Donald Trump in Washington DC. The US administration will raise concerns about Australia’s big tech company fines over online algorithms. Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/EPA View image in fullscreen Donald Trump in Washington DC. The US administration will raise concerns about Australia’s big tech company fines over online algorithms. Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/EPA Social media Trump administration to confront Australia over Labor’s social media algorithm plan White House warns trading partners against ‘imposing digital services taxes, fines, and other forms of extortion’ on US tech sector
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Prefer the Guardian on Google The Trump administration will confront Australia over its plan to force digital platforms to take down harmful content and let users opt out of algorithm-generated “for you” feeds.
Big tech companies would be fined more than $100m for breaching the proposed laws and the Australian government is under pressure to raise those fines even further.
A White House spokesperson, Kush Desai, said the US administration would raise its concerns with “trading partners”, in a statement released less than 24 hours after Australia’s announcement on Tuesday.
Read more “President Trump has unequivocally warned trading partners against imposing digital services taxes, fines, and other forms of extortion on America’s leading technology sector,” Desai said.
The communications minister, Anika Wells, downplayed the statement as “broad” and told News24 she had not directly received any such warning from a US representative.
“We’re a sovereign nation,” Wells said. “We have the right to defend Australian parents and kids and we’ll do that.”
If passed, the digital duty of care laws would require platforms to protect children from harmful content around eating disorders, misogyny, pornography, glorifying crime, abuse and cyberbullying. Adults and children would need to be protected from illegal material.
They would also require platforms to send users a notification or “pop-up”, giving them a choice between a main feed that shows personalised content from across the platform or one that shows only content shared by their online connections.
The Greens party has demanded the government make the latter option the default setting and force platforms to let users opt in to having personalised feeds.
The Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young repeated calls for higher fines to be pegged to companies’ global revenue, speaking to ABC radio on Wednesday.
“Big tech is going to spend a lot of money fighting these laws in the first place and finding every which way to get around them,” Hanson-Young said.
“You need to hit them really where it hurts, and that’s their revenue.”
Big tech companies Meta, Google and TikTok have not publicly commented, though their representative lobby group, Digi, has said the law’s definitions of harmful content and impact on user experience would be crucial.
OpenAI, owner of ChatGPT, said it planned to engage with the government on its laws to ensure they were “protecting Australians while enabling them to benefit from AI”.
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