Alice Dawkins

Alice Dawkins is the Executive Director of Reset.Tech Australia, the Sydney-based research-and-policy organisation that constitutes the Australian arm of the global Reset network on platform regulation, digital-democracy oversight, and AI accountability. She is tracked here as a Voice because her public analytical register — running across parliamentary testimony, bylined analysis, and public-advocacy engagements since succeeding founding Executive Director Chris Cooper by mid-2023 — constitutes a distinct and consistent contribution to the Australian policy debate on structural tech and AI regulation: the case for binding statutory rules, independent data-access obligations, and a "digital duty of care" framing that targets platform and AI system design rather than individual content moderation. This is the corpus's first Oceania Voice entry. Affiliation, career arc, and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.

"Only hard laws can achieve accountability": the Senate inquiry argument

The most concentrated single formulation of Dawkins's public analytical register at parliamentary level is the three-point argument delivered before the Joint Select Committee on Social Media on 10 July 2024, alongside Reset.Tech Australia Policy and Research Director Rys Farthing. The three points are structural rather than primarily empirical. First, "only hard laws can achieve accountability for digital platforms" — the voluntary-code model that has governed Australian platform oversight is insufficient by design, not by implementation failure. Second, the burden must shift: "the government needs to shift the burden onto social media companies to make their platforms safe. These companies know the harms that exist, but they also know how to manufacture their surprise when the issues are aired publicly" — framing the platform-harm cycle not as industry ignorance but as strategic performed ignorance that voluntary codes institutionalise rather than resolve. Third, the structural diagnosis: "our failed experiment with industry-led regulation has lured us into protracted regulatory capture" — the sector has been allowed to set its own compliance standards across successive Australian regulatory reviews, and the result is a settled capture dynamic rather than a correctable implementation gap.

The three-point framing represents the distilled public form of the argument Reset.Tech Australia has been advancing across the Australian platform-regulatory file since its 2020 launch: competition policy, consumer protection, online safety, and platform transparency are a coordinated statutory stack, not four separate policy files, and Australia's alignment with the binding-rules-plus-independent-oversight international benchmark is the test against which current voluntary arrangements fail. Dawkins carries this argument as the public face of the organisation's parliamentary engagement — appearing before Senate committees, providing expert commentary across broadcast and print media, and positioning the organisation's empirical research as the evidentiary ground for the structural claim.

The Meta / DIGI Code complaint: voluntary codes tested against the evidence

The most publicly prominent empirical artefact in Dawkins's public register during the Reset.Tech Australia executive directorship is the March 2024 enforcement complaint against Meta under the Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation. Reset.Tech submitted 152 posts containing fact-checked falsehoods to test Meta's transparency-report claim that all such content receives warning labels and found that only 8 percent received them — a gap of more than 90 percentage points between the platform's published transparency claim and its observed behaviour. The DIGI complaints subcommittee rejected the complaint in favour of a Meta offer to provide clarifying language in future transparency reports, without requiring public correction of the false content. Dawkins's post-decision framing was precise: "The decision today indicates that platforms can say what they like in their transparency reports" — a deliberate methodological claim that the outcome had established the Code mechanism cannot distinguish a credible transparency claim from a false one.

The complaint and its resolution function as the key empirical demonstration in Dawkins's public analytical voice for why voluntary codes fail structurally: platforms face no incentive to be accurate in their transparency reports, and the Code's complaints mechanism has no authority to compel correction. The episode is the public-record grounding example the organisation deploys most frequently for the "failed experiment" framing, and Dawkins carries it through both regulatory submissions and media commentary as the evidentiary centre of the case for statutory platform transparency with independent data-access obligations.

"When you want to regulate a harm online, you first have to define it": digital duty of care

The most substantive single piece in Dawkins's own bylined register is the November 2024 Crikey article arguing that Australia's misinformation bill is misunderstood as a censorship instrument. Her argument turns on diagnosing a category error in public debate: critics frame the bill as targeting individual speech acts, while the bill's actual design object is upstream system design — the algorithmic mechanics, "like" buttons, engagement systems, and infinite-scroll features through which platforms shape the information environment. The threshold claim is definitional: "When you want to regulate a harm online, you first have to define it" — naming the upstream systemic sources of information disorder as the correct regulatory object rather than their downstream manifestations in individual false posts.

This is the fullest published statement of the "digital duty of care" framing that runs across Reset.Tech Australia's regulatory submissions in the same period: a shift from content moderation — backward-looking, reactive, targeting the individual post after it circulates — toward system-design standards — forward-looking, structural, targeting the platform and AI product architecture that produces the harm pattern at scale. The framing is load-bearing for the organisation's AI-policy work as well: the argument that AI systems should be regulated through product-design standards and risk-assessment obligations rather than through content classification or individual-moderation obligations is the same structural move applied to AI deployment as to social media platforms.

Anti-exceptionalism, the written output, and the generational stakes

Running across the above three registers is Dawkins's standing anti-exceptionalism argument: "In every other industry, we expect fair markets, safe products, and proactive risk mitigation" — tech and AI companies have evaded this expectation through "arguments of exceptionalism and economic scare tactics" directed at regulators, a pattern she names as the long-term legitimation strategy the industry has used against every significant regulatory proposal. The generational stakes she attaches to this work are explicit: "alongside the climate movement, it is a defining challenge of our generation" — framing tech and AI accountability not as a technical-policy file but as a civil-society-scale democratic challenge with multi-decade consequences.

The written output through which this argument circulates includes bylined pieces at Tech Policy Press and Crikey, the two principal English-language platform-policy outlets in which her individual analytical writing appears. The May 2023 co-authored Tech Policy Press piece on Meta's targeted-advertising lobbying argues that Australia's Privacy Act reforms are "ambitious, but certainly not the radical package Meta and other industry interlocutors make them out to be", using the European opt-out precedent to demonstrate that Meta's claim that targeted-advertising restrictions are incompatible with free services is selective alarmism rather than structural necessity. The Mandarin's October 2024 reporting on her appearance at the NSW / South Australian social media summit captures her standing public-event posture: platforms are making design and moderation decisions "in the dark" and are actively hostile to the independent scrutiny that effective regulation requires.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Dawkins's public analytical register is itself the load-bearing object the corpus tracks: the "only hard laws" Senate inquiry framing and the "failed experiment" regulatory-capture diagnosis; the Meta / DIGI Code complaint as empirical demonstration that voluntary transparency regimes cannot verify their own claims; the "digital duty of care" argument for system-design regulation over content moderation; and the anti-exceptionalism throughline that frames tech and AI accountability as a generational democratic challenge. The register spans parliamentary testimony, analytical writing, and public advocacy, and carries a substantive structural argument — that binding statutory rules targeting platform and AI system design are the only credible regulatory model — that the corpus needs to track independently of the Reset.Tech Australia organisational record.

The corpus's voices slice carried no Oceania Voice entry before this. The nearest Pacific-registered analytical register in the corpus is Phet Sayo (Lao-Canadian, EngageMedia, Melbourne-based), whose voice carries the Asia-Pacific digital-rights strategic-analysis register; this entry adds the first Australia-anchored, English-common-law-regulatory-environment register with its distinctive parliamentary-testimony, domestic-platform-regulation, and AI-product-accountability shape. Affiliation, career detail, and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.