Another Brick in the ‘Disinformation’ Wall
There is a totalitarian tendency stalking the world’s democracies. It draws on the idea of “misinformation” and “disinformation” to try to delegitimise opposition to government policies, whatever they might happen to be at the moment.
What is “misinformation” or “disinformation”? While there are suitable dictionary definitions—the first is accidentally untrue information, and the second is deliberately untrue information. These definitions beg the real question—“What is truth, and how do you determine it?”
This seems to have suddenly become a matter of pressing importance, particularly in the English-speaking world, with what looks suspiciously like a coordinated push by governments to introduce legislation to control “untruths” on the internet.
The UK has the Online Safety Bill, where truth is to be regulated by OFCOM, the Office of Communications. Ofcom is currently being taken to court by Canadian Mark Steyn because they fined him for interviewing Britains affected by vax injury.
Canada has a bevy of laws, and as we saw when the trucker’s bank accounts were frozen, in some of the harshest approaches ever seen to dissent by a democracy.
While the United States is governed by the First Amendment guaranteeing free speech, the United States has a Disinformation Governance Board, and as the Twitter files have revealed, the U.S. federal government appears to clandestinely seek ways to evade the constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.
They do this under the cloak of national security, and to achieve their aim, “disrupting” a school board meeting with legitimate questions can be called an “act of domestic terrorism” so as to draw ordinary Americans into their net.
It’s no wonder then that Australia is now following the fashion and proposing to legislate the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023.
Labor has always been keen on political censorship, and indeed, back in 2009, Stephen Conroy, then the communications minister, introduced legislation to filter the internet in Australia.
