Why the misinformation bill must be stopped

Guest post by journalist Alison Bevege

Alison Bevege

is an independent journalist publishing on Substack at Letters From Australia. Alison previously wrote for News Ltd, Reuters and Daily Mail.

This guest post is an edited version of Alison’s submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Australian Government’s rebooted Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill 2024.

Submissions are open to the public until end of Monday 30 September.

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Consider this.

The young actress in the fear mongering ad below had almost zero risk of being hospitalised by Covid. The median age of Covid death in Australia was 85.5 years according to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), older than normal life expectancy.

This is an example of the government’s own Covid “misinformation,” which is jargon for “being wrong”.

The ad was touting gene-vaccines: novel products never before used in humans, which hadn’t been tested properly and harmed many people.

At the time of publishing, more than 100,000 injuries and over 800 deaths had been reported to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) by the victims of the Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca jabs, using a passive safety system known to be under-reported. Ten times that number of victims or more are out in the community, uncounted in the figures, multiple experts have said.

This is the serious harm created by the absence of loud and uncontrolled dissent.

This Bill will entrench the problem and make it infinitely worse.

What is true and what is not true?

No human being or government body can be trusted with the power to decide what is true and what is not true.

The whole point of the Enlightenment, on which our culture is founded, is that individual people have faculties of reason. Free speech is vital so that we can individually examine all the information and decide for ourselves what we think is true or false.

This Bill is based on the claim that the authorities and their agents can know what is true and what is false - and then ban everything they say is false to protect us from “serious harm”. They cannot.

This is a basic question of epistemology.

The entire premise of this Bill is based on the lie that the government can know something it cannot know.

What this Bill will do in practice

The whole concept of “misinformation” is highly subjective.

This legislation would give the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA), a government bureaucracy, sweeping powers to decide what is true and what is not true. The elected parliament will not be able to intervene.

Digital platforms will be made to invent codes of practice to prevent “misinformation and disinformation” that satisfy ACMA. They will then implement these codes to censor content that the ACMA deems is “not true” and might cause “serious harm”. That means everything you can see, hear or say on the internet will be policed.

Content that gets classified as “misinformation” will not have to have caused any actual harm.

It’s enough at 13 (3) for it to be “reasonably likely” to “contribute to serious harm”. Harm is a vague enough term, but with all those qualifiers, you could drive a truck through that definition. You could ban anything. Especially as the definition of “serious harm” at (14) gallops across the economy and banking system, preventative public health measures and “vilification” of a group - already a contentious concept.

Economists Martin North and John Adams say the definition is so broad it could even threaten their YouTube discussions on banking bail-in provisions.

This Bill defines the “serious harm” of misinformation, at 14(b), as “harm to public health in Australia, including to the efficacy of preventative health measures”.

The Bill fails to recognise that the government, public health authorities and the World Health Organisation (WHO) can all be wrong about “preventive health measures” – and were.

The WHO wildly exaggerated the Covid infection fatality rate to 3.4 percent at the start of the pandemic.

But Covid only had a median infection fatality rate of 0.03 percent for anyone under 60, unvaccinated, as shown by Stanford Epidemiology Professor John Ioannidis et al. This is comparable to a bad flu year.

It was not a public health emergency for the entire working aged population – the government was wrong.

Australia did not need to be shut down. No lockdowns were needed.

All we needed to do was follow the advice of the dissenting medical professors who signed the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020. But they were shut down as “misinformation” and their opinions were not able to be freely shared on social media during the pandemic.

The Federal Government listened only to preferred experts, many of whom had industry ties or other conflicts, including former Health Department secretary Jane Halton, who advised the government on Covid while at the same time chairing CEPI, an organisation whose stated goal is to promote mRNA as a platform for 100-day “lab to jab” gene-vaccines.

Had this law been in place during Covid, the pandemic censorship would have been even worse than what we experienced. My Substack would have been censored as I wrote about this issue.

This kind of incentivised censorship leads to exactly the disaster we all just experienced.

