Civil Society In Peril
Why Progressives Should Oppose the Australian Government's Misinformation Bill
In February 2020, shortly after the outbreak of the Covid19 pandemic, a joint letter was published in the Lancet by a group of 23 scientists on the origin of the virus, which at that point was unknown. The letter stated emphatically that the origin of the virus was zoonotic (i.e. it jumped from animals to humans), and condemned the theory already being floated in some quarters that it had leaked from a research laboratory, labelling it a conspiracy theory that was designed to serve racist anti-Chinese political agendas. A few weeks later, a group of virologists published an article in ‘Nature’ entitled The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2 that confidently asserted that the source of the virus was a zoonotic outbreak and that the possibility that it escaped from a laboratory, specifically one of the laboratories at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in the Chinese city where the outbreak is believed to have begun, was clearly unrealistic. Armed with these two interventions from expert scientists, public health authorities and the media swung behind the theory of zoonotic origin and affirmed the notion that the lab leak theory was implausible and driven by conspiracy thinking, and soon after, social media platforms began censoring material arguing in favour of the theory.
Fast forward to July 2023, and the theory of a lab leak from WIV is now accepted as a highly plausible alternative explanation for the emergence of the virus – indeed there is a split amongst the major US government agencies on the subject, with both the FBI and Department of Energy leadership viewing a lab leak as the most plausible explanation for the outbreak. Moreover it has been revealed that one of the scientists who organised the lab leak letter, Peter Daszak, had a clear conflict of interest in the issue due to his leadership of the Ecohealth Alliance, an US organisation that was involved in so-called ‘gain of function’ research on viruses to make them more virulent, and actually partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on this work. A 2021 investigation by Vanity Fair also revealed that senior figures in the US State Department and two government bureaus worked to hinder investigation of the lab leak theory by their staff, apparently to avoid unwelcome attention being given to the US’s role in funding and supporting Gain of Function research, including at WIV (one of only 3 laboratories in the world where this type of research is conducted).
Then in the last month it was revealed, through the leaking of private messaging amongst the scientists who authored the Proximal Origins paper, that they themselves considered the lab leak theory to be a credible alternative explanation for the virus’s origin, even as they were publishing an article emphatically denying this possibility; that there was involvement from public health powerbrokers in the US and UK, including Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins and Jeremy Farrar in the development and content of the article; that the scientists were aware of the political ramifications of the origins controversy, and that there is a significant likelihood that the publication of the article was intended to shut down the lab leak theory for political and self-interested reasons (as it would both expose the US government’s involvement in funding gain of function research at WIV, and likely put an end to gain of function research for the foreseeable future – research that most of the authors were personally involved in.
This story provides an excellent example of one reason why I find the increasing push to censor opinions published on social media to be so problematic: the accepted understanding of what is scientific truth can change over time, and what is accepted in public discourse as ‘true’ is subject to manipulation by governments, multinational corporations and special interest lobby groups of all kinds – as anyone who has read any postmodern theorist in the last 50 years should be well aware. If either governments or social media companies are given the power to censor online speech because it is deemed ‘misinformation’, then voices who are contesting official versions of the truth will be silenced to a significant degree. We saw this happen again a little later in the course of the Covid19 pandemic: a group of highly credentialled infectious diseases specialists, Dr Jay Battacharya from Stanford University, Dr Sunetra Gupta from Oxford and Dr Martin Kulldorff from Harvard were shut down on social media sites at the behest of the US government, and subject to smear campaigns in the media that cast them as dubious, fringe scientists, yet many of the concerns they raised about the harms associated with the mass-lockdown strategy for containing Covid in relation to child learning, mental health, increasing inequality, poverty in the Global South and many other issues were later shown to be accurate. Meanwhile Sweden, whose public health authorities pursued a more moderate approach to managing the pandemic that was almost universally vilified in Western English-speaking media, now has one of the lowest levels of excess mortality for the pandemic era in the developed world.
