Imagine you’re scrolling through your social media feed late at night and a message catches your eye. It says something alarming about a new respiratory virus, or a so-called outbreak that health officials are supposedly hiding, or maybe a strange home remedy that’s being shared by thousands of people. Your first instinct might be to share it with your family group chat or repost it to warn your friends. But the Ministry of Health and Medical Services is asking everyone to pause before doing that. They have noticed a worrying trend: unverified and misleading claims about respiratory illnesses have been…

Paragraph 1 When Communications Minister Anika Wells sat down for ABC’s Insiders on Sunday, she knew the questions were coming. The Albanese government had just released the exposure draft of its sweeping new internet law, the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill, and the political atmosphere was thick with suspicion. Two years earlier, Labor had quietly walked away from its own misinformation and disinformation bill, a policy that had sparked intense free speech debates and drawn fire from civil liberties advocates. That bill was never resurrected, but it was never formally buried either, and on Sunday Wells was…