The Albanese government seems keen to appoint bureaucrats for the job of controlling what Australians can and cannot say in the digital public square that is social media.
A new law is proposed – the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 – which, if passed, would turn the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) into a “Ministry of Truth”. ACMA would then have power to sting BigTech (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) with colossal fines if they allow “harmful misinformation” on their platforms.
Who gets to define what is “harmful” and what is “misinformation”? Whoever it is, it won’t be you. This law would give Big Tech and Bureaucracy an open excuse to collaborate in censoring information or opinion they decide qualifies as “harmful”.
In fact, they have already been doing this behind the scenes. Earlier this year, Senator Alex Antic uncovered Australia’s own “Twitter files” scandal, in which the Department of Home Affairs had been abusing powers designed to combat terrorism to instead control the social media postings of regular Australians.
Inviting foreign-owned Big Tech to interfere with the preconditions necessary for democracy to function (like free speech) potentially engages the Criminal Code Act 1995, which provides for sentences of up to 20 years in prison for “foreign interference”.
Instead of being ashamed of all this, Michelle Rowland, now the Minister for Communications, has apparently decided to regularise these arrangements. She has proposed this Bill and has even appointed a Senior Manager from “Google’s Government Affairs” team, to help ACMA with work.
Perhaps the most outrageous part – a great example of government “misinformation”, in fact – is the Minster claims all this is necessary to defend democracy.
Principles of democracy
It seems a short reminder of the basic principles of democracy is in order.
The first principle is that no one should be entrusted with the sort of power this bill proposes. It is not for the government to tell us what information we may share, what we should think, and what we can say. Even well-intentioned people get things wrong some of the time – and there is no reason to assume that government always has good intentions.
In Australia, we have always preferred the pub test: we let every crank and nutter have a say and we trust to the common sense of a discerning public to let the stupid ideas die a natural death. By debating different points of view, we arrive at robust conclusions that serve the common good. In the process, new information and ideas can be introduced, questions can be asked, problems with the evidence can be exposed, and hidden agendas dragged out into the sunlight.
Certainly, totalitarianism is more efficient. You cut out all the riff raff, you don’t have to confront differing perspectives, and you confine decision-making to a hand-picked elite. Consensus-building is so much easier when you can simply silence “harmful” dissent.
The problem – apart from creating an appalling society that no one wants to live in – is that low-quality outcomes are virtually guaranteed: corruption gets a free-pass, bad information cannot be killed off before it causes harm, and innovation is stifled.
It is not appropriate for a democratic government to propose legislation that undermines the necessary preconditions for democracy. It doesn’t matter how many limitations they say will constrain their use of this power – they will have eliminated the means by which those claims can be verified.
Free speech is essential if government is to be held to account and only a totalitarian government would propose to interfere with that.
The window for public feedback on this bill has been extended to Sunday 20 August. You can fill out the form (here) or email your comments to: [email protected]
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