It is therefore with great concern that I read of the Australian Government’s proposed Communications Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 that is currently open for submissions. This bill is intended to compel digital media platforms to develop codes of conduct for combating ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’, and allows the regulatory body the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to develop and enforce an industry code of conduct in the event that it deems the code/s developed by the digital media companies to be inadequate. The definition that the Bill sets down for misinformation is ‘online content that is false, misleading or deceptive, that is shared or created without an intent to deceive but can cause and contribute to serious harm’. The Bill then defines ‘serious harm’ as:
Hatred against a group in Australian society on
the basis of ethnicity, nationality, race, gender,
sexual orientation, age, religion or physical or
mental disabilityDisruption of public order or society in Australia (note that very similar wording has been used in anti-free speech laws under totalitarian regimes in the past)
Harm to the integrity of Australian democratic
processes or of Commonwealth, State, Territory
or local government institutionsHarm to the health of Australians
Harm to the Australian environment
Economic or financial harm to Australians, the
Australian economy or a sector of the Australian
economy
But these are all real and concerning harms, you might say: surely any right-minded society would want to prevent these from happening? And I would agree with you. However I find the notion that censoring online debate is the right way to do this – whether it be through taking down posts, suspending accounts, deplatforming users, or any other means – to be both misguided and dangerous. I would like to go through some of the pragmatic and ethical reasons for this conclusion, but first I need to address a common argument I have heard from some progressives regarding social media companies censoring their users: that these are private companies and are therefore entitled to set whatever rules they like for what kind of content can be shared on their platforms. I find this view highly disingenuous, an argument of convenience that actually goes against the traditional progressive opposition to the privatisation of public spaces.
In my younger years I remember progressive activists railing against shopping centre owners who took advantage of the power the law gave them as owners of the shopping centre property to stop public protests from taking place there. They objected, rightly, that shopping centres functioned as a public space, and that the rules governing protest should be the same there as in other public spaces such as streets and city squares. In the modern context, social media sites have become extensions of the ‘public square’, indeed there is surely now a far greater degree of information sharing and debate on digital media, whether it be through independent news sites, community pages, special interest groups or individuals’ personal pages than there is in either physical space or through the legacy media. Thus while social media companies exercise private ownership of these spaces (and leaving aside for a moment the questionable ethics of this state of affairs), the spaces themselves are a de facto extension of the public square, and the same rights (and responsibilities) that are considered applicable in public spaces need to be afforded to those who communicate through social media sites.
So why should progressives be concerned with the censorship of the online opinions targeted by this legislation, especially when they find many of them highly objectionable? Censorship has always been associated with hostility to civil liberties, and was most commonly favoured by conservatives up until very recently, whether it be censorship of radical political groups such as communists, anti-war movements or art that was believed to be ‘obscene’, whilst most progressives tended to be opposed to censorship. When taken far enough, it becomes one of the key signs of a government’s move towards authoritarianism, just as social workers recognise that control of speech can be one of the first signs of the emergence of abuse and coercion in an intimate relationship. The wisest thinkers and leaders of the past recognised that censorship represents a dangerous step onto the slippery slope towards authoritarianism, and rightly mistrusted the intentions of those who sought to introduce it, however noble their motives might seem. They also understood that the same weapons that their political ‘side’ crafts to oppress its opponents may be turned back on them when those opponents later come to power. In the case of the proposed legislation, we need only consider how a regulator appointed by Peter Dutton or Pauline Hanson might define misinformation that ‘threatens to disrupt public order’ to realise how this legislation could be used to censor progressive activists.
But I think it is important to understand why authoritarianism might hold attraction for many well-intentioned people in our current social and political landscape. Social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger describes how a society governed by totalitarian control presents an alluring option to many who see the dysfunctional, polarised nature of modern societies, mired in corruption and petty infighting. See how a nation such as China can implement major policies quickly and effortlessly, people think: if only we could do that! If only we could stop the climate deniers, anti-vaxers, transphobics, racists etc. from spreading their lies, and/or stop the politicians, big media and multinational corporations from spreading their lies, how much better the world would be! I think such a viewpoint is particularly attractive to people that think that experts are best placed to make decisions for the welfare of society (technocrats), and also those who believe a particular cause is so important that it is justified to suspend the usual rules of fair process and ethics to ensure the cause is successful. Both the Left and the Right have been guilty of the latter approach: George W. Bush administration’s endorsement of the use of torture when interrogating suspected terrorists following 9/11 is one of the most infamous recent examples, but communist regimes of the Soviet era also routinely employed violent repression and censorship of dissident to protect ‘the revolution’.
But as Schmachtenberger points out, while a society that disallows debate and dissent can get good policies implemented quickly, it can also end up implementing policies that have a truly disastrous impact, simply because there was no mechanism for questioning the prevailing orthodoxy. As an example of this, consider the notorious Four Pests campaign enacted by the communist Chinese government between 1958 and 1962. This campaign aimed to eliminate four creatures considered to be an incorrigible menace to Chinese health and prosperity: sparrows, rats, flies and mosquitoes. Sparrows were included on this list because they ate farmers’ grain and fruit crops, yet what was not recognised was that they also controlled various kinds of insects that also preyed on the crops. Following the enthusiastic public adoption of this campaign, and the resulting decimation of the sparrow population, a plague of locusts ensued, leading to a 70% decline in agricultural production in 1959 and contributing to the Great Famine and the loss of between 15 and 36 million lives due to starvation.
