zlacker

You're assuming the point of these laws is what they say on the tin and the people writing these laws are ignorant. A huge amount of legislation is written by think tanks and lobbyists.

Authoritarians don't want people to be able to talk (and organize) in private. What better way to discourage them than some "think of the children" nonsense? That's how they attacked (repeatedly) encryption.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter all could have lobbied against this stuff and shut it down, hard. They didn't.

That speaks volumes, and my theory is that they feel shutting down these forums will push people onto their centralized platforms, increasing ad revenues - and the government is happy because it's much easier to find out all the things someone is discussing online.

>>KennyB+(OP)
Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. have really done as much as they can. Whoever are pushing this in Australian Government have a super weird kind of personal vendetta against 'Big Tech' - many speculate it's about how chummy our political class are with the media owning billionaires here in Australia, and how the shakedown they devised to wring money out of tech companies to subsidise the local media (the 'Media Bargaining Code') failed to really work.

It's honestly super weird. Now of course they are just proposing to tax the tech companies if they don't pay money to our local media orgs for something the tech companies neither want nor care about.

>>stephe+zh
The sad part is, our major politicians are pretty much straight up blackmailed into doing this (though in practice they appear to do it gleefully). Murdoch and others own basically our entire media apparatus: don't do what they say, and you're destroyed in said media. It's absolutely wild the power they've been given.