But there is worse in this legislation. At 13 (4), the Communications Minister can determine whatever matter they would like to be considered, by legislative instrument.

That means the Minister can dictate what they want censored.

There are new protections included in this version of the legislation. For example, at 16 (1) it says it excludes parody, satire, or content for any academic, artistic, scientific or religious purpose. It also says it excludes news content that is already subject to media industry codes of practice such as the Australian Press Council code of conduct.

But these provisions can and will be easily bypassed to silence what the government doesn’t like.

The problem is that the digital platform providers are threatened with fines of up to 5 percent of their revenue if they fail to comply with the ACMA’s diktats. They won’t muck around ruminating on whether this or that post might comply or not comply in any particular. They will program their AI surveillance systems to shadow-ban, demonetise or delete anything that could get them into trouble.

Worse still, ACMA can make the rules up as it goes.

The ACMA has the power to approve the codes made by platforms. But from Section 57 onwards, it also has the power to determine whether the codes are deficient and to alter them, delete them or make new ones themselves. The ACMA is firmly in control of this internet censorship, hiding behind the platforms.

Another sinister example, at Subdivision B, 30 (1),  is that the ACMA can make the rules about what records digital platforms must keep about people being wrong on the internet.

Whether it’s just counting bad comments for self-serving reports that inflate the non-problem, or whether it is spying on “misinformation superspreaders” to shut down key dissidents, the point is that the ACMA can make the rules as it sees fit.

At Subdivision B, 33, digital platforms will have to turn over information and documents relating to “misinformation and disinformation” on the platform, which, at 34, the ACMA can also obtain “from other persons” – effectively making them a spy agency making dossiers on people who are wrong on the internet.

The ACMA can then keep those documents indefinitely, (at 37).

You don’t get to vote the ACMA in or out. They are a permanent Canberra bureaucracy staffed (among others) by ex-cops and security state operatives, unaccountable to you.

At Subdivision B, 44, (3) sections (e), (f) and (k) all support the ACMA being able to interfere in public discourse, preventing monetisation of whatever it determines to be “misinformation”, which will impoverish dissenting independent media and drive them off platforms through lack of income. These provisions also support fact-checking and giving end-users “information about authoritative content”.

During the pandemic, the fact-checkers were frequently biased and wrong - and so was the “authoritative content”.

These groups are not neutral arbiters of fact, and never will be.

Why “misinformation” is not a “serious harm” but this Bill is

In 2021 and 2022, the Australian Government used censorship and propaganda to push provisionally registered mRNA products on young people who didn’t need them, under threat of their jobs, before Phase Three testing had finished.

Thousands of Australians are now dead because of the government’s mismanagement of Covid, which was the direct result of censorship, suppression and perverse incentives.

This failure is not the fault of the public sharing memes.

Power without accountability always leads to disaster. This is exactly the same mechanism that enabled the fake science of Lysenkoism to create famines across the communist world, killing at least 30 million people from the 1930s on.

Nobody has been punished, they’ve been given medals instead. Factories are being built all over Australia to pump out the same unsafe mRNA technology for gene-vaccines.

This is the fault of a self-satisfied ruling class who think they and their friends are entitled to ignore terrible errors, because they are not held to account by the media.

The ABC and all corporate outlets behaved as government repeaters and sometimes as cheerleaders. A few trapped journalists wished they could report on the gene-vax scandal, but could not. These outlets never asked the basic questions about why lockdowns were needed at all, or why novel gene-vaccines were pushed on demographics that didn’t need them.

They never asked why early generic treatments such as the anti-viral Ivermectin were suppressed despite excellent safety profiles. They never asked why – after it was clear the mRNA products were injuring people - the Health Department refused to collate and release the all-cause-mortality figures stratified by age and vaccination status.

Instead, the ABC trotted out Norman Swan to tout boosters for all. The only “vaccine failures” Four Corners investigated was why we didn’t get the rollout even faster.

Now the government wants to formalise this selective blindness in legislation, entrenching the harm.

Freedom is guaranteed by diverse and chaotic voices that the government can’t control by registration, industry standards or the centralised ownership of a few big players.

