"Informed people all agree with the government": dodgy research props up censorship grab
Deadline extended to August 20 to oppose "misinformation" censorship law. Here is why your life depends on it
The deadline to have your say on the “misinformation” internet censorship bill has been extended to Sunday, August 20, the government says on its website.
The new law will censor everything you see, hear and say on Rumble, YouTube, Reddit, Substack, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter - anywhere deemed a social media platform where users upload and share content.
It will give Australia’s media regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), the power to impose “misinformation and disinformation” industry codes of practice to force these platforms to censor all your content.
Remember how people injured by the covid gene-vaccines couldn’t share their stories on FaceBook or YouTube? They were deleted, or you were not able to share them. Not even Senator Gerard Rennick’s post of the true story of injured Tasmanian teenager Faith Ranson can be shared.
Remember how doctors and scientists critical of mRNA products were taken off YouTube or hidden so they couldn’t trend by pre-Elon Twitter?
This new law will force all social media platforms to do this.
Send a formal submission via the webpage here as an attachment
Submissions must be attachments, not sent in the body of the email
Email your comments (they don’t get published) to: information.integrity@infrastructure.gov.au
Sign One Nation’s online petition against the censorship bill here
Freedom of Speech conference, Brisbane, August 26 (also One Nation)
Until now you could still find dissenting voices on Rumble or Substack, but this law is intended to crush those last corners of freedom.
ACMA said they want this in 2021, in Fact Sheet 3, snips below.
These fact sheets came with a ACMA’s 2021 Report to Government on the Adequacy of Digital Platforms’ Disinformation and News Quality Measures on which this legislation is based.
Notice the “risk” of misinformation “particularly as conspiratorial communities seek out alternative platforms to avoid content moderation”.
This means: people who disagree with the government cannot be allowed to share their views or organise against the government anywhere on the internet.
This law will in turn censor traditional media because journalists who write for outlets such as Daily Mail or News.com.au rely on their stories being shared on social media platforms for their careers. If their stories cannot trend or spread then they will fail, it is their metric of success. These outlets also depend on the social media giants for their revenue sharing agreements.
It is no exaggeration to say that “misinformation” means whatever Permanent Canberra wants it to mean. See the snip below from the ACMA report to government, asking for more power, on which this law is based.
As leading journalist Glenn Greenwald noted, “misinformation” and “disinformation” are made-up terms to sell a fraudulent new “misinformation expert” industry.
ACMA’s 2021 report is based largely on two pieces of research commissioned by ACMA: a report by the University of Canberra that ACMA says defines “misinformation” as anything that disagrees with the government, and a network analysis by We Are Social that confuses opinion with “misinformation” and uses the guilt by association fallacy to lump those who opposed covid lockdowns with Q-anon conspiracy theorists.
From this, ACMA produced a lengthy report full of statistics and complications and percentages of those “exposed to misinformation” - of which half the “misinformation narratives” turned out to be true.
Permanent Canberra is complicating a simple issue to justify censorship.
ACMA also claims without valid evidence that “misinformation” is dangerous.
It’s not a “risk” or a “threat” to have “misinformation and disinformation”, which is just wrong information and different opinions. Nobody has a monopoly on truth.
A free democracy can only operate with an adversarial press, which means views the government doesn’t like.
Remember Australia’s Health Department telling us face masks don’t work unless you’re sick? There was a shortage, so in early 2020 they said they didn’t work. Then masks were compulsory in 2021 and early 2022, and you could be fined for not wearing one. Then the Cochrane Review ruled there is no conclusive evidence for whether masks work or not. They just don’t know.
The Government is often wrong. The Health Department is often wrong.
The landing page claims without evidence that “misinformation and disinformation” poses a “threat to the safety and well-being of Australians”.
But in reality your safety depends on giving dissidents the freedom to oppose the government, weeding out the bad ideas.
Misinformation is at worst a minor problem that can be overcome with basic education. Censorship can get us all killed.
Let me remind you of Lysenko.
Trofim Lysenko killed more people than any other biologist in history.
Lysenko was an agricultural scientist who quickly climbed the promotion ladder in the former USSR because he was a dedicated communist.
He was put in charge of Soviet agriculture in the 1930s.
He was the Fauci of his day, a powerful science bureaucrat.
Lysenko said he could teach spring wheat to grow in autumn, dramatically boosting crop yields. Together, Joseph Stalin and Lysenko “modernised” Soviet agriculture with the collectivisation of farms and Lysenko’s poorly-tested hypothesis of educating grain.
Nobody could oppose his ideas or tell him he was wrong. Those who did got sacked, executed or sent to the gulag.
There was no free speech or oppositional press in the USSR. There was no safety net to catch bad ideas.
Lysenkoism was implemented across the USSR including in the fertile wheat fields of the Ukraine. In the widespread crop failure and famine that followed, millions died.
The Atlantic reports deaths peaked around 1933 in the USSR, but because of censorship these bad ideas could not be challenged and Lysenkoism lived on for another 30 years.
Communist China picked up Stalin and Lysenko’s ideas in the late 1950s. This produced the Great Leap Forward into the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1962. The estimates vary from 15 to 50 million people dead, but many have settled on 30 million.
Lysenko was never punished, his portrait hung on walls. His power only diminished after Stalin died in 1953.
That is the threat of censorship. The worst murderers are true believers who cannot be challenged.
There is no tinkering the details of this dangerous new law. It must be rejected outright.
The concept is an evil power grab from a bureaucracy that views the public as stupid bleach-injecting cattle to be managed.
Taking the freedom to be wrong off the internet will result in something infinitely worse, that senses its hour has come at last, and slouches towards Canberra waiting to be born.
READ MORE ABOUT THIS NEW LAW HERE
Update 07 August: added We Are Social graph, tweaked one par for readability, deleted big picture link to prior story on the new law and replaced with a simple text link above.
I have shared the petition far and wide, I have tried to alert the people I know and encourage them to take the few minutes for action.
I suspect they are to busy trying to get on with their lives to pay much attention.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.🤷♂️
Signed and commented - this would never even be attempted in a true “freedom of speech” society. Attempts by the ruling class to censor speech in line with what they do or don’t want their citizens to know is pure EVIL