Trump Admin Calls Australia Duty of Care Bill 'Censorship'

The Trump administration told Canberra that Australia's proposed digital duty of care bill would amount to "extraterritorial censorship of protected speech" and asked the Albanese government to carve US social media companies out of the law entirely, in a submission the US Embassy published this week and reported by the ABC.

The draft bill would create a legal obligation for online services, including social media, gaming and other platforms, to build a safe experience through design. It would also force Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to send users a pop-up choosing between a personalised algorithmic feed and a feed limited to accounts they follow. The ABC writes that excluding US firms, as Washington requests, would "effectively neuter the law, removing the biggest platforms from its reach."

The submission said Washington had "serious concerns" about how Australia would decide what counts as "foreseeable harm," and warned that "the US government would likely consider such a measure as facilitating censorship." White House spokesperson Kush Desai reiterated that President Donald Trump had warned other nations against imposing "digital services taxes, fines, and other forms of extortion on America's leading technology sector."

The rebuke lands while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is at the UN General Assembly promoting his tech agenda, which the article says has "increasingly earned the ire of the Trump administration," including his support for international AI regulation and the government's teen social media ban. The American industry body NetChoice has already joined a High Court challenge to that teen ban, calling it "the most extensive prohibition on youth access to social media in force in any liberal democracy."

Communications Minister Anika Wells characterised the White House warning as "broad" and said she had not directly received it from a US representative. Her office declined to comment. The story adds to a heavy run of coverage on our regulation tracker.