<em>Lizzie O’Shea is an Australian lawyer, author, and the founder and chair of **Digital Rights Watch**, which advocates for freedom, fairness, and fundamental rights in the digital age. She sits on the board of **Blueprint for Free Speech**, and in 2019 was named a Human Rights Hero by **Access Now**.</em> Interviewer: **Jillian York** **Jillian York:** Hi, good morning, or rather, good evening for you. **Lizzie O’Shea:** Hi Jillian, it's great to be here. **JY:** I'm going to start with asking a question that I try to kick off every interview with, which is, what does free speech or free expression mean to you? **LO:** Yes, so **Digital Rights Watch**, which is the organization I founded and I chair, is focused on fundamental rights and freedoms in the online world. And so freedom of speech is obviously a big part of that. It's obviously a very vexed right, partly because of its heritage and interpretation in places like the United States, which sometimes sits in contrast culturally to other parts of the world. Certainly, if you ask Australians about it, they do not want to have a culture of free speech that looks like the United States. Australians understand that freedom of expression is a really important component of democracy. So one of my jobs is to make the claim that curtailing freedom of speech, including in online settings, can have a real impact on democracy. And I think that's fundamentally true, and you don't want to wait until it's too late to be able to make that argument, to ensure that the policies are in place to protect that freedom. So I think it's a really important freedom. It's got a vexed history and expression in the modern online world, but many people still instinctively understand that those in power see speech as something that is important to challenging their authority, and so it can be a really important place to fight back and protect democracy and other rights from being impacted by those who hold power at the moment. **JY:** I want to ask you about your book. You're a critic of techno-utopianism. Your book, *Future Histories*, came out right before the pandemic, if I recall, and it looks to the past for lessons for our technological and cultural future. I really appreciated your take on **Elon Musk**. So I guess what I want to ask you about is two things. What, in your view, has changed since you wrote it? **LO:** Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I must admit, I was thinking about it the other day whether some of what I wrote really holds up. And I think the fundamentals are still true, in the sense that I still believe that a lot of the discussions and debates we have about technology today are presented as fundamentally novel when they are very old, ancient discussions and debates about how power should be distributed through society, and how technology enables that kind of power distribution or works against it, right? So I feel like that fundamental analysis, whatever contribution to the field, is still valid, of course. In some ways though, those technical systems have become more opaque, like the artificial intelligence industry and how that's been built off the back of years of exploitation of personal information and centralization of power in technology companies. Those things have become more powerful and concentrated and difficult to understand—if you're not deep in the weeds—beyond an instinctive understanding that something's going a bit wrong, perhaps. So in some ways those trends have exacerbated things in ways that I think many other contributors, yourself included, have brought a really important set of analyses to these discussions. More generally, though, one of my fundamental understandings of how I frame some of these arguments is that there are two sources of power, right? Government power and corporate power that really shape how the online world is developing. And post-pandemic, there's a lot greater skepticism, criticism, and outright distrust of government authorities seeking to do work to protect people from some of those corporate excesses. Now that's obviously something that is much more part of American culture as opposed to European culture, and in Australia, we sit somewhere in between. But that skepticism and that mistrust of institutions, I don't know that that serves us well. I'm somebody who does treat with criticism policies put forward by government, because I think it's our job as civil society people, as people part of a social movement that want to have rights at the center of our society, to be critical of those in power and make sure that they're being held accountable. But that mistrust has fundamentally shifted how possible it is to do that in an effective way. And I think that poses real challenges for people who want to see government policy look different to how it is and how you can bring people into a sense of trust, investing in a democratic rights based society, rather than rejection and cynicism being the overriding, overriding kind of factor in how they shape their political arguments. Which is a real challenge, I think, for people like us who rely on some of that mistrust and skepticism in order to fuel the fire of some of these campaigns, but do want to see people still invested in democratic processes. **JY:** Yeah, absolutely. So speaking of policies, you're in Australia, where the government's enacted some of the strictest social media laws for minors in the world, I would say. In one of our most recent interviews, which was with **Jacob Mchangama**, we talked about how the comparison of social media to Big Tobacco is spreading, and this idea that there's no utility in social media for minors, that it's a net harm. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that, and then we can dive into the more nitty gritty bits of the Australian law. **LO:** I think that's a great place to start, because the overwhelming sense in how this policy was presented to the public in Australia is that this is a very dangerous place for young people to be, and that desperate times call for desperate measures. “We don't have time to fix these spaces. We need to just restrict access.” It's described as a delay. Many, including me, describe it as a ban for under 16 year olds. So what has been very interesting in this discussion is who's been left out of the conversation. And if you talk to young people—and there are many organizations working with young people—and you talk to them about what they use social media for, they often say that they wish adults understood that they used it for different reasons, or they're scared about different things than what adults think they might be scared of. And so that kind of fundamental failure of communication, which I suppose is not a surprise, when these people don't actually have the power to vote, have the power to do things a normal legal person would do, is somewhat unsurprising. But when you're making policy about these people, that can be quite impactful, it can have very detrimental impacts. And if you take a human rights approach, that is your job to think about the negative impact on human rights, and what you're going to do about it, it's not really good enough. And this has been an experiment that Australia has led on, very much, looking for headlines, for a perception of boldness. Some of that claim is legitimate in the sense that they want to be seen to be taking action, and a lot of people feel very concerned that governments aren't prepared to take action against big tech companies. So, some of that is a valid feeling. But I think in this context, we lose so much when we don't actually listen to the people affected, and listen to the myriad ways in which they use social media. Some things they're concerned about, some things they find harmful, some things they're really sick of. But there's so many ways in which they use it to find a sense of community, to find a sense of empowerment, to talk to people they would never otherwise be able to access, sometimes because they're isolated, socially, geographically, whatever it may be, and it's so disappointing to me that that kind of part of the conversation was not had as we debated this particular policy. **JY:** So, what do you think some of the harms are for youth who can't access social media? What are young people losing out on? Who is harmed by these laws? **LO:** It's a great question. When we do a human rights analysis, we have to think about who's harmed by a particular policy, even if we think it's overall justified on a utilitarian ground, say it's better off for everyone overall who's harmed, is a really important question, and so much of that has been absent from this discussion. So it's not just me. It's like hundreds and hundreds of experts in Australia and organizations th