Like Emily Blunt’s character in The Devil Wears Prada, who was “just one stomach flu away from goal weight”, the Australian Government was just one emergency away from manufacturing consent for its widely panned misinformation bill… until now.
In the wake of two violent stabbings in Sydney, one of which claimed six lives at a shopping mall, and the other of which was live-streamed during a church service, senior politicians and bureaucrats are promising to ramp up social media censorship to protect Australians from misinformation and violent content online. (A third stabbing on the same weekend resulting in the death of a Sydney teen has been omitted from the discourse around censorship, probably because it wasn’t filmed.)
Two narrative threads dominating the media cycle underpin the renewed calls for censorship.
The main plot is a stand-off between Elon Musk’s platform X and Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant over footage of the non-fatal church stabbing. The incident was classed as a terrorist incident by the New South Wales police, giving Inman Grant the legal power to order the footage removed from social media sites within Australia.
X says it has hidden the footage from Australians, but refuses to comply with a further demand to withhold the footage globally. Apparently the order for a global ban is to prevent Australians from using VPN technology to circumvent an Australia-only geo-block. eSafety says X isn’t doing enough to protect social media users from the violent content, and has obtained an injunction from the Federal Court to force X’s hand.
The subplot is the mis-naming of the Bondi Junction mall attacker, spread first on social media, then amplified with apparently zero attempt at verification by major news station Channel 7, with the wrongly named man now suing the station for defamation.
At a press conference on Monday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese blamed social media companies entirely for spreading the damaging rumour, omitting mention of the corporate media’s role.
From these events, Australia’s top politicians and bureaucrats have drawn the following conclusions:
- Inman Grant should be backed 100% in her attempts to censor content globally (says Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley)
- Social media platforms have a “social responsibility” protect Australians from content that might “cause division” (says Prime Minister Anthony Albanese)
- Elon Musk is “totally out of touch with the values that Australian families have” and is causing Australians “great distress” (again, Albanese)
- Social media companies are “pouring accelerant on the flames” of misinformation and extremism (says Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw)
- In fact, social media is responsible for “just about every problem” in society, leaving governments to “pick up the pieces” (says Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil)
- Therefore, the only responsible action for the Government to take is to revamp its shelved misinformation bill in the hope of preventing “dangerous falsehoods” from spreading “at scale and speed” (says Communications Minister Michelle Rowland)
- Indeed, our politicians are “prepared to take whatever action is necessary to haul these companies into line” (says Albanese)
- Even the opposition party, which until now had vigorously opposed the misinformation bill, is prepared to back the laws and “happy to look at anything the government puts forward” because social media companies “see themselves [as] above the law” and we need to show them they’re not (says Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton)
Currently, the main way the Australian Government controls the internet is under the remit of the eSafety Commissioner, who is empowered to minimise online harm. The Commissioner can order the removal of child abuse content, revenge porn or a recently added category, “adult cyber abuse”, which has resulted in the removal of gender-critical posts on social media. Read more about the eSafety Commissioner and her role in the global censorship network in my recent collaboration with Network Affects, here.
However, the Government has little control over online content outside of eSafety’s remit. During the pandemic, the Department of Home Affairs and the Department of Health exploited the emergency to co-ordinate the removal of content on social media sites, including memes, true information and vaccine injury testimony, but that gravy train has ended.
This year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) named mis- and disinformation as the world’s most pressing threat – more than war, more than hunger, more than poverty.
Governments are increasingly looking for ways to solve the problem that global elites have decided tops the list of all possible problems. In Australia, the solution put forward is a misinformation bill that would give the government new powers to set and enforce industry standards for digital platforms.
The issue is, the bill was deeply unpopular when it was floated for public consultation last year, attracting 23,000 comments, including 3,000 submissions. Many of the submissions were critical of the proposed laws, which would have the effect of censoring a staggering range of speech on issues from the weather, to elections, to public health, to gender ideology and so on.
Notably, the Government and mainstream media are exempt from the proposed laws.
Even the Human Rights Commission, which completely dropped the ball during Covid, claimed that the bill was a risk to democracy. Human Rights Commissioner, Lorraine Finlay said of the bill:
If we fail to ensure robust safeguards for freedom of expression online, then the measures taken to combat misinformation and disinformation could themselves risk undermining Australia’s democracy and freedoms.
An article I wrote for Umbrella News last year, titled, ‘Australia on ‘Dangerous Ground’: Is the New Misinformation Bill a Threat to Democracy?’ echoes Finlay’s concerns.
