The timing of the Misinformation and Disinformation bill – delightfully abbreviated in true Canberra acronymic style to the MAD bill – is bizarre, and potentially destructive of the Albanese government.
The bill is a multi-faceted disaster-in-waiting for the Albanese government. This is a trifecta of poor intentions, bad law and terrible politics; a quinella of prohibition and state overreach where a backlash from voters, founded already on a smouldering distrust of this government, is more likely than not on the eve of an election year.
In a sense it is a piece of breathtaking delusion. This government, like almost every government around the world, is not in a position to regulate truth nor oblige tech companies to do their bidding.
There are, as Donald Rumsfeld famously said during a media briefing in 2002 on the existence or otherwise of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s Iraq, known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
The descent into epistemology from the late former Secretary of Defence in Gerald Ford and George W Bush’s administrations, raises a Socratic absurdity known as Meno’s Paradox, where a student, Meno, asked Socrates if virtue can be taught.
Socrates, as chronicled by Plato, replied that he didn’t know what virtue is. Meno then asked, “And how will you inquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of inquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?
Socrates replied, “A man cannot inquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to inquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to inquire.”
There’s your paradox, right there, expressed roughly two-and-a-half thousand years before Rumsfeld babbled into a microphone at the Pentagon.
It is known that the classical Athenian philosopher’s teachings pre-date the internet. Socrates could not pull out his stylus and bang away on his tablet in a Google search or even on Duck, Duck, Go — platforms where information and misinformation co-exist and mingle.
One of the unknown knowns about the Albanese government is that few, if any, of those who play in Albo’s sandpit enjoy the benefits of a classical education, otherwise we would not be where we are today, staring into the abyss of a paradoxical search not just for knowledge but of truth as defined by a committee of fact checkers hired by a government agency.
It is unknowable what Socrates would make of the Albanese government’s MAD bill but my best guess is, the founder of Western philosophy would have taken one look at it and said, “Shut up and give me the hemlock already.”
The bill, as it stands, pits an opinion posted on social media platforms against opinions expressed by employees or ad hoc hires of the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Opinions are like sigmoid colons, in that everyone has one and when push comes to shove, a fair amount of shit is never far away.
The bill demands social media platforms, including Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X develop means to identify misinfo and disinfo and remove the awfulness promptly or face huge fines. It may not be knowable but highly predictable that the response from Musk will be of the third finger salute variety while Zuckerberg’s reaction might well be to switch Facebook and Instagram off from Cape York to Tasmania’s South-East Cape, to the Kimberley Ranges in the north west, and everywhere in between.
Once, just once, I would like the Minister for Communications, Michelle Rowland, or the Prime Minister, indeed any senior figure in cabinet, to acknowledge the limits of government. I despise the deliberate spread of lies and falsehoods, as we all should, but regulating truth is not the role of a government or one of its agencies.
The best response to disinformation must come from end users, news and opinion consumers. The answer is not bad black letter law but eternal vigilance, a little bit like the sprouting of nose and ear hair for gentlemen of a certain vintage, one has to be on the lookout at all times. This credo is best expressed by a contemporary philosopher of a kind, Lou Reed who intoned, “Don’t believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.”
The line taken from the final verse of American Whale – a lament on social disparity in the US, is oft quoted. Less known is the final line before the chorus refrain which poses a knowable truth if the Albanese government persists with this nonsense: “Stick a fork in their ass and turn them over, they’re done.”
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