Having an authority to rule on what is truth is deeply problematic

There is no better sign of the loss of faith in democracy than the belief that government must protect people from being told lies online. 

The government’s attempts to rein in misinformation and disinformation online are drenched in a fear and contempt for the intelligence and capability of our citizens.  

The proposed Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 will grant the Australian Communications and Media Authority heightened powers to fine social media giants for hosting false information and content deemed ‘harmful’.  

While a forensic takedown of the specifics of the bill is important — and much work has been done and is being done on this score — it is also important to understand and refute the mistaken thinking underpinning the legislation. 

At its core there are three fundamental failures that make the anti-misinformation crusade a misstep. 

The first is the loss of the ability to respectfully reason with people whose values and beliefs are different from one’s own. While this ability is in decline on the right, it has all but disappeared on the left. Arguably, many on the left no longer even believe that they should have to do so.  

Look at how the Voice campaign was conducted. The common complaint is that the Yes campaign didn’t provide enough detail on how the Voice would work. While this is arguably true, and important, it’s far from the whole story. 

The fact is that many, if not most, of the main proponent of the Voice felt that the detail was irrelevant. The left, having reached the conclusion that the Voice was ‘the right thing to do’ according to their values, decided that anyone unconvinced by the vibe of the thing was effectively choosing to do the ‘wrong’ thing. 

There was also an obvious tactical decision not to engage in debate with No campaigners. This was a baffling choice: and a fundamentally anti-democratic one, denying voters the right to see the ideas tested to their upmost.  

It is hardly surprising that this backfired spectacularly.  

The Yes campaign willingly forwent its chance to directly combat supposed disinformation and misinformation. Yet the misinformation legislation — which specifically highlights the Voice campaign — would seek to retrospectively make that bad, anti-democratic decision correct by creating a higher authority that could decree the left is right and the right is evil.  

Which brings us to the second point. The polarisation of politics into tribal groupings is stopping a genuine contest of ideas within either side of politics. This means that bad policies are increasingly untested before they reach public consideration 

Again, this is easily identified on the left: their ongoing obsession with identity politics and grievance culture means they privilege identity over competence; making it very difficult to challenge the ‘lived experience’ of a minority group, even with evidence.  

The tribalism also effectively requires them to constantly consolidate strings of completely unrelated ideas together to avoid contradicting the interest groups pushing them and keep the alliances together. No better example than the need to tack the issue of Palestine onto every left-wing cause.  

Consider, too, the ongoing trainwreck that is the movement for an Australian republic. Having worked for months on an intricate model to satisfy the many (left-wing) interest groups, within days of contact with the ‘enemy’ the saleability of the model was in tatters.  

Why did no-one in the movement say ‘hang on, the public is never going to accept something so ridiculously complicated’? Must be disinformation… 

It’s not just the left that has this problem: how many otherwise sensible American Republicans been forced to publicly argue the 2020 election was stolen, lest they be run over by the Trump bandwagon? 

Or worse still, those shilling for domestic tariffs despite the overwhelming empirical and theoretical economic evidence that they are harmful and will not do what their proponents want them to? 

Of course, this issue is far worse in America and Britain than here, but we should at least ask why we are ‘leading the world’ in seeking a solution to this alleged ‘problem’?  

The final point worth exploring is that the problems seeking to be solved here actually have little to do with social media and even less to do with Russian bot farms.  

The central problem is the decline in trust in institutions and the abandonment of liberalism by many on the left and right.  

After all, most of the examples where misinformation supposedly matters involve the people contradicting the pronouncements of the recognised authority.  

Consider the issue of public health, covered under the bill. The government essentially seeks to re-litigate the issues of the pandemic; arguing that people may be misled to ignore public health advice. 

But the lessons that should have been learned from the pandemic are just the opposite. Australians were unbelievably trusting of public health advice — even when that advice was contradictory or based on nothing more than the beliefs of those making the decisions.  

Even worse, there are clear examples of politicians and public health officials around the world deliberately misleading people to try and influence their behaviour. Look at the constantly-changing advice on masks, or the origins of the pandemic, or the pathetic double standards displayed over the BLM protests.   

Moreover, the media has torched their credibility to such an extent you would have to think it was intentional, displaying a partisanship and bias that would once have been unthinkable but has become par for the course.  

And that doesn’t even touch on the calamitous collapse of the academy in the past three decades.  

The answer to the problems of misinformation is not new legislation, but old truths. The core of liberalism, an ideology that spans both the left and the right, is that a common framework of rights and norms protects citizens from both government and each other.  

Liberalism favours more debate, not less. Liberalism says the way to combat bad ideas is with good ones — not an appeal to a higher authority to rule those ideas out of order.  

Which should make clear that these debates aren’t really new. The Catholic Church effectively made the same arguments about disinformation when Luther nailed his theses to the church door. Back then they burned heretics rather than fining them, but the principle is the same.  

The truth is that truth has always been contested and contestable. No authority should be given the authority to decide otherwise.  

Simon Cowan is Research Director at the Centre for Independent Studies.