The Myth of Misinformation, By James Reed

The Australian government is now moving on censorship, via the social media companies themselves under threat of fines of 5 percent of global revenue, via the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024. The aim will be to combat misinformation and misinformation. Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. Disinformation is knowingly false information designed to deliberately mislead. Most of the government attacks will be upon misinformation, as this casts a wider net.

But how sound is the conceptual basis of the concept? Rebekah Barnett quotes her co-worker Graham Young, director of non-partisan think tank the Australian Institute for Progress, on the conceptual flaws of this concept. The core argument here was given by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), On Liberty (1859), where the main argument for comprehensive free speech as that we do not know with certainty the truth, so we need to be open to debate, something alien to the Labor Party.

""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."

Interfering in the discursive process would be problematic enough even if all misinformation could be eradicated from the internet, but the government's own documentation supporting its bill proves that it's an impossible pursuit, even for qualified 'experts.'

"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," said Young.

Indeed, in a key study of misinformation commissioned by the ACMA, 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."

https://brownstone.org/articles/acmas-role-in-australias-censorship-campaign/