Overseas Commentary on Australia’s Move to Internet Censorship, By James Reed

The debate in Australia coming from the internet censorship of social media, in particular Musk' X, of the Sydney knife attacks, has not gone unnoticed overseas. While in Australia, the lobby is focussing on dealing with Islamophobia, not terrorism, overseas social critics have seen the key issue as one being an excuse to clam down on freedom of expression. The attack issue is a convenient way of doing this, to move into place a mechanism for suppressing speech that opposes the status quo, such as anti-vax and anti-immigration material. While not having anything particularly new, this piece from Networkaffects.com, is common in US sites discussing the Australian plight.

If America can get out of its mess, perhaps down the track the US may need to help sort out the Australia mess if we don't.

https://networkaffects.substack.com/p/australias-misinformation-bill-was

"The Australian government is seeking to exploit two recent knife attacks to relaunch its misinformation bill after it was put on ice late last year over free speech concerns.

Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023, coupled with Australia's existing eSafety legislation, would radically expand the government's ability to control online speech and is part of a broader global push to reshape the online domain.

The legislation would extend the voluntary "disinformation code" launched in 2021 and in part crafted by US/UK NGO First Draft, now the Information Futures Lab. To some, First Draft is a leader in the "anti-disinformation" space, to others it is a key node in the global Censorship-Industrial Complex.

Among other activities, First Draft participated in an Aspen Institute workshop that rehearsed how to suppress the now-verified Hunter Biden laptop story, two months before the New York Post broke the story.

Australia has been out in front in shaping the bureaucratised internet: the eSafety Commissioner is touted as the first online "harm regulator" in the world and as recently detailed, is deeply embedded in the global networks driving this push, from the World Economic Forum, to the EU, to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and beyond.

Australia's conservative party had until recently opposed the bill (despite getting it started), but is now wavering in the wake of the recent stabbings. On top of this, the Labor government is now proposing an expansion of the eSafety Commissioner's powers.

This all bodes badly for free speech in Australia.

The misinformation bill would allow the Australian Media and Communications Alliance (ACMA) to levy fines of up to $6.8 million or five percent of a company's global turnover if they deem a platform has taken insufficient steps to remove "disinformation." The existing eSafety regulations, which also sit within ACMA but do not cover disinformation, can already levy fines of hundreds of thousands of dollars per day, as per the Commissioner's recent penalisation of X regarding its refusal to globally take down images of one of the attacks.

The likely result of such harsh fines is that platforms will become more risk-averse and scrub legitimate citizen content, discussions, and information for fear of the costs.

ACMA claims Australia has been swept up in a global misinformation "crisis." ACMA's determination of this "crisis" was built on flawed research, including that of marketing agency We Are Social whose work includes promoting Tinder and helping clients sell sneakers.

The government, along with academia and mainstream media, are conveniently exempt from the bill. This is particularly ironic as one of the main sources of misinformation after the recent Bondi Junction stabbing was mainstream television news, which misnamed the attacker.

Exempting academics from the bill could be seen as a positive given the current wide-scale academic censorship experienced during the years-long Covid crisis. However, investigations into the Censorship-Industrial Complex revealed that academic institutions are at the forefront of the new restrictions on free speech. Everyone should be exempt from the bill, not just governments, academics, and key media players, because the logic of "disinformation" is fundamentally flawed.

The bill lowers the threshold for what can be considered harmful content online. Content must only be "reasonably likely" to "contribute to serious harm." It need not be in and of itself directly "harmful."And what kind of content is "harmful" according to the bill? Examples include, among others:

hatred against a group in Australian society on the basis of ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or physical or mental disability

disruption of public order or society in Australia

harm to the health of Australians

The first is only tangentially related to misinformation, and much more a case of hate speech or discrimination. "Disruption of public order" could sweep up all manner of legitimate protest, likewise, "harm to the health of Australians" could squash legitimate dissent or questioning of public health measures.

Furthermore, the bill states that content that is merely "misleading" can be considered disinformation, and allows the Minister of Communications to initiate and direct the terms of "disinformation" investigations at their pleasure.

