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@dangillmor US tech firms have been very flippant about the social harm they do. So naturally governments are going to intervene. Typically, the Australian government has chosen the worst possible option.

That's partly because the Australian Public Service is too deskilled to understand the problem, partly because Murdoch wants to use the Australian Government as a club to beat Facebook (Facebook have stopped paying Murdoch for use of news content).

But the era of tech firms hiding behind a peculiar US definition of "free speech", and behind "Section 230" is over. Social networks are a curated platform, its publishers are responsible for the content they republish, and governments are on a search to find ways to make that responsibility stick even when the tech firms try to escape that responsibility by playing jurisdictional games.