Letter to the Editor: Censorship in Australia
Dear DailyClout,
The Australian government is endeavoring to formalize its version of the Censorship Industrial Complex that has attacked free speech in the US and Europe. The government will legislate to provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) with “new powers to hold digital platforms to account and improve efforts to combat harmful misinformation and disinformation in Australia.”
It is hard to think of a more vaguely conceptualized, bad law. How are misinformation and disinformation to be defined? Prima facie it would seem to start with identifying something that is false. So does this apply to the forecasts of economists, who routinely make predictions that are wrong? Is that disinformation or misinformation worthy of removal?
Obviously not, but why not? Economic forecasts, if believed, could be quite harmful to people. But the government is saying it would not apply to the truth or otherwise to individual posts. It will be posts that challenge what the government says, particularly about matters of public health. The so-called “spread of online disinformation” referenced by the minister is clearly alluding to social media activity questioning the governments’ COVID-19 policies, especially the mandating of the so-called “vaccines”.
Many of the claims made by politicians and health authorities turned out to be false – and therefore, it would seem, potentially misinformation or disinformation would be a problem, at least in a sane world. For example, Australians were told in 2021 that they were confronting a uniquely deadly virus that required an extreme response. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), however, recorded that 2021 was the second lowest level of respiratory deaths since records have been kept (the lowest was 2020).
Australians in that year were brutally confronted with the choice of either getting inoculated with an untested drug or being banned from the workforce. This was presented as necessary to stamp out COVID. Yet the ABS reported that, in 2022, after about four-fifths of the population had been injected, deaths from COVID rose ninefold: from 1100 to over 10,000. So was the government’s claim that it would keep society safe from misinformation? Or what about the initial claims that the lockdowns, which lasted longer in Australia than anywhere else in the world, would only last a few weeks so as to “flatten the curve” (you know, the curve that never existed).
The government will not apply the same standards to itself, of course. That would mean having a functioning rule of law. The target is rather the intent of those who post unacceptable things online. It is not about what people say – after all, whether posts are “true or false” seems not to be the issue – but why they say it. When the government gets things wrong that is fine because the government always means well. But when people question the government, they must be stopped because they have bad motives and are not allowing the government to “keep Australians safe”.
There appear to be two clear legal difficulties. How do you establish a person’s intent from a post? You only have the text to go on. Their writing may be ironic, or there may be a variety of other possible motives. How would you know? In literature this is called the Intentional Fallacy: the error of thinking that determining what an author is thinking is no more difficult than solving a mathematical problem. It should also be added that finding compelling evidence of intent is not something the legal system is well-placed to do.
Secondly, how do you know how the reader will respond? To state the obvious, once people get past about eight years old, they develop minds of their own and will come to very different conclusions about what they read. Those of us who have worked as professional journalists will have noticed an extraordinary array of reader responses to articles, some of them based on the diametrical opposite of the intended meaning.
“Meaning”, indeed, is the keyword, not information, which is merely passive. When people write posts, they are actively trying to communicate meaning. So the attempt to legally proscribe disinformation or misinformation is based on a false premise about what is actually occurring. The ABS furnishes information; people posting on social media are doing something much more complex.
The government is now moving to crush what George Orwell sardonically described as “thought crimes”: having the temerity to question the government’s edicts. The movie is not just reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984, a lurch toward government tyranny. It is also suggestive of Alexander Pope’s great poem The Dunciad in which he described a voluminous gaggle of stupid, vicious people degrading society.
It seems to me that this ridiculous mis/disinformation nonsense is actually a literary issue, about the misuse of language by the authorities. It can be attacked on that basis.
Sincerely,
David James
