Lawmakers in several European countries, as well as California, have recently called for online restrictions that would mandate transparency on social media.
That includes age disclosures intended to prevent children under the age of 16 from accessing dangerous and addictive platforms.
“We want our children — and every California kid — to grow up in a world where technology supports their wellbeing, rather than exploits their vulnerabilities,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said recently after signing a new law to that effect, NBC reported.
However, privacy advocates and other critics have routinely cautioned that the double-edged sword could do more harm than good in its effort to monitor and regulate people’s internet activity.
One potential fallout, per investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger, may be exposing the influence campaigns waged by other governments, such as Australia, in their bid to influence public debate using bot accounts.
“Democrats both used and demanded censorship of bots — and funded R&D into them,” Shellenberger wrote in a post on Public. “Now, Australia’s governments want to use bots in violation of the policies of social media platforms.”
A recent censorship bill in the land down under warned of the problems that stemmed from the widespread use of online aliases and anonymous social-media identities, referring to them as “sock puppet” accounts.
“A sock puppet identity is a false or fictitious identity assumed by a person in the course of using, or carrying out any activity in relation to, an online service,” said a line buried in the draft of an amendment to the Aussie parliament’s 2021 Online Safety Act.
While some might see the scourge as cause for a crackdown, Australian lawmakers boomeranged back in the opposite direction.
“The legislation goes on not to warn of bad actors using sock puppets but rather to authorize the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, to create and use sock puppets to ‘disseminate’ information,” Shellenberger wrote.
In a separate X thread, he said that the new bot policy was in the process of being “field tested.”
Once a bastion of conservatism, Australia’s leftist Labor Party took control in 2022 with the election of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
It has faced previous criticism for over-the-top, reactive policies, including an effort to further tighten its already draconian gun laws after a December 2025 mass shooting at Bondi Beach.
Although the attack was staged by two Muslim extremists inspired by ISIS, the woke Australian parliament also used it as the pretense to pass unprecedented “hate speech” restrictions.
“If you can’t get laws passed in the wake of a massacre, then it’s difficult to see people changing their minds,” Albanese said, according to NBC.
The drastic censorship measures mirror some of those taken by US Democrats during the Biden administration, most notably the establishment of a controversial Disinformation Governance Board that was designed to target mainstream positions including COVID vaccine skepticism and questions about the 2020 election outcome.
Mike Benz, a former State Department official and current executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said Australia’s plan looked a lot like one advocated by former Obama adviser Cass Sunstein, the husband of Biden administration USAID administrator Samantha Power.
Benz and others have long suggested that USAID, which was largely defunded by the Trump administration as part of the cuts tied to the Elon Musk-run Department of Government Efficiency, had been a key player in bankrolling CIA dark ops, including color revolutions to overthrow foreign governments.
