The news is out, and it is as predictable as the sunset: Australia has doubled its penalty for social media platforms that fail to police their content, and Britain, ever the loyal follower in the transatlantic regulatory race, is now leading a European push for the same toughness. One might ask: is this the dawn of a new era of digital responsibility, or merely the latest chapter in the long, slow suicide of the liberal order?
Let us not mince words. Australia’s move is not a bold stroke of genius but a desperate lunge at a problem that governments have created themselves. By doubling the fine—now up to 10% of global turnover for repeat offenders—the Australian government signals that it believes the answer to online chaos is more state violence, more censorship, and more bureaucratic control. It is the regulatory equivalent of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, except the nut is wearing a suit of armour and the sledgehammer belongs to a man who does not know how to swing.
Britain, sensing an opportunity to prove its relevance after Brexit, has now positioned itself as the vanguard of this push. The Online Safety Bill, that bloated monstrosity of legislation, is already an embarrassment; now they wish to double down on its worst instincts. One can almost hear the champagne corks popping in Brussels, where the Digital Services Act already offers a similar vision of a tightly controlled internet. The European Union, that great bureaucratic behemoth, must be delighted to see their former neighbour trotting along behind them, eager to adopt the same regulatory piety.
But let us consider the historical parallels. This is not the first time societies have sought to control the chaos of new communication technologies. The Romans censored gossip columns. The Victorians regulated penny dreadfuls. The Americans burned books. And in every case, the result was the same: the state grew stronger, the individual grew weaker, and the underground found new ways to thrive. Social media is, for all its faults, a genuine force for democratisation—flawed, vulgar, and often toxic, but still a space where the powerless can speak. Doubling down on penalties will not fix toxicity; it will simply hand the keys to the censors.
And what of freedom? The word is bandied about with the same careless abandon as the fines. But freedom is not merely the absence of state coercion; it is the presence of a robust public sphere where ideas can clash. This regulatory fervour assumes that the state knows best what ideas should thrive. It is a paternalistic fantasy, one that ignores the reality that bureaucrats are just as fallible as the worst online troll. Indeed, many of these same regulators cannot even manage their own Twitter accounts without causing a scandal.
The real crisis is not that social media is too free, but that it is too controlled by a handful of corporate behemoths who have no allegiance to any nation. The answer is not to empower the state to police speech, but to break up the monopolies, enforce real transparency, and let a thousand competing platforms bloom. That would require courage, not just the cowardice of slapping fines on the same few companies.
But courage is in short supply. Instead, we get a race to the bottom, where each nation tries to outdo the other in regulatory toughness. Australia doubles the penalty; Britain leads the push; Europe applauds. Meanwhile, the users—those millions of unwashed, opinionated, annoying souls—are left with fewer platforms, fewer voices, and a state that feels ever more comfortable telling them what they cannot say.
Call me nostalgic. Call me a libertarian crank. But I see in this frenzy the same intellectual decadence that plagued the late Roman Empire: a belief that rules and punishments can substitute for virtue and resilience. We are building a digital state that is efficient, controlled, and utterly sterile. And we are doing it with the smug confidence of the most boring man in the room.
So here is my contrarian take: instead of doubling penalties, why not halve them? Instead of leading a push for toughness, why not lead a push for letting go? The internet was wild because we were wild. Tame it too much, and we may find we have tamed ourselves.
