The Australian government is seeking to exploit public sentiment around public stabbings to relaunch Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024. Coupled with Australia’s existing eSafety legislation, the bill would radically expand the government’s ability to control online speech and is part of a broader global push to reshape the online domain.

Below is our letter to the Australian parliament stating opposition to the proposed “Misinformation Bill”:

TO:
Committee Secretary
Environment and Communications Legislation Committee
Department of the Senate
Parliament House
CANBERRA ACT 2600
AUSTRALIA

FROM:
Andrew Lowenthal, CEO, liber-net
Hobart, Tasmania

29 September 2024

RE: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 [Provisions]

Dear Senators,

My name is Andrew Lowenthal, a native-born Australian and longtime proponent of free speech across the globe. I have worked in human rights and technology for more than 25 years. For almost 18 years I led EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific digital free expression non-profit. Most recently I worked with Matt Taibbi on the #TwitterFiles, including writing the Australian Twitter Files, and led the mapping of the Censorship-Industrial Complex for Racket News. I also helped coordinate the Westminster Declaration, a new free speech manifesto signed by a large number of high-profile artists and intellectuals. 

I was a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and Film Studies Center, and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. 

I am now CEO of liber-net, a digital civil liberties initiative that combats digital authoritarianism and works to reestablish free speech and civil liberties as the norm for our networked age. We oppose systems of online censorship, their growing social acquiescence, and the accelerating surveillance regimes operating in and through information technology.

With this experience in hand, I write to express my opposition to the proposed Misinformation Bill in the strongest possible terms. Its origins are fundamentally and irreparably flawed. The bill should be immediately stopped. 

Summary of Criticisms:

The bill builds on the voluntary disinformation code developed by DIGI in cooperation with First Draft. The leadership of First Draft participated in an Aspen Institute exercise to coordinate how to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, two months before the story broke publicly. The bill extends a code written by an organisation that itself took part in a disinformation operation, one that potentially impacted the outcome of a U.S. presidential election. Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged that Facebook (who also participated in the exercise) wrongly suppressed the story, and censored legitimate Covid related content at the behest of the government.

The bill permits labelling content as “misleading” or “false” based on what is “reasonably verifiable,” but its broad definitions of misinformation and disinformation may also include truthful yet controversial or politically inconvenient content. 

The Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill makes the Government an arbiter of truth, while hypocritically exempting select professional groups in media, science, and academia. While small improvements have been made since its initial introduction, the bill remains fundamentally flawed and authoritarian in nature. It would grant sweeping powers to the Australian government to regulate and control online content, risking the suppression of legitimate speech, dissent, and political discourse under the guise of protecting citizens. The desire to create a government-sanctioned, sanitised web content sets a dangerous precedent for global internet freedom, attempting to do for Australia what countries such as China have demanded and often received from Big Tech companies with a financial interest in operating there.

The Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill expands government censorship to include questioning government health measures, stifling any legitimate debate and criticism of public policies. The major shifts in COVID-19 narratives the world has experienced since 2020 illustrate how definitions of “misinformation” can rapidly evolve, making strict censorship programs as proposed in the bill entirely unworkable.  Cumulatively, the proposals in this bill would have a strong chilling effect on journalism, as journalists and commentators fear self-censorship due to potential legal repercussions, limiting investigative journalism.

Detailed Criticisms:

The Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill 2024 would radically expand the government’s ability to control and manipulate online speech and is part of a broader global push to reshape the online domain.

The Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill extends the voluntary disinformation code developed by the Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), whose members include Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, TikTok, and previously Twitter/X. 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.” DIGI developed this code in partnership with US/UK NGO First Draft, now the Information Futures Lab. First Draft’s Asia-Pacific office was housed at the UTS Center for Media in Transition. 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.

First Draft (now the Information Future’s Lab at Brown University) is a key node in the global Censorship-Industrial Complex. Among other activities, First Draft participated in the Aspen Institute workshop that rehearsed how to suppress the now-verified Hunter Biden laptop story mentioned above. Two months later, the New York Post broke the story only for it to be effectively scrubbed from all major social media platforms as “misinformation.”  

First Draft was also the only NGO in the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a consortium of legacy media organisations including the BBC, The New York Times, Facebook, Twitter, and The Washington Post, among others. TNI coordinated to steer the prevailing Covid narrative in favour of the guidelines and mandates imposed by most major governments and to suppress dissent. A lawsuit against TNI has shown that TNI claimed it was misinformation to suggest that “COVID vaccines are not effective in preventing infection.”

The fact that the bill extends the work of this clearly dishonest NGO means it should be immediately scrapped.

Through the Australian Twitter Files, I discovered that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) requested Twitter remove 222 pandemic-related tweets: often jokes, commentary, scientific debate, and information that turned out to be true. Rather than relying on Australian scientists, the DHA referred Twitter to Yahoo! News and USA Today “fact-checks” to justify their censorship requests. FOIA documents revealed there were more than 4,000 such requests to social media. 

When asked for comment, the DHA stated that it was merely referring content to social media platforms for “review against their terms of service” and that “any action taken by digital platforms in response to these referrals was a matter for those platforms.” It sought to clarify that the Department “no longer refers COVID-19 misinformation or disinformation to digital platforms.”

The Twitter Files show that the Australian Twitter staff enthusiastically cooperated with the DHA to enable censorship. These same people also contributed to drafting the voluntary misinformation code. That code, which Twitter signed up to at the time, failed to protect free speech and instead shut down legitimate debate during Covid. The revelation of these close, interconnected relationships reveals a deeply concerning nexus between past censorship efforts and the latest iteration of the Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill.

The Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill would also allow the Australian Media and Communications Alliance (AC