices include “cyber-bullying, intimate images and cyber-abuse”.

The digital duty of care laws would result in the maximum penalty for noncompliance with an eSafety commissioner removal notice being upped to $21.84 million dollars. Removal notices would be expanded so that they can involve the removal of sites that are used to generate deepfake nude images, as well as demanding that sites take down links that lead users to harmful materials.

“When it comes to social media, Australians over the age of 16 will be able to opt in or opt out of the algorithm easily,” explained communications minister Anika Wells, on the day the draft exposure was released. “The duty of care will require platforms to give users over 16 choice on what feed they see when they open the app and to respect that choice.”

Digital harms and the duty of care

The updated objects of the Act, contained in the Digital Duty of Care Bill, comprise of creating a “safe online environment” for all, along with protecting children online, “providing complaints schemes or mechanisms to quickly investigate, remove and remediate illegal or seriously harmful material, and providing for an eSafety commissioner to promote, monitor, investigate and enforce compliance”.

In terms of the “seriously harmful material and conduct” the bill seeks to protect all persons from, these are contained in new subsection 25C(1) of the Act, and involve materials related to child sexual exploitation, grooming children, sexual violence, extreme violence and cruelty, threats of physical violence and incitement to self-harm, terrorism, the commission of criminal offences or drug use.

New subsection 25D(1) sets out harms that children are to be specifically protected from, which include pornography, information causing eating disorders, misogynistic content, along with content promoting crime commission, or abuse, harassment and bullying, as well as material that can harm children.

In terms of the draconian power the communications minister will be bestowed with, subsections 25C(2) and 25D(2) provide them with the power to “determine material or conduct, or a combination of material and conduct” that they’re satisfied may “cause serious harm” or “cause harm to children”.

New subsection 25G(1) sets out digital platform design features that are considered to result in negative behavioural impacts and, therefore, should not be available to children under 16. These include a recommender feature, a logged-in feature, an endless feed, a feedback feed, a time-limited feature or a design that the minister can identify under their new power in subsection 25G(2).

Three pillars make up the digital duty of care. They’re set out in new section 26 of the Act. The first involves online service providers managing the design features of the service appropriately, which includes the provision of empowerment tools, which are those that allow a user to manage design features of the service, which should involve opting out of default algorithms.

The second pillar involves online service providers being required to conduct risk assessments of their content to prevent “all reasonably foreseeable risks”. And once these are identified, the provider must then document the steps they have taken to ameliorate these risks and record their effectiveness.

The final pillar making up the digital duty of care involves service providers taking proactive steps to implement the measures that have been identified in risk assessment. And failure to comply in this manner can result in penalisation.

Censoring Americans online

The response to the Duty of Care Bill exposure draft from the US Embassy was issued on the final day that the Australian government was accepting feedback on the proposed laws, which was Tuesday, 22 September 2026.

“The United States welcomes the opportunity to provide input to Australia’s public consultation,” the response opens. “Preserving a free, open internet and protecting freedom of expression online are top priorities for the Trump administration.”

“Our objective is to ensure that any resulting measures respect freedom of expression and fair competition, by avoiding restrictions on speech that should be protected, and preventing prescriptive product design mandates or expanded litigation risks that unduly burden American companies,” the superpower underscored.

The US is concerned about how the Australian government would determine an online harm, as well as requiring online platforms to alter their algorithmic systems.

Specific circumstances the US is concerned about include potential mandates, vague definitions of harm, and the extraterritorial reach involved when denying Americans free speech online, and the economic impact the laws will have upon US companies.

“If Australia compels platforms to aggressively filter content in algorithmic feeds to satisfy a government mandate, and such filtering draws in protected speech, the effect on a disfavoured speaker or media source’s reach would not be meaningfully different than outright removal,” the brief reads.

“The US government would likely consider such a measure as facilitating censorship.”

However, the Trump administration is yet to spell out how it might react if the Albanese government does pass its Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill in its current form.

Image: Photo of Donald Trump by the US government is in the public domain. Photo of Anthony Albanese by the Commonwealth of Australia is licensed under CC BY 4.0. The digital eye is from Shutterstock.