There are already laws in place to deal with criminal matters such as incitement to violence and fraud.

It is not possible for media to be free and adversarial if it has to tiptoe around the ACMA regulations in order to publish.

During Covid, the only protection the public had from the relentless and false government messaging were tiny corners of freedom on the internet: Substack, Rumble, Telegram. Sure there were ridiculous conspiracy theories, but there were also dissident scientists and journalists who could speak freely so people could make up their own minds.

This legislation will remove those places, so nobody can get in the way of government policies in future.

Independent Substack journalists such as Rebekah Barnett of Dystopian Down Under, Andrew Lowenthal of Network Affects and Maryanne Demasi of Maryanne Demasi, reports plus Rebel News, Quadrant, perhaps five mainstream reporters and a slew of new podcasters, were the ones holding the government to account during Covid.

I am a journalist who publishes on Substack. My questions to the TGA were a thorn in the Health Department’s side and I was made to feel it.

They falsely accused me of “misinformation” for correctly describing the mRNA products as gene-vaccines, which they are. They were previously classified by both the US FDA and the European Union as “gene therapies”, according to Moderna’s 2020 SEC filing, and they insert a genetic sequence into your cells to instruct them to express a non-human protein. They are nothing like traditional vaccines.

So this is how the term “misinformation” can be used to threaten reporters, to control language, and to make journalists compliant. This proposed law will shut down what’s left of the free press.

Independent journalists who are inconvenient will soon find themselves classified as “misinformation” and deplatformed, shadow-banned, and de-monetised. They won’t be able to earn a living. Their stories will not be seen.

Pseudoscience used to pad the narrative

The entire body of self-serving “research” that produced the narrative the government has relied on to justify this bill is junk science.

A parasitic industry of fake “misinformation and disinformation” experts has been created to justify censorship. There is no qualification that enables “experts” to identify wrong information in a way that you are not able to.

These “studies” rely on subjective information loaded with biases and assumptions.

They use questionnaires and focus group interviews – the tools of soft value-laden social “sciences” that will produce whatever narrative you want.

They go trawling through Facebook and Twitter to count conversations.

They subjectively judge human interactions and put them into categories for counting. Then pie charts and graphs can be made and percentages used, disguising it as a hard science.

It’s a deceit used to make a social pseudoscience seem objective like engineering or maths.

It’s not maths or engineering. It’s propaganda. It’s completely subjective and half the assumptions built into the “research” are laughably wrong.

Several examples of “dangerous misinformation” that ACMA used to lobby for these powers turned out later to be factually accurate, or just different opinions that challenged government messaging.

The ACMA commissioned research from the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre to use in its 2021 report on the adequacy of digital platforms' disinformation and news quality measures.

In the survey methodology for determining “Covid-19 informed vs misinformed”, the researchers state (emphasis mine):

“The questions addressing misinformation beliefs are designed to assess agreement with official advice on a range of issues related to Covid-19 including mask wearing and appropriate treatment … Those who are in general disagreement with the authoritative or factual advice are labelled as ‘misinformed’.”

So there it is. If you disagree with the government, you’re “misinformed”. It’s baked into the research definitions.

The Impact Analysis accompanying this Bill is no better. A literature review covers 14 similarly bogus studies, bundling them together and giving them a AAA rating.

Bogus nomenclature cluttering the conversation

The lexicon is already clear.

Misinformation means being wrong

Disinformation means lies

Malinformation means inconvenient truths

This new jargon is a deliberate complication to deceive the public into thinking there is some quasi-scientific rationale behind this Bill. There isn’t. It is a naked power grab.

In reality, “Misinformation and disinformation” is a fake problem, small in scope. Wrong information on the internet is not a big threat to Australians.

Our safety and wellbeing is guaranteed only by a robust marketplace of ideas where people are able to be heard, even when they are wrong. The government wants the sinister power to decide for the public what is true and what is not, then ban everything they don’t like under the pretext of “misinformation”.

This Bill must be subjected to public hearings, rejected in full and never brought before Parliament again.

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