Summary
- Teach Us Consent received 89% of its 2024/25 revenue from government. Albanese then showcased the group while presenting his digital crackdown as change driven from below.
- FOI records show private lobbying with Reset Australia and Digital Rights Watch, a reply from a senior prime ministerial adviser the next morning, and a meeting scheduled for 9 April.
- The government has retreated on its proposed power to define new harms. Its wider push to make platforms police online content continues.
The Australian government is astroturfing civil society support for its own censorship policies. The government supplied 89% of the annual revenue of a campaign group it then showcased as evidence of public demand for its digital censorship crackdown.
At the 8 September launch of the proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese named Teach Us Consent among the organizations joining him. He credited the assembled advocates with producing “change from the bottom-up, my Government listening and acting.”
There’s just one problem: the funding didn’t come from the “bottom up,” but from the top down. Teach Us Consent’s annual report records that in 2024/25 it received A$2,436,156 in government funding out of A$2,738,561 in revenue. Canberra was presenting a group overwhelmingly financed by the state as evidence of pressure from outside it.
The legislation would make online services proactively assess and manage risks from users’ content and platform design. The September draft also expanded takedown powers and authorized the eSafety Commissioner to operate fictitious accounts. The government sold this expansion of regulatory power by promising people control over their social media feeds.
Yet the September draft left the specific feed-choice requirements to later ministerial rules. Section 26 allowed the minister to require user empowerment tools, describing control over recommended content as an example. The government’s launch promised a specific choice that the draft itself did not spell out.
Teach Us Consent claimed victory. Its Fix Our Feeds page declared “We did it” and said the government had heard its calls. The same page describes working closely on the legislation to prevent platforms from exploiting loopholes.
Revenue rose from A$254,807 in the previous financial year, an increase of approximately 975%. Its annual report credits an A$3.5 million grant announced in 2023 with allowing its consent education work to expand. The report describes how government backing allowed it to grow from a volunteer operation with limited resources.
The money was awarded for the Promoting Consent Initiative. That left the government financing the growth of an organization whose separate political campaigning it could then cite to justify more regulation.
Reclaim The Net also identified a separate A$4.4 million grant from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet for a pornography-literacy campaign. That award extends the government’s financial support beyond the year covered by the 89% figure.
FOI records from the Prime Minister’s department show that founder Chanel Contos sent a private letter on 30 March 2026 jointly with Reset Australia and Digital Rights Watch. Copies also went to Ministers Anika Wells and Katy Gallagher.
The campaigners backed a statutory digital duty of care and wanted platforms to default users to feeds drawn from accounts they follow. They explicitly invoked the EU’s Digital Services Act, arguing that Australia should go further by closing what they described as loopholes in the European rules.
FFO’s reporting on Carnegie UK traced how its advocacy helped establish the framework at the center of Britain’s Online Safety Act, making platforms responsible for proactively managing speech-related risks.
The Carnegie Blueprint: How a US-Linked Nonprofit Shaped the UK’s Online Censorship Act
A senior adviser in Albanese’s office replied the next morning offering a meeting after Easter. The released records show a half-hour meeting scheduled for 9 April and an earlier meeting entry for December 2025.
An investigation by liber-net reports that the first grant was awarded through a closed, noncompetitive process and required departmental approval of the funded project’s content strategy. It also traces Reset Australia’s advocacy for preventive platform regulation to before the launch of Fix Our Feeds.
The campaign’s website says an account mimicking a teenage boy can receive misogynistic content within 23 minutes, regardless of viewing preferences. Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek repeated the 23-minute claim in August while backing the campaign.
The underlying Dublin City University study used ten simulated accounts on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Researchers entered selected searches, watched and liked leading results, and watched and liked recommended videos they classified as problematic. Some accounts explicitly searched for Andrew Tate and similar subjects. Two control accounts were set up without deliberate engagement with specific content.
Researchers were actively signaling interest to the algorithms. Presenting the results as exposure occurring regardless of viewing preferences stripped that behavior out of the story. The experiment also measured neither changes in real teenagers’ attitudes nor violence. Ministers nevertheless repeated the campaign’s version to promote the legislation.
The September exposure draft’s harmful-content categories for children included material promoting hostile attitudes toward women or gender equality. Platforms would therefore have to make judgments about social and political expression to meet their obligations.
The draft authorized fictitious accounts for the Commissioner and approved researchers despite conflicting Australian laws, contracts or platform policies. It also protected good-faith use of those powers from civil proceedings. The Commissioner could use the accounts to generate material, including with AI, where its production, dissemination or possession was lawful.
The government’s launch statement put the maximum penalty for failing to comply with the duty at A$109.2 million. That gives platforms a powerful financial incentive to restrict content whenever they fear the regulator could judge it harmful.
The government has now retreated on one of its most contentious proposals. Wells says the revised bill removes the ministerial power to define new harms, leaving additions to Parliament. The wider duty to police content remains the government’s objective.
The regulator seeking these powers already has a record of overreach. As FFO reported, Australia’s Federal Court rejected eSafety’s attempt to impose an additional standard involving private-message detection on X. FFO also documented its demand for the worldwide removal of footage of the 2024 stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel after X restricted access in Australia.
