PM’s free speech fight with Elon puts Australia on the side of the censors

If the PM’s logic in his feud with X owner Elon Musk was pursued to its logical conclusion, we wouldn’t be able to see footage of 9/11 or the JFK assassination lest it lead to “conspiracy theories”.

Last October, when pro-Palestinian marchers broke from an approved route to celebrate Hamas’s massacre on the forecourt of the Opera House, NSW Police couldn’t have been more obliging.

Cops were ordered to stand back and allow demonstrators to set off flares, while at least one counter-protester carrying an Israeli flag was forced to move on because the police couldn’t guarantee his safety.

Police resources were even expended to forensically listen to audio from the demonstration so as to assure a worried citizenry that the crowd was only chanting “f--- the Jews,” not “gas the Jews”.

Fast forward six months to the stabbing of Assyrian Christian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in an alleged terror incident and it is a very different story.

Faced with an unruly crowd at the bishop’s church in Wakeley, the police moved in and confronted the troublemakers (at least one was seriously injured for his efforts).

In October, police stood by as pro-Palestine demonstrators set off flares and chanted anti-Jewish slogans. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Officials put out photos of suspects they wanted to speak to about their behaviour on the night and, in an even more extraordinary intervention, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese blamed footage of the livestreamed attack for the trouble.

That footage is now at the centre of a legal and political fight that has pitted Australia against the world’s richest man and which could ultimately decide how much control governments get to exercise over what citizens get to see and say on social media.

Here, of course, the usual caveats apply.

Police were much more active against rioters at a church in Wakeley last week. Picture: Liam Mendes

There is a lot of trash on social media, and parents should do everything they can to keep their kids away from the stuff.

Researchers like American psychologist Jonathan Haidt have blamed it for a “great rewiring” of young peoples’ brains and a catastrophic decline in teen mental health.

TikTok promotes dangerous diet advice and Palestinian propaganda and has been credibly accused of spying on journalists and critics of China and funnelling their personal information to Beijing.

X owner Elon Musk. Picture: Getty Images

Meta hosts jihadi preachers, including some living in Australia who preach violent anti-Western and anti-Jew hatred, and the platform often appears to be a safe haven for all manner of hackers, scammers and con artists. Across the space users must contend with black box algorithms that serve up content that veers from gory and extremist to hilariously wrong.

On Monday it was reported that Meta’s AI chatbot ranks Anthony Albanese, Julia Gillard, and Malcolm Turnbull among the nation’s best prime ministers – a remarkable feat given the short time all three spent or have spent so far in the Lodge.

The federal government and the eSafety Commissioner have tried to censor a video of an Assyrian bishop’s stabbing. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers

And it goes without saying that every platform exploits legal and regulatory grey areas in ways that traditional publishers and broadcasters could never get away with.

Yet despite all this the government’s fight against Elon Musk has more than a whiff of wag the dog about it. Because, to go back to the stabbing of Bishop Emmanuel, this was an incident that would have set alarm bells ringing in the PM’s office.

Without a circuit breaker, a scapegoat, the conversation would have quickly turned to issues of integration and immigration and multiculturalism and a million other topics that would have been supremely unhelpful to a government already being dragged far to the left on Israel. Blaming Musk for refusing to take down vision of the attack – which Albanese mischievously suggested was “misinformation,” as if it never happened – was absolutely in keeping with the vibe politics that has come to characterise this government.

And, amazingly it worked.

Of course, the prime minister could not have done this without backing from Australia’s unelected eSafety Commissioner, a job title straight out of Orwell if there ever was one.

Julie Inman Grant at Davos, 2022, talking about the need for limits on free speech.

Julie Inman Grant, the woman who currently holds the gig, used to work for Twitter/X in its pre-Musk days when it was known as an online playground for the left where conservative voices were routinely censored. More recently, she told the World Economic Forum in 2022 that the world needs a “recalibration” of the right to “freedom of speech”, which may be why she is trying through the courts to, as Musk says, control “the entire internet”.

But as we have seen, any such “recalibration” is likely to be selective and political.

Again, there was no call from the government to take down the footage of Hamas’s butchery of innocent Israelis that provoked the riotous celebration of mass murder at the Opera House last October.

No one has (yet) suggested scrubbing the internet of footage of violent events like Pearl Harbor, the JFK assassination, or 9/11 just because all three have provoked conspiracy theories.

JFK in Dallas just before his assassination. Footage of the killing has spawned conspiracy theories for decade.

At the same time it is has only been through dogged journalism and freedom of information requests that we have learned how government agencies have used social media to shape their own narratives.

During the Covid pandemic, the Australian government worked with social media companies to censor at least 4000 social media posts that went against the official line despite many in fact turning out to be correct.

In 2020, US intelligence officials conspired to suppress information about the contents Hunter Biden’s laptop lest it help Donald Trump’s re-election effort. And in a colossal act of promoting real and not alleged disinformation, they put forth the line it was the product of a Russian hoax.

This is why history has shown that in the long run, those who put free speech in scare quotes are rarely the good guys.

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