“If your products are safe, this costs you nothing,” Anika Wells said. | Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images

Communications Minister Anika Wells may amend controversial online safety powers to win opposition support, and warns AI chatbots are coming for children's emotional attachment.

CANBERRA — Australia’s communications minister has rejected accusations that her government’s proposed online safety laws amount to censorship. “We are regulating the machine here, not the message,” Anika Wells told POLITICO’s Canberra Playbook Podcast.

“I don’t think anybody’s free speech depends on an algorithm pushing eating disorder content to a 14-year-old.”

The comments are a rebuke to the United States government, which made a rare submission on the draft legislation, due to be introduced to parliament Oct. 15.

Wells was responding to reports that American author and advocate Michael Shellenberger has traveled to Australia to campaign against the digital duty of care legislation, which would impose new responsibilities on technology companies to protect users from online harms.

“If your products are safe, this costs you nothing,” she said. The legislation faces opposition from the conservative Coalition, which has raised concerns about provisions allowing the communications minister to designate additional categories of harmful online content.

Room for compromise

Wells said she is prepared to change the controversial ministerial rulemaking power to secure bipartisan support.

“Every online safety law that Australia has passed has had both parties’ fingerprints on it, and I would like to keep that streak alive,” she said, referring to bipartisan work between Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition. “I recognize this has been a stumbling block for the Coalition from the beginning,” she said.

Still, Wells pointed to controversy over Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot, which enabled users to digitally manipulate photographs to make people appear nude, as an example of a fast-emerging harm that could have been better tackled with a digital duty of care and discretionary ministerial powers in place.

Wells has not spoken with Greens leader David Shoebridge over the bill, although she said she was willing to do so. Her team has been speaking with Coalition communications spokesperson Sarah Henderson. “She hasn’t called me,” Wells said.

Wells argued there are three “core elements” of the legislation that must be preserved: “We have to make sure we protect kids. We have to get illegal content off platforms. We have to give Australians more choice over what they see online.”

The next frontier — chatbots forming relationships with kids

Wells is moving beyond familiar arguments about addictive social media algorithms, and warning that the risks posed by artificial intelligence extend to the emotional relationships children develop with chatbots: “they’re now coming for our kids’ attachment,” she said.

The necessary response, in Wells’ view, is legislation to fundamentally change the relationship between technology companies and their users, by making platforms responsible for the risks created by their products.

“For 20 years, big tech has not had to own the risk” around the products it built, Wells said. Her goal: “if you build it, you own the risk.”

‘The law isn’t failing. The platforms are failing to follow the law.’

Wells defended Australia’s world-first restrictions on social media accounts for children under 16, which took effect last December, amid questions about whether technology companies were adequately enforcing the ban. “We didn’t scrap speed limits because people still speed,” she pointed out. “The law isn’t failing. The platforms are failing to follow the law.”

While compliance with the new restrictions has been patchy, Wells said the debate has moved forward in meaningful ways. “A year ago, these people [platforms] were saying that it was impossible. Today, they’re arguing about how fast they can comply.”

Wells rejected arguments that parents should shoulder greater responsibility for protecting their children online. “We don’t ask parents to crash test the car seat themselves,” she said, so we should not ask them to outsmart global tech companies if they have safety concerns. “You can’t out-engineer an algorithm. Nobody can.”

‘The most compelling policy question of my generation.’

Named Sept. 30 among TIME magazine’s 100 most influential rising stars, Wells deflected attention when asked about what responsibility comes with membership of the list.

She instead credited parents who have long campaigned for stronger online protections as the reason for her inclusion, and said ruefully that her proposed reforms had arrived too late for some families.

For the minister, the political stakes are also personal. A mother of young twins, Wells said she plans to keep them away from smartphones for “as long as I can delay it.”

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‘We’re regulating the machine, not the message’: Australian minister hits back at censorship claims