In this age of great untruth, some lies should be criminal

Anti-vaccination groups claim freedom of speech, but that should not give them the freedom to recklessly lie.

We live in an age of ubiquity of misinformation.

On Tuesday evening, I looked at a Facebook post from a person who is linked to anti-vax/anti-lockdown activists. He was summarising legal proceedings from the NSW Supreme Court and published what he claimed was an extract of testimony given by a witness for the defendant.

It took a little while to determine the post was an outright lie, a bit of shuffling through court listings and court filings on the internet. It took about five minutes to determine the exchange between lawyer and witness was entirely fabricated.

The post contained no approbation or imprimatur from the NSW Supreme Court. It was just text, but it had been posted in a way that readers would be inclined to accept it as accurate. By the time I had seen it and debunked it, it had been read by hundreds if not thousands of people.

The fake extract of testimony was a fictional account of admissions from a NSW Health official but the context is not as important as the content in this instance. Ultimately, it was a working example of the old axiom that a lie will be halfway around the world while the truth is still tying its shoelaces.

Mainstream media needs to be a reliable source of fact and truth and it sometimes is not. That politicians lie their way out of trouble is meat and drink in political communications. Truth has been devalued to the point where it becomes fragile, precious and hidden away. If enough of us can’t discern the truth then our political institutions cannot survive.

Politically weaponised misinformation is the greatest threat participatory democracies face. The irony is, lies, hyperbole and wanton exaggerations are the dark tools of political discourse. It has always been thus. But we are at a point now where it has become difficult to discern the truth. When we get to a point where there is confusion about a US presidential election result despite a seven million vote differential and a clear win to one candidate over the other in the Electoral College count, there clearly is a problem and that problem is inexorably linked to a view that freedom of speech equals a freedom to lie.

Lesson one: if a person chooses to ignore even basic news coverage, any dark conspiracy not only becomes possible but likely. In a similar way, people have come to a belief that Covid-19 vaccination renders them sterile or magnetic or will kill every single recipient stone dead in three years.

People are often told by hobby cultists, “Do your own research.” And the cultists are satisfied that if people do start hammering phrases into search engines, sooner or later misinformation will appear with a hearty smack of legitimacy. Google’s YouTube is perhaps the best example. Conducting your own research into anything from adverse reactions to Covid-19 vaccinations to the results of the 2020 US Presidential election is likely to drag people down rabbit holes where the line between truth and misinformation has become so blurred it has ceased to exist. Discernment is difficult and the loudest voices predominate.

It might be a lot harder to discern these days, but the real question is not how to find the truth but what to do about people who knowingly lie or create misinformation, particularly where that act causes harm, injury or death.

Let’s take one example: A group of anti-vaxxers have promoted lies about childhood vaccines to Maori and Islander communities in New Zealand. The anti-vax group known as WAVES (Warnings About Vaccine Expectations) promoted the nonsense that the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine could lead to autism in young children. The film, Vaxxed, an ugly piece of propaganda if ever there was one, was screened almost interminably in and around South Auckland.

The upshot of that was not just that Maori and Islander communities began to display vaccine hesitancy and that as a result, vaccination rates for MMR as well as other preventable childhood diseases declined in New Zealand although they did. The activities of WAVES and other anti-vax groups led to a measles outbreak in Samoa where childhood immunisation rates were much lower. The outbreak led to 87 deaths in Samoa and counting.

There is a direct line of causation between the fear mongering and the outbreak. Normally, anyone responsible for the deaths of 87 people, mainly children would face a reckoning in the courts, but WAVES and others merely pulled up their caravans and took off to fight another day, all in the name of doing their own research and ‘free’ speech.

The spread of such dangerous misinformation cannot be reconciled by a free speech argument. Forget the nonsense that freedom of speech means anyone can say whatever they want whenever they want. Freedom of speech doesn’t mean speech without consequence. We only need to look at our defamation laws to understand that.

The Morrison government is hell bent on bringing social media to account, especially where anonymous account holders spread defamatory messages that amount to acts of bullying and cowardice. Powerful social media companies are unlikely to bend because any reforms requiring greater moderation, and an editorial or a curatorial process will take large chunks of cash off their bottom lines.

It is very much a chicken and egg debate. But it is pointless to put the blame on a lack of editorial process where speech or expression occurs that is deliberately false and causes specific harm. The real truth is that people who type up the bile, and fling it to the world need to be made accountable.

If the government is serious about social media reform the time has come to criminalise the reckless spread of misinformation.