James Morrow: ‘Misinformation’ just means the government wants to control what you’re allowed to think

If we have learned one thing from the past five or so years it is that governments always tell the truth and never, ever try to manipulate information to advance their own agendas, writes James Morrow.

If we have learned one thing from the past five or so years it is that governments always tell the truth and never, ever try to manipulate information to advance their own agendas.

In fact, anyone who thinks differently is probably guilty of spreading harmful propaganda and misinformation through words that could be considered “hurtful” or even “dangerous”.

I kid, of course, because no one in their right mind could believe the previous two statements.

Except, of course, the government.

And specifically our present Labor government, which is holding fast to its plans to introduce the Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill that would allow government bureaucrats to police and penalize online platforms that allow things to be published that have the potential to cause “serious harm.”

Of course, “serious harm” is in the eye of the beholder.

A Dan Andrews meme that Home Affairs sought to censor during the pandemic

If the legislation passes, that harm could be viewed through the lens of everything from the environment to the economy to “hatred against a group”.

Even more concerning, the bill would create two classes of citizens, with (along with other protected classes) the government being immune from the fateful charge of “spreading misinformation.”

In other words, the government is always right.

But while the government may be considered without sin, for ordinary citizens it is another story.

We have seen in recent weeks the way the government (and, shamefully, some journalists as well) use the label “misinformation” or “disinformation” to shut down or bully critics.

The loaded, subjective nature of the terms were revealed on Tuesday when a Sky News investigation led to Facebook suspending its partnership with the RMIT Fact Lab amid accusations of bias and misleading fact checks about the Voice.

But it’s not just the Voice.

Labor’s omnibus online censorship bill just further locks in Australia’s bipartisan slide towards a soft totalitarianism, where speech is theoretically free so long as everyone says the same thing.

People are seen marching down the streets in Sydney CBD for a rally in support of the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Picture : NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

As an example of this look at how during the pandemic, Home Affairs bureaucrats asked Twitter to censor at least 222 posts – all in the name of keeping us safe.

Over the course of the three years covering the pandemic the government attempted to censor or remove some 4,213 posts across all social media platforms via their Orwellian sounding Social Cohesion Unit.

Among the items that came to the government’s attention was a post that showed Dan Andrews wearing a mask with the caption, “this mask is as useless as me” (history and science are on the poster’s side here).

It is a supreme irony that the same Labor government that wants to see Julian Assange sprung from jail for publishing military secrets also wants to use the full power of the state to crack down on memes.

It is a far cry from the old days when Labor and the progressive left stood, or at least were perceived to stand, firmly on the side of free speech and dangerous ideas.

It was, after all, the Whitlam government that put the final nail in the coffin of Australia’s censorship regime that banned even the 18th century erotic novel Fanny Hill in the name of preserving order and decency.

Home Affairs bureaucrats asked Twitter to censor at least 222 posts – all in the name of keeping us safe. (Photo by Constanza HEVIA / AFP)

And it is part of a global push, largely from the left, to crack down on what ordinary people can and can’t say, see, or increasingly, think.

Now, though, Labor is going down the same road as so many other democracies in trying to use the heavy hand of the state to advance particular narratives, shut down inconvenient truths, or simply stay in power.

This desire to censor is based on a very grim view of humanity that sees words as worrisome, debate as harmful, and which demands codes and censors to sit above the public square to make sure things don’t get out of hand.

Where once the left hailed the principle that when it came to bad ideas “sunlight is the best disinfectant” (in the words of US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis), today it sees that same sunlight as the spreader of cancerous ideas like hate speech and “misinformation”.

In the US, along with a similar mass censorship effort around Covid, a cabal of intelligence and law enforcement bureaucrats worked to keep news of the Hunter Biden laptop from spreading weeks before the 2020 election.

Ironically they did this by putting out the lie that the hard drive was the product of Russian “disinformation.”

In Ireland, the government is pushing a bill under the guise of fighting hate speech that could see people jailed for “inciting hatred”, though as Spiked Online’s Fraser Myers has noted, “In practice, if other European hate-speech laws are any guide, ‘inciting hatred’ tends to mean little more than causing offence.”

The EU, too, is using its Digital Services Act to regulate social media companies and narrow the bounds of what can and cannot be talked about.

In every instance the common denominator is governments believing that in order to save liberalism, they need to suspend it.