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Josh Taylor @joshtaylor.bsky.social

Interesting dissent in the Andrew Laming Facebook posts high court judgment from Edelman J. Points out the court interpreting that it only matters how many posts, not how many see the posts to determine contraventions means people may see that as the cost of doing business. jade.io/article/1146...

130. Unless or until any amendment is made by the Commonwealth Parliament, there will now be a radical change in the digital equivalent of the treatment, which has endured for more than a century, of a political campaigner who would have committed 1,000 offences by dropping 1,000 contravening pamphlets in letterboxes. The political campaigner of today will commit only a single contravention by an electronic message transmitted and received by 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 or 1,000,000 unique profiles on Facebook, or on TikTok, Reddit, or any other social media. The same reasoning applies, by necessary analogy, to transmissions by text message or email; indeed, as is plain from the passages quoted from the JSCEM Report in the introduction to these reasons, Facebook posts were intended to be treated in the same way as text messages. The democratic roadblock presented by today's interpretation of s 321D, from which I dissent, can be appreciated without speaking of the penalty of $25,200 for a single contravention of that provision having become
aug 13, 2025, 9:11 pm • 7 3

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