An op-ed by Nelson Chen, Editor at Policy & Internet
As digital platforms push back with government regulation in the fight against harmful content, Australian policymakers often turn to the United Kingdom or the European Union for precedents. But valuable lessons can also be found in a far older playbook: the cooperation between Rome’s imperial government and church leaders in tackling heresy during the late Roman West.
While the era of the Roman West was certainly not digitised, the Roman church faced a similar challenge to defend their congregations from harmful teachings. By the end of the fourth century, church leaders were well-versed in guarding Christian communities from external beliefs. Like today’s major digital platforms, the late Roman church emerged as a quasi-political entity with immense resources and ties to high-ranking secular officials. Inevitably, for some prominent clergymen, the regulation of their communities’ exposure to false teachings was often secondary to their own personal ambitions.
Disingenuous attempts from church leaders to regulate against false teachings highlight the prevalence of the hidden agendas within the efforts of powerful actors to protect its clients from harm. From December this year, a social media ban in Australia will require digital companies to verify the age of its users. The policy will ban users under 16 years of age from YouTube, X, TikTok, and Instagram, and fine platforms heavily for non-compliance.
However, there is no guarantee that digital companies will uphold their responsibilities to protect vulnerable users from harmful content.
In the leadup to the Australian federal election in May 2025, Meta vowed to curtail any content that could lead to imminent violence and physical harm, as well as restrict the distribution of misleading information. Meta’s approach to fight misinformation followed other regulatory safeguards from other platforms to enhance AI labelling and provenance tools, support election integrity, boost authoritative content, and promote transparency initiatives. At the same time, X and Meta have also scrapped their fact-checking teams and are profiting from user engagement with misleading information.
Learning from the late Roman West
The imperial government’s approach to the spread of a heresy from Spain into Aquitaine provides a useful guide on how modern governments might cooperate with digital platforms to counter harmful content. In allowing the church a certain degree of autonomy, imperial authorities recognised the expertise of bishops in ecclesiastical discipline while also keeping a watchful eye.
Bishops from Spain and Aquitaine alerted those higher up in the church hierarchy of the issue on the ground and organised councils where they discussed solutions to prevent further spread of harmful teaching. While bishops were largely responsible for managing the situation, the secular government in Trier and Rome kept an interest in church affairs and could issue official directives if necessary.
A similar governance approach can be utilised by policymakers to manage the spread of harmful and misleading information on social media. This largely hands-off approach recognises the risks of straining relationships with big tech companies who possess the expertise, resources, and accessibility to counter online threats. However, it also considers the risk of giving full autonomy to the self-regulatory measures of digital platforms.
Avoiding pitfalls from the late Roman church
While cooperation between the fourth-century imperial government and the Roman church provides a model for a collaborative response to harmful information it also brings important warnings that must be avoided.
The bishops of the late Roman church were notorious for mislabelling heresies in councils and often spread lies to serve their own agendas. The lack of transparency in which the imperial government implemented extreme sanctions and pursued undemocratic judicial processes without the knowledge of certain church leaders should also be avoided.
But when it comes to helping the digital companies regulate harmful information, the late Roman government’s cooperation with church leaders contains important lessons for managing online threats alongside influential and politically-affiliated actors.
Australian policymakers must realise that digital platform companies will pursue their own business interests and might not always succeed in safeguarding users from harmful content. This makes it even more important to ensure that platforms owe a legislated duty of care to their users, and that deeper efforts are made to help the public improve their critical media literacy.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of Policy & Internet, nor the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney.