It’s time to choose what kind of society we want. We have only one chance to get it right

One of the most sobering things in the week since the devastating attack on MP Helen Haines is how many of our politicians expressed that this appalling violence was “a shock but not a surprise”. They had been dreading the real-world consequences of the decline of our public debate and, with that, our democracy. Degrading our leaders has turned into a sport, and increasing personal threats mean a dangerous new world.

Last week, The Age hosted two global leaders at its Melbourne Assembly, the former mayor of New York Bill de Blasio and pioneering urban planner Carlos Moreno, who lives in Paris. Both came with experience of how anger towards society can turn into unthinkable acts of political violence.

They arrived in Melbourne as Paris was burning. Even those accustomed to the French and their love of a protest have been shocked by the scale of violence. As we were sending journalists to France to cover the riots, we were also sending journalists to Wangaratta, where the community was coming to grips with the unimaginable.

The morning after the alleged attack on Helen Haines, de Blasio challenged those in the room – don’t let this happen again. We can all agree on that, but what do we do?

In a common story for this country, I’m an import from the UK who has made Australia home. One of the things my family and I have loved about Australia is the wonderful lifestyle and the respectful and carefree nature of our society.

However, it’s become clear that our geography and good nature is not enough to protect us from the assault on our national fabric from social media algorithms tuned to divide, and AI models with hallucination built into their operating systems.

What we do know is that for a society to solve difficult problems, we need to start with facts as the basis for debate.

Every day, across our mastheads and TV newsrooms, Nine sends journalists to gather those facts, sometimes at great risk to their own safety. We train them. We put them through rigorous verification processes. And their work is accountable to our viewers and readers, a raft of industry standards bodies, the courts, our shareholders and public scrutiny. They abide by agreed rules for access to our institutions, including parliament and the courts, while also maintaining a healthy tendency to get up in the face of authority. Sometimes we get it wrong, and when we do, there are consequences, as there should be.

It is the media’s role in a democracy to inform and to hold power to account.

On the flipside, social media and algorithm-driven feeds, mainly from outside our country, are shaping the debate in Australia every day. They amplify fringe grievance narratives, erode trust in public institutions and lock users into polarised echo chambers. The Australian Federal Police has warned that AI is accelerating and lowering the skills required to manipulate and radicalise individuals online. To whom are the social media platforms and AI models accountable? By which rules do they abide? And what are the consequences when they get it wrong?

The sad fact is there is no accountability or consequences for the damage being done to our public debate.

Can we put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to social media? It’s an uphill battle. Do we need to embrace new technology? Absolutely. At Nine, we use social media just as we use AI. Like most businesses, we are navigating how to do so in a responsible way. We must learn the lessons of the past, otherwise we will be doomed to repeat them with each technological evolution.

We are playing catch-up in response to past complacency, regulating these tech platforms to protect our children from harm and fight back against the damaging effects on our society.

And the next policy challenge is clearly around artificial intelligence; how should we regulate it and what guardrails must be put in place to make sure it benefits us, the Australian public, not just a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires?

From changes to copyright to construction of data centres, we require our leaders to look to the long term. We will get only one chance to get this right. If the Australian Parliament rushes into watering down our copyright regime in the hope of a data centre boom, there will be no going back. Once the content is devalued, we risk Australian voices and local accountability being lost. The facts, which have never been more important, could be sacrificed.

We’re at a point in time in which we need to choose what kind of society we want. We need to be able to have serious conversations about serious issues without causing harm to each other.

The health of our democracy and our social cohesion are at risk. We cannot continue to sleepwalk towards their demise. We all have a choice here, and we all have a role to play.

Matthew Stanton is the CEO of Nine Entertainment, publisher of this masthead.