Big Tech’s Influence on Public Discourse is overstated-its out fault.

Big tech is the whipping boy of 2021. Sure, it deserves the lash here and there. It should be liable for defamatory content on its platforms and be held to account for online violence. Young children should be protected from business models that harm them. How to do this sensibly is the harder question. But blaming tech companies for the sickening state of public discourse is a cop-out. Fair and square, we are to blame for the vulgar, intolerant state of our public square.

After the death of British Conservative MP David Amess we should demand answers to politically motivated violence directed at our elected representatives. The starting point is surely asking how a radicalised Islamist, who had allegedly been planning an attack for years, escaped the attention of the authorities charged with keeping the country safe from terrorists.

Australian politicians and their families are not immune from violence in all its forms. WA Premier Mark McGowan, Northern Territory Chief Minister Michael Gunner and his family and federal Health Minister Greg Hunt and his family have been targeted by hate-filled threats, including threats of violence. Nicolle Flint decided to leave politics after the abuse she endured. It's a safe bet to assume just about every MP has attracted horrendous abuse, online or otherwise, for doing their jobs. It would be a tragedy if fear of violence drives more politicians out of parliament or means they won't interact with people they represent.

So what is the solution? British Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries says online hatred has "poisoned public life". On the weekend she pledged to bring in sweeping new laws that will require tech companies to identify and remove illegal content, prevent children from accessing harmful content and enforce age limits and prohibit anonymous abuse.

"It will end abuse, full stop," she said. "If it's racist, if it's misogynistic, if it's anti-Semitic - if it's any kind of toxic content that breaks a social media company's terms and conditions, whether hiding behind a fake name or not, it will have to be removed." Dorries said the laws will force platforms to "stop amplifying hateful content" through algorithms.

Scott Morrison has described social media as a "coward's palace" where people can anonymously "destroy people's lives". "That's not a free country where that happens," he said.

The urge to do something, especially with an election looming, is unmistakeable and predictably kneejerk. Unless carefully drafted and applied, new laws laudably aimed at ending online abuse risk damaging our ability to engage freely online.

Defining what is hateful content is not as easy as it sounds. For years, some of my more warped opponents dubbed my writing "hateful". That's what happens when politics becomes a morality contest; your opponent isn't just wrong, he or she is evil and hateful and must be shut down. As Matthew Lesh, the new head of research at London's Adam Smith Institute, wrote in response to the proposed reforms in the UK, "to the extent that the Bill has any impact it will be that social media firms mass delete legal speech, most of it not actually abusive whatsoever, in order to avoid a massive fine. It won't, however, stop people from being nasty".

The harder response is finding a legal solution without creating another set of problems. Governments are notoriously bad at that. Sometimes the answer, as unpalatable as it might be to them, is to do nothing, or at least to do something less than taking a populist sledgehammer to a problem. A sensible law would enable police and other authorities to track down those who use online platforms to threaten others. Short of that, governments are having us on by telling us they can fix public discourse by regulating online platforms. It's as boneheaded as those calls from the Greens for fair speech to replace free speech. Allowing government to decide what is nice speech should be resisted. To rearrange the PM's words, that's not what happens in a free country.

In any case, blaming tech algorithms and online anonymity doesn't address the intolerance and loathing that infiltrate our society at so many levels.