Transparency Report 2024

It’s customary in the nonprofit game to release a glitzy document bragging about the year’s activities and making big claims about the impact. We did a relatively modest version of this for 2023 and we’re proud of it.

2024 was a giant year for tech accountability in Australia, and we’ve really reflected on how we wanted to tell the story of what we did and how we did it. What stuck with us is the ongoing farce of ‘transparency theatre’ when it comes to digital platform providers in this country. The public continues to know very little about the thousands of design decisions digital platforms are making about our online experiences, decisions that have a credible impact on, among others, Australians’ public health and wellbeing – as we heard throughout the debates on the under-16 ban. As we also heard through the ‘kids ban’ policy debate, we are armed with little information about how digital platforms handle public health risks, including unique issues for young people. New products are released and marketed as meaningful improvements, but we lack both the data baseline and the means to look under the hood and assess the impact of digital systems and various technical elements.

So here’s our transparency report – issued with the objective not to brag or claim credit for policy movements but to comprehensively show our working, and make it clearer to Australians where some of the concepts travelling through tech policy debate have received a bit of our input. Digital platform regulatory issues can be novel and the debate over the right policy settings needs to be prosecuted with clarity and humility. Too often this year, we heard flimsy (and sometimes just wrong!) policy and legal arguments take off in parliamentary corridors. We stand by our arguments and welcome a debate, so we’ve presented it in this document for all to see.