A centerpiece of the government’s legislative agenda, the bill has come under intense scrutiny from the opposition, legal experts and free speech advocates over concerns it could allow censorship.

Support for the proposed laws is thin on the ground, with the Coalition already announcing it will try to block the bill and several senators expressing serious concern.

Professor Twomey, one of the nation’s leading legal scholars, has also raised serious doubts in recent weeks and told Sky News Australia on Tuesday that the government needed to provide more clarity on how the legislation would work in practice .

“There are a lot of problems with it, but most of it comes down to definitions,” she said.

“What is disinformation and who decides what it is? At the moment, the bill effectively outsources this to the (social media) platform. So it is the digital platforms that are responsible for deciding and must decide if something is fake. , misleading or deceptive.”

Professor Twomey explained that while this could be made to work under the Bill’s definition of information that is “reasonably verifiable as false”, the explanatory statement accompanying the legislation complicated the issue by suggesting “opinions and comments, assertions and invectives’ would also be covered. .

“How do you think an opinion is true or false?” she asked.

“How does Google or Meta or anybody in the United States do it? I mean, it’s really problematic.”

The professor has already issued a warning about the disconnect between the bill and the statement of reasons, saying a Senate hearing on Monday could create a “constitutional problem”.

“When I read the bill, I thought that’s fine, because it deals with things that are verifiably false, and it only deals with it if you screw up election processes, not political content,” she said.

“When I read the statement of reasons, it says something completely different, and that confusion, to me, is where the constitutional problem may come in.”

Legal experts at the hearing told senators that as it stood, the legislation had no explanation for how the government or the Australian Communications and Media Authority would actually determine what constitutes truth, with one describing the lack of detail as a “gap at the heart of the bill.”

According to Professor Twomey, the most likely outcome was that social media platforms would “lead Australia’s fact-checkers to decide”, an approach that carried additional risk.

“Fact checkers rely on experts,” she said.

“So it depends on which experts you choose, because when it’s a contested matter, it’s not a clear factual matter, two experts might tell the trier of fact one thing and there might be five others who would say something else, but maybe they didn’t bother to answer their email that day and reply.

“So you could get distortions just based on who you elect, who makes that kind of decision. So while fact-checking can be helpful, it’s not always perfect.”

As a result, Professor Twomey suggested that the legislation in its current form would enshrine a “problematic process” given the power of social media companies to make “very good decisions about freedom of expression”.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday, shadow communications minister David Coleman said criticism from the professor and other legal experts showed the legislation was “one of the worst bills ever put forward by an Australian government”.

“It would have a chilling effect on free speech, it would mean that ultimately government regulators would decide what can and cannot be said,” he said.

“It is completely unacceptable in a democracy, it has no place in this country and that is why the Coalition has so strongly opposed this legislation and will continue to oppose this legislation and we would call on the Senate to ensure that this legislation does not become justice.”

With limited time until parliament is adjourned for the summer, the government looks set to face an uphill battle to pass the bill, as key commonwealth senators continue to express doubts about the views of legal experts.