But flick through news coverage over the past fortnight and you’ll find that dissent over the bill is just a distant memory, because no one is safe until we’re all safe.
Corporate media are gleefully playing the story as Australia vs. Musk, throwing their full weight behind the Government, while politicians and top bureaucrats are taking every talk-to-the-press opportunity to push the bill as a necessary measure to bring errant social media platforms to heel.
At the same time, in the parallel digital universe of X where Musk holds forth, people are wise to the Government’s cynical ploy, and that far-Right-wing-white-supremacist-Nazi tactic of telling jokes is doing its work.
What kind of misinformation does the Prime Minister Albanese think social media companies have a responsibility to censor? Photoshopped memes of himself, a year-old video reveals.
The internet responded accordingly, spawning a tonne of new Albo meme threads overnight.
Ironically, the life-as-meme ridiculousness was foreshadowed by Senator Pauline Hanson, who reposted a July 2023 video from her cult Please Explain series, featuring a cartoon Albo trying to get the misinfo bill passed so that he can censor memes of himself. Fifteen-year-old me could never have imagined that Senator Hanson would turn out to be Australia’s number one troll, but here we are.
Less funny is the discussion taking place around glaring double standards in the way the Australian Government goes about the business of censorship.
The Australian journalist Adam Creighton notes that propaganda scaring the public with fake virus death scenes is fine, but real news is not.
Independent journalist Maryanne Demasi points out that no one called for censorship of recently circulating footage of a man setting himself on fire in public, or of footage of George Floyd’s dying moments in 2020.
Left-wing Australian news site Crikey describes Elon Musk as a “vile piece of work with a penchant for extreme right-wing views”, but nevertheless called the corporate media, with its “if it bleeds it leads” modus operandi, “deeply hypocritical” for savaging Musk over his refusal to comply “with Inman Grant’s view that she should determine what anyone in the world can see online”.
And on the right, Daily Wire commentator Michael Knowles points out that mainstream media received no fines or take-down notices for publishing the news story featured in a post on X recently censored by eSafety – so is this regulatory pursuit of posts on X about the content, or is it about going after X?
Besides, it’s misleading to imply that the choice is “censorship or nothing”, argues digital rights expert (and my recent collaborator) Andrew Lowenthal. Speaking with Demasi, he said, “I think there are non-censorship ways of addressing community concerns”, such as suggesting warning labels or disabling auto-play so viewers can decide whether to view the content or not.
In a comic narrative turn that could have been lifted from a Fawlty Towers script, the victim of the church stabbing, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, has now declared that he disagrees with eSafety’s censorship of the footage of the attack on him, warning against the incident being co-opted for political gain.
In a statement posted to YouTube yesterday the Bishop, who is recovering in hospital, said:
I do not condone any acts of terrorism or violence. However, noting our God-given right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion, I’m not opposed to the videos remaining on social media. I would be of great concern [sic] if people use the attack on me to serve their own political interests to control free speech.
Nevertheless, Australia’s political class is unlikely to let this emergency go to waste. The eSafety Commissioner has the full-throated support of the Government to continue her online censorship crusade, and the misinformation bill is currently being overhauled, to be tabled again later this year.
My sincere thoughts and prayers go to those who have suffered due to the knife attacks in Sydney this month.
Update: In the latest news, opposition leader Peter Dutton has tempered his support for unbridled censorship, telling 2GB radio that the Government cannot be the “internet police of the world”. However, he maintains support for the eSafety Commissioner’s actions within Australia, and for working with the Government to legislate the misinformation bill later this year. My guess is that his strong pro-censorship statements from earlier this week didn’t land well with his conservative base, and so he has softened messaging accordingly.
This article was originally published on Dystopian Down Under, Rebekah Barnettt’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Nice to see Amazon recording a loss at least.
Indeed and a personal loss for the little space traveller .
Wish ill on another. How very Christian of you.
Are you pissed again?
I don’t drink alcohol, idiot.
I don’t do recreational drugs either.
What’s your excuse?
He’s a Scotch: judgemental and belligerent is his natural state.
It’s not very Christian to wish ill on all the Amazon workers forced to wear nappies to shit in so they don’t ‘reduce productivity on shift’ is it??
I do not use Amazon since they refused my card and tried to tell me what bank to use ( b’ stards) but in this situation they are right, too many people are playing up the flue situation
..since March 2020
They “told” you what bank to use?
How does that work?
They said they were going to refuse to accept VISA cards and demanded people supply details of debit cards or other credit cards.
