As I wrote recently, even Big Brother himself, Mark Zuckerberg, is raising an eyebrow at Anthony Albanese’s Orwellian “online misinformation” bill. The bill would allow the government to arbitrarily declare anything online as “harmful misinformation”, while exempting themselves from the same scrutiny. The bill would also outlaw speech that “harms the integrity of government institutions”.
This is such an obviously bad idea that even the supine Human Rights Commission is finding something resembling a backbone.
The Australian Human Rights Commission has warned against giving any body the power to be “the sole arbiter of truth”, as the nation’s media watchdog concedes that concerns raised about Labor’s proposed misinformation laws that will give it elevated powers are “valid”.
The nation’s top human rights body told a Senate committee in a submission that there were “inherent dangers” in any body – be it government, a government taskforce or a social media platform – becoming the sole arbiter of truth.
The Australian
As lawyer and journalist Paul Chadwick warned in 1999, “All roads from a so-called independent statutory tribunal lead back through a parliament to a cabinet room.”
Do we really want politicians deciding for us what is true or not? Especially after the last five years?
In an age of relentless propaganda it’s more important than ever that governments not be allowed to censor differences of opinion.
Modern states have vast resources to promote their views on their own websites and in paid advertisements, and that’s even before much of the commercial media amplify the government’s views and attack its critics. Could the last few years provide any better example?
As we’ve plainly seen, the very governments who declared themselves our “sole source of truth” have in fact been the most shameless peddlers of lies, fraud and bullying mendacity.
Big tech has been only too happy to comply.
A landmark court ruling in the US last week highlighted the shocking extent to which the US government has been pressuring social media platforms, mainly Twitter and Facebook, to remove viewpoints it didn’t like. A 155-page ruling by a Louisiana federal court judge laid out in depressing detail how various US government departments – especially the White House – provided significant encouragement, verging on outright coercion, to social media platforms to remove or throttle posts the government didn’t like.
Judge Terry Doughty said the allegations entailed “arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history”, which sounds like an exaggeration until you read the judgment. For almost two years senior White House officials and top bureaucrats were privately demanding Twitter and Facebook provide regular proof they were censoring certain individuals and posts that officials would routinely flag.
Some of the speech removed from these platforms included criticism of Covid-19 vaccine mandates, the vaccines themselves, the wisdom of lockdowns, the veracity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, US election outcomes and governance, and even parody or joke accounts mocking Joe Biden.
The Australian
Amateurs. The Australian government has been at it even harder. As an FOI request by Liberal senator Alex Antic revealed, the federal government spent the entire pandemic period censoring thousands of social media posts.
Everything else Antic asked about was redacted. One document requested under FOI had just its title – the other 28 pages were completely censored.
Are these really the people we want appointing themselves as the ultimate arbiters of truth?