Brace for the new ‘mega-censor’ who will determine what is correct and true

People who thought politicians exaggerate were classified as misinformed. If you suspected authorities were flying by the seat of their pants without proper scientific evidence, you were also classified as misinformed.

And if you realised that, for most people, COVID was not a serious risk and could be treated using supplements and over-the-counter drugs, you were also misinformed.

Ironically, when you re-analyse the data using the correct values for misinformation, you find that the people most likely to be well-informed are those who spent the most time on internet platforms, particularly social media, yet it is those sites that the government, and ACMA, has its sights on and wants to control.

The misinformation and disinformation act will intersect with the industry standard to deputise service providers to spy on Australians who use email, social media, chat rooms, and end-to-end encrypted services.

The New 'Online Safety' Standard

Like the Misinformation Act, which uses COVID-19 to constitute a real threat that might justify action, the Standard uses potential harm caused by child abuse material and terrorism.

That is the thin end of the wedge stuff.

In the normal, rule-of-law world, it is well-recognised that threats can be posed by child exploitation and terrorism, but there are fail-safes to ensure the privacy and rights of innocent citizens are not interfered with.

To do what the commissioner is asking service providers to do for her would in the rule of law world, require, at the very least, a warrant from a judge, and the warrant would need to be requested by someone with proper training, like a law officer.

What we will have under this proposal is employees of tech companies, without necessarily any relevant training, using algorithms of variable accuracy to monitor the accounts of millions of users and make ad hoc decisions as to what they may, or may not, say or do.

The Standard is administered by the e-Safety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who should know exactly what risks are entailed when the government asks businesses to do its censorship for it, because her immediately previous job was at Twitter (now X) where "she set up and drove the company's policy, safety, and philanthropy programs across Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia."

As the Twitter files demonstrate, the US government used the platform and other social media companies to vandalise the First Amendment rights of Americans.

Inman Grant has a progressive attitude to free speech, telling a World Economic Forum seminar that “…I think we’re going to have to think about a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online, from freedom of speech to the freedom to – you know – be free from online violence…”.