ALP president takes on social media giants

Labor has launched an attack on social media giant Facebook, with the party's national president raising the prospect of breaking large companies up over fake news.

Wayne Swan hit out at internet behemoths for not addressing the spread of political misinformation and hate on their platforms.

"Nothing - including breaking up the social media platforms where the concentration of their market power is damaging society - should be off the table," he told the Towards 2022 conference in Sydney on Saturday.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese also used the conference to name Facebook as one of the forces robbing Australia's political debate of civility.

"What if Facebook's laws of the jungle trump Australia's laws of the land?" he said.

Mr Albanese took aim at billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for failing to crack down on far-right figure Leith Erikson falsely attributing something to the Labor leader.

"The image even included my legal authorisation at the bottom - a clear breach of Australia's electoral laws," he said.

"We raised it directly with Facebook, you know what? They just shrugged. They said it wasn't a breach of community guidelines."

A Labor graphic originally supporting Australians' right to protest became a graphic pushing Mr Erikson's campaign against the Family Court.

"Unless you'd seen the original, there is no way that you would know the image was a fake," Mr Albanese said.

Labor was on the end of a fake news campaign during the lead up to the May federal election, with Facebook posts alleging the party had a policy to implement death taxes.

Mr Swan, a former federal treasurer, said social media giants should be recognised as publishers with the responsibility to ensure misinformation and hate isn't spread.

He also wants accountability for how platforms collect, store and use people's data.

That includes who the companies are partnering with and how algorithms shape user behaviour.

Mr Albanese warned platforms against complacency given the increasing amount of "deep fakes" - false videos and images which are virtually indistinguishable.

The Labor leader also threw his support behind a media campaign to strengthen press freedom, pledging to work for stronger laws backing the public's right to know information.