Yet I think we also need to go beyond the practical arguments against censorship, and consider the idea that there is something inherently valuable to freedom of thought and speech that is necessary for our full humanity to be expressed. I believe it is part of being an autonomous, sovereign human being to have our own perspective on the world, and to be able to express this respectfully amongst our fellows. Conversely, there is something degrading and dehumanising about a society that silences certain topics of conversation, however wealthy and luxurious that society may be, and historically, democratic societies have recognised that freedom of speech is one of the foundations of a truly civil society. Similarly, there is an understanding found among many great writers and thinkers that the willingness to hear another’s opinion that contradicts our own without needing to silence them is one of the challenges of acquiring maturity as a moral being, as well as, on a collective level, being an essential step towards peace between nations.
Should this freedom be absolute? No: all societies have recognised limits to freedom of speech, But the bar has historically been set very high: in the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution, the only speech that can be proscribed is that which directly incites listeners to commit an imminent attack on others. Even inflammatory speech that could incite a level of anger in listeners that then led them to commit acts of violence against others is not outlawed. So-called ‘hate speech’ presents a difficult area, as there we may find people expressing decidedly uncivil ideas, indeed ideas that work against the values of a tolerant society (we may also find this phrase being employed as a rhetorical weapon by some against any idea that they find personally objectionable). Even here, I think it is wiser and more effective to address the factors that might cause the intolerant view to gain traction, such as inequality, poverty and lack of education, rather than try to silence the intolerant, although I think there is an important distinction to be drawn between expressing a sincerely held view and personal vilification, harassment and verbal abuse, as I believe the impulse to curtail these in a civil society is a right one, with legal prohibition being applied once a threshold of severity or repeat offending has been crossed.
All of the above does not mean that there is no problem with online communication in Australia, including the rapid spread of false or misleading material. But this is not primarily a problem of ‘misinformation’ but of the way in which social media and its algorithms promote emotionally-driven thinking, lead users into silos of people with similar opinions, and encourage polarisation, toxic discourse and extremism. All of these are very serious problems, and an excellent summary of them can be found in the documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’. Daniel Schmachtenberger, who was involved in the development of that documentary, argues that the only way to overcome the antisocial tendencies of the social media landscape is through citizens’ education, so people can learn to detect the tricks used by social media to manipulate them and to some extent inoculate themselves against these. I also think that attention should be given, not to regulating the content of social media, but its processes, i.e. the algorithms, to counteract the problems described above. It is highly questionable whether private companies should be functioning as effective custodians of a large part of the ‘public square’, but if they are to carry out this role, they need to be regulated so that they are no longer doing this in an antisocial way. Beyond this, there is a need for a deeper and more profound work that the online landscape points to: the rebuilding of community and shared trust that has been eroded by decades of individualist, neoliberal economic policies.
The Australian government’s legislation to ‘combat misinformation and disinformation’ represents, in my view, a regressive and dangerous move to further entrench censorship of public discussion. Like the Four Pests campaign, I don’t think it will achieve its aims, and it may result in serious harm to Australian society. Banning dissident opinions and beliefs, however repugnant we find them, does not make them go away: rather they go underground and become more virulent, extreme and disconnected from any sense of shared reality. Alternatively, the dissidents may come to power, and then use the same mechanisms against their former masters: we can see an example of this in the actions of several conservative state governments in the US to outlaw the teaching of subjects and content deemed ‘woke’ in schools. Before enacting any piece of legislation, we should be conscious of the use to which it may be put by a different political administration with different values and beliefs than the current one, in case the stick that we give the government to use to beat people we don’t like is later turned upon us.
A US major involved in the Vietnam War was reported to have described a military operation a reporter in the following words: ‘it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it’; we need to ask ourselves if this legislation, in seeking to save our society, will actually end up destroying it through entrenching polarisation, distrust of public institutions, extremism and ultimately, violence. For, as Louis Brandeis, the first man of Jewish descent to sit on the US Supreme Court, famously wrote:
‘Those who won our independence believed ... that public discussion is a political duty . . . They knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies; and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.’