Freedom of speech not protected through censorship

The federal government decision this week to withdraw its legislation requiring social media companies to regulate misinformation represents a victory for freedom of speech.

Under the proposed law, misinformation was defined as “information that is reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive”, a passage reminiscent of George Orwell, and his Ministry of Truth from 1984.

It was not merely a question of who, or what, was going to decide what is true and what is false, or why any law should give a bureaucrat or an institution the right to make such decisions. It was also, more fundamentally, that the right to be wrong, foolish or offensive (short of actual incitement to commit a crime) is all part of the privilege of living in a free society.

It was a privilege that, until this week, the Labor government seemed happy to end, in the spurious name of ‘online safety’.

But it was, sadly, even worse because, objectively, what was decided to be ‘misinformation’ may well have been nothing of the sort.  Quite probably, it could have been an expression of legitimate opinion that the state did not want people to utter.

It was mooted that the Australian Communications and Media Authority (which already oversees the broadcast media) would be enlisted to regulate –- or censor –- the output on platforms controlled by digital giants, even on questions that are a matter of opinion.

It was far from certain that digital platforms would care sufficiently about the free speech of Australians, or anyone else, to take issue with any government that imposed censorship, for fear of being fined or prohibited to operate and losing revenues. The difficulty was that so many issues have now become battlegrounds, and could tax the ethics of the digital platforms to the limit.

For example, the debate over gender, where the established ideas of male and female are under question, would have been an obvious cause of contention. What if ACMA ruled that the usual delineations of gender were not merely outdated, but offensive and harmful to those who chose to identify in non-traditional ways? Vilification is illegal, and rightly so, but should it be against the law to write on an online platform that there are only two biological genders, a view held by the majority?

In a free society, disproving the arguments of radical opponents and providing solid counter-arguments is always the best way to proceed.

Under the Australian government’s failed plan, the state would have had the power effectively to nationalise opinion. If a certain view did not tally with the state’s orthodoxy, people would not have been allowed to express it.

The approval or disapproval of various ideas would have rested with an elite. They would have controlled discourse, large areas of which could have been shut down. They would have allowed manipulation of the very idea of truth, in that some things that were objectively true would no longer be ‘allowed’ to be so.

Recall Twitter’s decision to censor claims that the Covid virus started in a Wuhan lab in China – which is now widely seen as a plausible explanation.

That takes us back to Orwell: that was the function of the Ministry of Truth. Did the Australian government really feel comfortable in being prepared to use the law to enforce a version of the truth that was not the truth, but was acceptable for the political purposes of the client groups with which the ruling party wished to ingratiate itself? That would have meant the end of what, by any definition, we regard as a free society.

It is impossible to defend digital platforms that, in order to make money, churn out lies and other rubbish. But such platforms, if they persisted in such behaviour, would have been rapidly discredited.

That is a far better way of dealing with them than allowing the state to decide what it regards as true, or not. In a civilised democracy, the freedom of the individual cannot be compromised by a state that arrogates to itself the right to dictate ‘truth’ in this way. Thankfully, sanity prevailed, and the government was forced to jettison the legislation.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney where Emilie Dye is a research analyst.

Photo by Sora Shimazaki.