Governments deciding what we can and can’t say is anathema to democracy. End of story | David Penberthy

This isn’t a self-serving rant. I’ll get special protections under these laws that you won’t, writes David Penberthy.

“Never read the comments.” It’s advice you often hear being given to prospective newspaper columnists or occasional contributors to the opinion pages about the need to brace themselves for the free-wheeling mosh pit that is unfettered feedback from the general public.

It’s a sentiment with which I have never agreed, nor one I have understood.

The comments are often the best part of a column.

As columnists we should be honoured that people take the time to comment, whether we agree with their feedback or not.

The comments are often funny. They’re insightful. They are frequently completely over the top. They can be personally abusive.

Bring it on. Bring all of it on. To the readers I say go your hardest; to the writers, toughen up, princesses.

Occasionally you read comments which are completely moronic. Comments from people who have totally missed every point you have made, and need to have the column re-read to them by a sentient adult.

You also read comments which are based on false information or lies. Covid was a good time for that if you were a columnist writing in support of vaccinations.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

It was a red rag to every wellness weirdo and conspiracy nut out there, and they had a jolly old time of it jumping online saying that people like me had been “got to” by the likes of Anthony Fauci, the WHO cabal, and the faceless millionaire monsters running Big Pharma.

When you write about issues involving race or religion, you invite comments which are sometimes demonstrably untrue, based on crap that does the rounds of the internet.

You could classify some of those comments as disinformation or misinformation.

Here’s where things get interesting – and politically dangerous – for our federal government.

The last thing the Albanese government needs, given the way it’s going, is a new political headache.

If it is not careful it will end up with one with its misinformation Bill.

Like many things this government has done, or tried to do, it has been poorly explained. It seems to be a triumph of good intentions over practical implementation.

And it risks impinging on one of our most important freedoms of all, freedom of speech.

Now a lot of people would say that Elon Musk is a power-hungry, egotistical whack job who has turned Twitter, as X, into a clearing house for crackpot and extreme content around politics, crypto, vaccinations, lockdowns, with the racy added extra of a significant increase in smut.

Some say the blogosphere is dangerous as it has no barriers for entry and no checks or balances meaning any old bit of deluded or dangerous nonsense can find its way into print.

I will tell you what is more dangerous than all of the above combined – the federal government Department of Misinformation and Disinformation.

A state-owned entity hovering above us all, telling us what we can and cannot say.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk speaks at a campaign rally for US President-elect Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden in New York on October 27. Picture: Angela Weiss/AFP

Now, the federal government has said that news organisations are exempt from these proposed new rules.

But what is a “news organisation” and what is “news”.

Is news an article? Is it a letter to the editor? Is it any one of your comments published online on the bottom of this piece?

These are not rhetorical or mischievous questions.

They’re the same questions every major news organisation, and the Australian Press Council and the Human Rights Commission have all put in relation to the mystery surrounding Albo’s disinformation Bill.

Frankly, I am not even sure what the difference is between mis- and dis-information either.

There have clearly been issues where false information spread online has been linked to terrible social outcomes.

Indeed much of the impetus for this discussion internationally came from the stabbing in England of young children at a Taylor Swift dance concert earlier this year, where false information was spread like wildfire online wrongly decrying this outrage as an act of Islamic extremism.

A cynic might argue that such baseless conclusions become more tempting when the politically-correct British Police has an ignoble history of trying to hush-up or airbrush genuine cases or Islamic terror from public discussion.

It was a boy-who-cried-wolf scenario where the extreme right went hard on the basis of past PC silence in the face of uncomfortable truths.

Riot police hold back protesters near a burning police vehicle after disorder broke out on July 30, 2024 in Southport, England. Picture: Getty Images/Getty Images

Misinformation fighting an absence of honest information.

Cans of worms don’t get larger than the one contained in this Albanese government brain bubble.

The idea that the job can fall to government to decide what people can and cannot say is anathema in a democracy, end of story.

And this isn’t some self-interested piece on my part, as my understanding of the Bill is that while columnists such as me could still write freely, the commentary pieces like this attracts may not.

But to end in the joyful world of the comments section.

The best argument against what the feds are considering comes from the comments section itself. It is the ultimate self-regulatory environment.

If you get an accolade from a piece that’s been generally well-received, dozens of people will hit ‘like’ on that comment.

If you get a powerfully-written counterargument from someone telling you you’ve missed the point, or are full of it, dozens of people will ‘like’ that too.

But the truly nutty comments, the delusional comments pointing to conspiracies and making laughable claims – barely anyone (if anyone) ‘likes’ them because they are demonstrably stupid and absurd.

Far better to let the readers judge for themselves than to go down the Orwellian path of filling some grey building in Canberra’s outer suburbs with an army of thought-police, making sure no-one is speaking impurely against the mandated strictures of the government of the day.

Originally published as Governments deciding what we can and can’t say is anathema to democracy. End of story | David Penberthy