A reworked version of the misinformation bill tabled by the Labor Government this week is an improvement on an earlier version of the bill, but fundamental flaws make the laws unworkable, experts say.
The government shelved its first version of the misinformation bill last year after strong political and public pushback, with over 3,000 submissions, and a further 20,000 comments made to the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA) during its consultation phase.
This week, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland tabled the new bill with significant revisions based on public consultation.
“Following public consultation on the draft bill last year, revisions have been made that carefully balance the public interest in combatting seriously harmful misinformation and disinformation with the freedom of expression that is so fundamental to our democracy,” said Rowland.
“These revisions reflect that feedback and I look forward to seeing the Bill become law as we combat the threat of misinformation and disinformation.”
The new bill includes strengthened protections for free expression, with exemptions for satire, parody, news content, academic, artistic, scientific and religious content.
The previously overbroad definition of harm arising from misinformation and disinformation has been narrowed include only “serious” and “imminent” threats, and
content disseminated by the government will no longer be exempt from the laws, although professional news organisations regulated under other legislation and industry codes will be exempt.
As in the previous version of the bill, the ACMA will not police content or individual accounts, but will instead take a “systems-based approach” to holding digital platforms to account through enforcing transparency and adherence to an industry code.
However, Graham Young, director of non-partisan think tank the Australian Institute for Progress, said that the bill can amount to nothing more than a “shoddy attempt at censorship” because it is premised on flawed understandings of misinformation and the discursive process.
“It’s essential for the functioning of a modern society that information be freely available and freely discussed,” he said.
“Inevitably, especially in situations of emerging information, there is going to be a lot of misinformation, whether deliberately or by accident. That is a benefit.”
“Misinformation is essentially a hypothesis that is wrong. Knowledge advances by testing and discarding hypotheses. But most hypotheses aren’t completely wrong, so testing them can provide knowledge that would otherwise not have come to light.”
Ironically, the one of the key studies underpinning the misinformation bill demonstrates the difficulty of picking out the right (or wrong) hypotheses while public debate is in flux, said Young.
“Re-examination of the data from [the research underpinning the bill] shows that what is misinformation yesterday is often fact, or close to, today, and it calls into question the government’s whole rationale for this intervention,” he said.
To wit, Canberra University researchers incorrectly classified posts about vaccine mandates and the lab leak theory as misinformation, but vaccine mandates were introduced months later, and the lab leak is now widely thought to be equally or more likely than the zoonotic origin theory.
Moreover, the researchers coded respondents who thought that authorities exaggerated the risks of Covid, or who questioned the efficacy of masks or the safety of Covid vaccines as “misinformed.” Yet it is now accepted that authorities wildly overestimated the risk of Covid – the World Health Organisation initially reported a 3.4% risk of death, compared to the real risk in 2020 of closer to 0.05% – and there are hundreds to thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers questioning both the efficacy of masking and the safety of Covid vaccines.
Based on the best available evidence to date, it appears that the respondents who the researchers categorised as “misinformed” were in fact better informed than those who were categorised as “informed,” while the latter were simply those who believed everything the government said at the time.
Twitter Files journalist and founder of digital civil liberties initiative liber-net,
Andrew Lowenthal agrees that the revisions to the government’s misinformation bill only make it marginally less bad.
“On some level it is an improvement, but that’s a low bar because the previous bill was so terrible,” he said, noting that one of the key underlying problems of the legislation remains, which is the (currently) voluntary industry disinformation code that the new laws will extend and enforce.
The code requires that digital platforms employ a range of moderation tools including the labelling, removal, deamplification or demonetisation of false and misleading content, and the suspension of accounts engaged in inauthentic behaviours.
This activity is to be supported by “prioritising credible and trusted news sources,” “partnering and/or providing funding for fact checkers to review Digital Content,” and co-ordination with government regulators.
These are obviously flawed methods for sorting true from false information. “Credible and trusted news sources” routinely publish falsehoods without making follow-up corrections, and fact-checkers frequently make false and biased claims which amount to no more than opinions in a court of law. Platforms using official policy positions as a proxy for ‘truth’ ensure strict adherence to political policies but automatically filter out emerging science and thought.
Lowenthal has documented the weaponisation of these industry standards by governments to censor dissent, showing that, given enough rope, governments will claim a monopoly on ‘truth’ for political ends.
“Governments are political operators and will have a tendency to employ all the tools at their disposal to make their political view dominant,” said Lowenthal, who has reported on the Australian Government’s role in censoring online dissent during the pandemic, and the US Government’s role in censoring true Covid information and suppressing the true Hunter Biden laptop story.
Canberra Daily asked the ACMA how it will ensure that the wrong information (i.e.: true information) will not be demonetised, deamplified or removed by overzealous platforms eager to comply with the new misinformation laws under threat of financial penalties of up to 5% of global revenue.
A department spokesperson assures that the tightened up definitions of misinformation and disinformation provide “a high bar,” meaning that the bill “only applies to content that results in certain, defined serious harms to Australians.”
However, Rowland suggested this week that the new laws will cover, for example, content that urges people against taking preventive health measures like vaccines, causing alarm within the vaccine-injured community that they will be silenced and marginalised under the new laws.
IMAGE: https://x.com/radofaletic/status/1834193510674956571
The alarm is not unfounded – the Department of Health co-ordinated with Facebook during the pandemic to successfully shut down a vaccine injury support group over “unsubstantiated” vaccine reactions.
The department further advises that under the new laws, platforms will be required to be transparent about the misinformation and disinformation policies and processes.
Further, the industry codes will be subject to “protections around freedom of political communication, as well as Parliamentary scrutiny and disallowance.”
Transparency and free speech provisions are encouraging, though it is unclear how they will prevent true information getting caught in the policy and algorithmic nets, especially given that ‘misinformation’ so often turns out to be correct.
“The absurdity of the government’s legislation has recently been demonstrated by the fact that the Labor Party established a site for reporting misinformation, and it was swamped with people using the government’s own propaganda as examples,” Young noted dryly.
While the shadow Communications Minister David Coleman strongly criticised the draft misinformation bill last year, Opposition leader Peter Dutton more recently said that he was “happy to look at anything the government puts forward.”
The parliament will debate the misinformation bill at a future date, and the government hopes to pass the bill into law before the end of the year.
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