My year as Pro Bono Partner: Disinformation, AI and violence against women

This Law Week, I’m reflecting on my first year as Partner at W+K, leading the firm’s human rights and law reform practice. Separately, I’ve also had the privilege to work with a diverse panel of experts as a member of the Australian Government’s Interim Independent Advisory Board advising the Minister for Government Services.

While I do not specialise in any one area, my human rights advocacy background and pro bono leadership role have given me a birds-eye view of a number of emerging legal issues. Disinformation, AI, and violence against women – I certainly don’t have all the answers. My hope in sharing my observations with you is that it will provide new ways of thinking and help more of us to engage with the pressing challenges in our community and beyond in an informed way.

Disinformation and online content – The unhelpful choice between free speech and censorship

Drawing on my personal experience of racism, ten years ago I wrote an article explaining why I supported keeping 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act as a legitimate limit on free speech to protect people from hate speech, arguing that the law serves an important educative purpose.

Our recent pro bono work revisits this issue of balancing the right to free speech against other rights. Our secondee at the Australian Human Rights Commission spent 3 months exploring the legal definition of disinformation/misinformation to assist Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay’s work, particularly in light of the Government’s exposure draft of its Bill to combat misinformation and disinformation (W+K article in partnership with the Commission, forthcoming).

We’ve also drafted a factsheet for the Human Rights Law Centre (coming soon) about the right to freedom of expression explaining that the failure to protect the right to freedom of expression may lead to potential censorship of legitimate communication, especially from whistleblowers, investigative journalists and people speaking for minority groups or expressing dissenting views.

My fellow Advisory Board panel member, Johanna Weaver , recently interviewed Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, for her ANU Tech Policy Design Centre podcast. Listening to this interview made me think about whether this dichotomy, positioning free speech against censorship, is outdated and unhelpful - especially given these concepts were developed at a time before mass online communication technology, let alone AI. Just as the right to bear arms in the United States never envisaged semi-automatics in the hands of teenagers, the right to freedom of expression didn’t envisage the ability of bad actors to instantly influence billions with a key stroke. We need to focus on the principles of why we have these rights, what are we trying to achieve in society, then work backwards from there.

To do this, we need to upskill the community. Frances Haugen made an interesting point that if you ask people what they suggest we do about harmful online content, most will say “take it down”. Most people have not worked at Facebook like she has, so they are not aware of what other tools may be available or may be developed to address this issue. The podcast discusses the concept of transparent censorship, where we have a community conversation about what content we want to see, when and how we want to see it.

Domestic violence advocate and entrepreneur, Kate (Katelijne) Tailly , recently told me about her idea to use AI to educate us all on positive communication, providing a filter on incoming and outgoing communications. Imagine a service that identifies ineffective communication and helps you think about how to address it. This is exactly the kind of innovation that goes beyond the free speech or censorship choice.

All of us need to be part of the developing the solution, those working in STEM and the broader community. So how do we upskill more diverse voices in STEM to facilitate this community engagement and innovation so more of us can shape the tools to tackle disinformation?

The impact of AI and other new technology on women

Our pro bono partnership with Basic Rights Queensland ’s Working Women Queensland (WWQ) program has included a secondment resulting in a research paper and presentation on the impact of AI on women’s work that looks at the extent and barriers that would need to be addressed to increase female representation in STEM.?

Our ongoing work with WWQ continues to look at this issue and a whole range of considerations to ensure that the impact of AI for women’s work is positive. We’re not just talking about the female dominated jobs that AI will replace. What are the new AI jobs that will create new feminised industries? How will AI impact women’s working conditions, sexual harassment and new opportunities?

Beyond the workplace we are also partnering with Women's Legal Service NSW to look at how new technology will impact victim-survivors of family and domestic violence and what measures can be taken to protect women from technology facilitated abuse. Leveraging work that we’ve done with the Australian Human Rights Commission on the human rights implications of neurotechnology, for example, we’re helping our community partners to looking around the corner to identify risks and opportunities of which many of us are not yet aware.

Family and domestic violence, financial abuse and responsible business

Another fellow Advisory Board member, Dr Simon Longstaff AO , the Executive Director of The Ethics Centre has been helping me think about how to make tricky decisions in the pro bono practice and the firm more broadly, by providing tools to develop an ethical framework to align decision-making with the firm’s purpose and values.

In 2022, W+K went public with a commitment to reduce gender equality as part of its 20 Actions for 20 Years project. In alignment with this commitment the firm has put its resources behind efforts to tackle financial abuse, recognising that 99% of cases of family and domestic violence involve an element of financial abuse.

Leveraging our insurance expertise, we conducted research on how the Insurance Contracts Act could be modernised to support the work of the Centre for Women's Economic Safety to publish Designed to Disrupt: Reimagining general insurance products to improve financial safety written by Catherine Fitzpatrick.

We hosted the launch of this paper on International Women's Day, where we also launched a new cadetship program with Arise to provide paid, flexible employment pathways that will allow women impacted by financial abuse to re-skill and further develop their confidence and professional networks as they transition into the labour market.

Join us!

I hope this article has helped highlight some of the intersections between current human rights issues in the headlines and the opportunity we all have to shape the future. As we fast approach the end of May deadline to apply for a job working with me in the W+K pro bono team, I can honestly say to any candidates considering whether they will apply that working in a committed team at a firm that genuinely strives to be a responsible business is motivating and fulfilling. If you’re a junior lawyer interested in joining us, please apply!