Who gets to decide what is true?
The most important question of all. If you look at all the massive corruption scandals that FriendlyJordies has exposed on youtube over the last 5 years, it’s not hard to see that this will be immediately misused to silence the voices of people like him who are out there shining light on government corruption and political wrongdoing.
It’s effectively a ministry of truth on our own shores: they decide what is true and what is untrue on any given day. I realise we’ve had massive issues here being infiltrated by hard-right whackjob ‘not news’ services spreading rubbish, but any time you try to legislate an arbitrator of ‘truth’, you are just opening the door to thought control and potentially hiding dirty deeds that should be brought to light.
I am not in favour of this at all. I’d rather deal with my relatives becoming Qanon’d than have the government decide on consensus reality. They can’t even understand an issue as simple as vaping.
https://www.acma.gov.au/ would have the power to go after an organisation for publishing it, so effectively them.
I don’t have a problem with this in principle, I would just want there to be some caveats in it.
Conspiracy theories spreading on Facebook are a problem that Facebook needs to step up and help address, but that doesn’t mean I think they should be held liable every time a cooker posts nonsense.
If I make a post on here saying “the sky is purple”, am I spreading disinformation?
Contrived example obviously but this seems like very far reaching legislation.
For the purposes of this Schedule, dissemination of content using a digital service is misinformation on the digital service if:
(a) the content contains information that is false, misleading or deceptive; and
(b)the content is not excluded content for misinformation purposes; and
© the content is provided on the digital service to one or more end-users in Australia; and
(d) the provision of the content on the digital service is reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm.
Draft bill located here
I think the last one is key.
Also the bill doesn’t empower the government to make individual rulings on misinformation. It says sites have to follow an industry code of practice to have systems in place to keep on top of misinformation.
Think of it as a way to avoid another Cronulla, or any of the pizza gate/Qanon shit happening here. i.e when news is breaking, sure let it through in the fog of war. But don’t let people post for years that the election was stolen by the deep state kiddy fiddler alliance.
I bet the politicians have excluded themselves, because God knows they spout so much misinformation that they’d all be constantly in court.
Yep. In the draft bill, Anything published by any level of government or anything published by political parties about electoral matters or referendums is excluded. So they’re free to push misinformation to their hearts content.
Professional news content is also excluded. Though to be fair is probably included under other acma rules.
Right. So the government is free to do a propaganda without consequence, but I can’t? Wild.
Well that’s interesting. Murdoch’s Fox News claimed it wasn’t a news organisation in a court case.
So Sky News is gonna have to decide if it’s a news organisation or potentially be up for misinformation…
