Until a motive is established — if it ever is — the horrific attack on Helen Haines seems destined to be fodder backing up whatever the commentator speaking or writing already thought.
Social media posts by the alleged attacker (who has since been charged) have been raked over, and any reader can take up or discard whichever bits they need to. And so can Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who, in an opinion piece for The Daily Telegraph yesterday, drew the event back to the digital duty of care bill his government is trying to get through parliament:
“The warnings have been clear. This is not just an issue for politicians, of course. It’s an issue for our entire society. Ask anyone who works in retail or hospitality, and they’ll tell you about the rise in anger, abuse and even violence they have been facing in recent years.
Social media has no doubt played a role in this decline: polarising the political debate, algorithms pushing people into their corners and promoting rage over reason.”
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Social media has become a go-to villain, for many good reasons, with politicians now often relying on it as a convenient scapegoat to justify any policy move, or solve any perceived problem the government faces — all while ridding a complex issue of any need for further discussion.
1) People are being bullies online (and that’s our job)
In 2012, The Daily Telegraph instigated a “Stop the Trolls” campaign in response to the cyber-bullying reported by TV personality Charlotte Dawson. Notwithstanding observations at the time that the Tele didn’t always express such concern for its subjects’ mental health, there were calls to better regulate social media. The next year, then-prime minister Julia Gillard announced guidelines around social media complaint processes, which the Tele claimed as a victory.
Gillard directed particular criticism at Twitter, echoing what was by then already an established media narrative:
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“We need to see Twitter also agreeing to use these protocols and guidelines because it is on Twitter that so much of the damage has been done by trolls. And I do call on Twitter to replicate what has been done by other major social media companies, and embrace these guidelines.”
In 2019, then-prime minister Scott Morrison also went after “trolls”, promising to increase the maximum penalties from three to five years for people who use a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence. In 2021, he would reiterate his view of social media as a “coward’s palace”.
“Cowards who go anonymously onto social media and vilify people and harass them and bully them, and engage in defamatory statements, they need to be responsible for what they’re saying,” he said.
As with many campaigns of this kind, the subtext was that social media users should not be allowed to maintain anonymity to discourage online abuse. As they say, the more things change…
2) Our government is unpopular (and there’s only one possible explanation)
Along similar lines, in 2017, the Turnbull government imposed new social media policies for public servants, which prohibited public criticism of government policy, or posting such criticism anonymously or under a pseudonym. It didn’t stop there. The policy went so far as to make “liking”, sharing, or even failing to delete criticism of the government posted on a public servant’s page by other people the same as the public servant themselves making the disparaging comment.
It was probably unconstitutional, a workplace law expert told Crikey at the time. Turnbull wasn’t the only leader to want to minimise criticism on social media. Speaking to The Saturday Paper in September this year, Communications Minister Anika Wells laid blame for distrust of her government on “online scare campaigns”, saying:
“A lady came to talk to me about her various grievances and I was struck by how I could say to her, ‘I’m a member of the cabinet, that’s not true, we’re not doing that, that is a scare campaign from online’. I look you in the eye and I tell you that will never happen in this government and she didn’t believe me.”
It is inevitable that social media, the apparent cause of all society’s ills, would eventually threaten social cohesion, the solution to all society’s ills. In September 2024, then-communications minister Michelle Rowland warned:
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“Seriously harmful misinformation and disinformation spreads at speed and at scale across the digital world. Recent events in Australia and abroad demonstrate the real-world impact this is having on the social cohesion and safety of communities.”
In a December 2025 interview promoting the teen social media ban, Albanese said that Australia needed to address threats to social cohesion: “There’s a range of things that are contributing to that. Social media is one.”
4) The youths are doing crime
In 2024, among the potential solutions put forward to solve the “youth crime crisis” faced by Alice Springs — which brought about a two-week curfew — the NT Government said it was considering instituting tougher penalties for people who post on social media about their offences.
5) People are criticising Israel
In May 2024, former prime minister Julia Gillard told The Australian that the many young Australians protesting against Israel’s genocide in Gaza were only doing so because of what the piece called “ill-informed and unbalanced views about the Israel-Hamas conflict”, owing to “social media [exploiting] their lack of knowledge about the history of Israel”, adding:
“I think a lot of what is going on today is a distortion of history from social media. It’s a misunderstanding about how Israel came into existence. It’s a misunderstanding about the nature of the conflict.
“And because of that, I think particularly young people are developing views about this which are unbalanced and really not informed by the history in any way.”
In mid 2024, then-home affairs minister Clare O’Neil blamed a rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia on the “echo chambers” of social media. The “filters, bubbles and echo chambers” of social media, which “germinate and grow this bigotry … are not just straining the social fabric of our country,” O’Neil said. “They are ripping at it, continuously, aggressively.”