The bill's scope covers "digital services," including "any of the content accessible using the service, or delivered by the service, is accessible to, or delivered to, one or more end-users in Australia." That means it claims sovereignty over the content of non-Australians. As shown in the Australian Twitter Files, the Department of Home Affairs used the notion of "circulating a claim in Australia's digital information environment" to justify requests to censor non-Australians. Would we like China, Russia, or the UK to be making judgements about the "truthiness" of content produced by Australians?

Outlets like The Guardian, however, claim the bill is "eminently sensible" and that the dissent is just a "scare campaign." More than 23,000 public responses were made to the bill suggesting many people disagree. The Guardian has also tried to sweep away concerns about ACMA's powers, carving out this feat of double-think: "Existing content moderation has not affected freedom of speech – ACMA has noted that platforms like Facebook have removed thousands of posts under the existing voluntary code."

Moreover, The Guardian says that despite having major new powers, ACMA is unlikely to use them: "This bill creates a dialogue where, if an issue arises, ACMA can converse with the platforms about meeting their own self-imposed code of conduct and, if necessary, recommend that voluntary code be strengthened with the threat of the government enforcing a code of conduct as last resort."

It is worth noting that former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was critical in establishing The Guardian in Australia, and also first appointed eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.

The misinformation bill extends the voluntary disinformation code developed by the Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), in partnership with First Draft. In the words of DIGI, the legislation "would enable the ACMA to have a longer-term mandate to oversee The Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, which DIGI developed and administers."

First Draft was a leading "anti-disinformation" NGO founded by Claire Wardle that closed in 2022 and morphed into the Information Futures Lab at Brown University. Wardle coined the Orwellian concept of "malinformation" and was one of the biggest promoters of the Mis- Dis- and Malinformation framework that is now commonplace among "anti-disinformation" organisations and eager regulators.

In the words of DIGI, the code was initially developed "with assistance from the University of Technology Sydney's Centre for Media Transition and First Draft." First Draft's Asia-Pacific office was housed at the Center for Media in Transition.

DIGI members include Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, and previously Twitter/X. X was dumped from the voluntary code in November 2023 following a complaint from the Omidyar-funded Reset Australia, a digital policy organisation focusing on "online harms," relating to Australia's failed 2023 Voice Referendum.

That DIGI chose a US/UK outfit to lead the development of the initial voluntary code underscores the global nature of the censorship push.

AMCA's report on the "adequacy of digital platforms' disinformation and news quality measures" references First Draft more than half a dozen times, as does ACMA's paper which guided misinformation code development.

Why is this a problem? As noted earlier First Draft participated in information suppression operations, most egregiously the "pre-bunking" of the since-verified Hunter Biden laptop story.

The Twitter Files revealed that the Aspen Institute organised a "table-top exercise" to gameplan a response to (a supposedly fictional) laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the contents of which suggested corruption relating to Ukraine's Burisma energy company and the Biden family. That event occurred in August of 2020, when the verified laptop had supposedly only been in the possession of the FBI, The New York Post, and the Trump campaign team.

Attendees, including First Draft, work-shopped how to snuff out such "disinformation" before it could take hold in the public consciousness. "Bring your most devious and cynical imaginations!" exclaimed Garret Graff, the Aspen Institute's Director of Cyber Initiatives, in the invitation to First Draft and others:

The exercise was also attended by The New York Times, Washington Post, Stanford University academics, Rolling Stone Magazine, CNN, NBC, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as Twitter and Facebook.

First Draft was also included in emails where Graff explained how funny the prescience of their plan was:

The story was denounced as a "Russian information operation" by 50 former top US intelligence officials, and social media companies including Twitter and Facebook suppressed the New York Post report across their platforms, just in time to keep the story from gaining momentum prior to the 2020 presidential election, arguably influencing the result. It wasn't until well after the election that admissions slowly trickled out that the laptop was real (as later admitted by both The New York Times and Washington Post).

Wardle also attended pre-election table-top exercises with Pentagon officials.