ASIO chief Mike Burgess slaps down claims foreign governments were spreading ‘disinformation’ in Australia

Mike Burgess said Australians have a ‘right to be wrong’ and ASIO has no interest in policing disinformation spread by Australians.

ASIO Director-General of Security Mike Burgess. Picture: Twitter

The head of ASIO Mike Burgess has slapped down speculation the voice referendum was influenced by disinformation spread by foreign governments, adding that his organisation had no interest in policing misinformation or disinformation that is propagated by Australians.

In what could also be seen as a veiled swipe at pending federal legislation to police speech on social media platforms, Mr Burgess said he hadn’t seen evidence China, Russia or any other governments were seeking to influence Australian opinion.

“There‘s lots of people who claim it is there, during elections or referendums, people like to think it’s there, but we haven’t seen that,” he told The Australian at a Five Eyes conference near San Francisco last week.

“We don’t see very much of that at all, but we’re on the look out for it”.

Former Twitter (now X) executive Yoel Roeth told the ABC in September that he expected Russia, China, and Iran might seek to influence the outcome of the Voice referendum, which failed last week in national vote, 61 per cent to 39.

Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk. Picture: AFO

“Elections, and especially elections that touch on divisive social and cultural issues, are prime targets for organised disinformation campaigns and abuse, both foreign and domestic,” Mr Roth told the ABC.

Reports in The Age in September speculated Russia might have been behind certain social media accounts, specifically ‘Aussie Cossack’, on X, which had been advocating a No vote.

“Disinformation, in the form of information put out there deliberately to influence people in a way that‘s not declared; we will only have an interest in that if that is done by a foreign government or intelligence service,” Mr Burgess said.

“If it‘s done by Australians, for their own reasons, as long as there’s no violence or political objective in that… we will have no interest in that”.

Governments in California, UK and Australia have proposed legislation since the Covid19 pandemic to give regulators the power, variously, to police information online or disbar doctors who disagreed with health bureaucracies about Covid19.

The latest draft of the government’s Misinformation and Disinformation Bill before parliament says that it aims to “protect the community and safeguard end-users against harm caused, or contributed to, by misinformation and disinformation on digital platform service”.

European Commissioner Thierry Breton issued public letters to Elon Musk, owner of X, and Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Meta, this month demanding they explain how they were complying with a new European Union law to prevent mis and disinformation online, which he alleged had flared up in the wake of Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel.

EU commissioner for internal market Thierry Breton. Picture: AFP

Mr Burgess, speaking to The Australian on the side-lines of the first ever Five Eyes summit of intelligence chiefs near Stanford University, California, convened to sound the alarm about growing Chinese efforts to steal technology, said misinformation was of no concern to ASIO.

“People are entitled to have the wrong view, that’s no interest to ASIO,” he explained.

Mr Burgess also vowed to stop politicisation of ASIO, in the wake of accusations in the US that the FBI, whose head Christopher Wray also attended the Five Eyes conference, had favoured the Democratic Party in the US, by suppressing the New York Post’s damning story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 presidential election, for example.

“I have to make sure that we‘re not politicised, or doing things that lead us to favour to one element, one part of society, one political party … I can assure you, if people were tempted to politicise ASIO, I would prevent it,” Mr Burgess said.

Earlier this year Republicans in congress created a special committee to investigate the alleged ‘weaponisation of the federal government’ by agencies including the FBI and the Department of Justice.