A few days before the deadline, they claimed they’d reached an acceptable arrangement with VISA and withdrew their threat..
So, they didn’t tell anyone what Bank they could use.
Not that Visa is a Bank of course.
I read that migrants crossing the Mexican border are being shipped to towns with huge Amazon depots. Quite a tidy racket. Ship them in, heaven knows the terms and conditions of their employment, and the big fat consumer on the doorstep is as happy as the proverbial pig at least for a short while.
Grow up. The world would be worse off without Amazon. Bezos introduced the concept of online deliveries and the world went mad for it, quite rightly.
You can get almost anything you want, from almost anywhere on earth thanks to him, and the world of online shopping was born.
Those squealing “I’ll never buy from the evil Amazon again” will just go to an Amazon inspired, retail online sites, empowered by Bezos’ vision. Probably running on his serves.
Tomorrow it could be you or me that turns an online bookstore into the biggest retail organisation in the world.
OK, the guy might be a wanker, but then so are all our politicians and they haven’t done a fraction of what he’s achieved.
LOL. Downtickers.
Amazon Derangement Syndrome.
Funny, because they all use Amazon. LOL
Money for jam, eh?
Actually I’m grateful to Amazon for supplying goods promptly, efficiently and without fuss while all local traders were hiding down their rabbit holes, only emerging in order to bleat about face nappies.
Thank you Annie. A reasoned response.
Bog rolls galore from Amazon when Sainsbury’s and Tescos couldn’t get their shit together to provide for their communities.
I have bought online from Waitrose for 2 years since March 2020 and not once, not once, were ‘bog rolls’ not able to be supplied. Not one. I never, ever experienced a ‘stock out’.
There have been ‘stock outs’ of a few products, but alternatives are always available. You roll with the punches….
Having used non-Amazon online stories and delivery channels, I can confidently tell you that Amazon ‘delivery tracking services’ are infinitely inferior to far smaller, less powerful competitors.
All this ‘Amazon is the god of the universe’ is just claptrap. They are a very powerful, early mover in the space and other competitors are now outperforming them in terms of customer service.
And they don’t say ‘have a 30 day free trial of Amazon Prime’, then two days later say they are ‘taking your 12 month subscription within 24hrs’, thereby being a bullying contract breaker who did NOT get that subscription when I told every MP in Westminster to see Amazon as organised crime, not a service to humanity.
Can you really operate within human society in a purely predatory manner? The fact that a few people might think so is less troubling than the blindness regarding such practices and seems like wilful ignorance. Weak pleasure seeking people who could never countenance a truth that might make them feel bad. Perhaps the time of frugality that we are moving into will have a purgative effect in this regard. But if you have no reading or religion or culture to fall back on. what happens when the religion of consumerism disappears?
Amazon doesn’t do “society”.
They might say that they don’t but their emplyees were nurtured in society. Any skills they have were developed in society. Such a model is death bound. They will not survive the horror to come regardless of how rich they are.
They’re doomed, I tell you, doomed.
FFS, grow up.
Describe how Amazon will fail, without the fanciful wittering.
Hey downvoters, I asked a question you dipsticks.
Accuse others of tyranny then engage in it yourself.
Hilarious.
Of course it does. Amazon invented cheap goods to your door.
No it DID NOT. If you compare Amazon online prices to other sources, much of the time the products are MORE expensive online than via retail stores. I’ve found zero evidence for prices being cheaper buying through Amazon. If you want cheap online products, try alternatives.
These cheap buzzwords don’t match hard retail reality.
Yes they do, but you have to earn $75,000 a year to be part of it.
A charlatan stands up and the herd follows. Elon Musk.
PS I have no problem with his buying Twitter, he can do what he likes.
Predatory?
Bezos brought online shopping to the whole world. Are you mad? He was nearly bankrupt on several occasions doing it.
You can buy a carpet from Indian peasants on Amazon in 5 minutes, when it would have taken you 5 months of effort to find and buy one by conventional means, at twice the price. And deliver would have cost you as much as te carpet.
If Amazon is so bad, then use it to make your life more profitable. Who knows, you might start an online bookstore that beats Amazon.
Bezos is predatory because he seeks to wipe out all competition through predatory pricing, then when he has wiped out the opposition, the prices go back up to what they were before his predatory pricing games.
He didn’t invent that, UK supermarkets did that in the 1980s to gain market dominance. Then they put all the prices back up again and again until I could buy food for half the price on covered markets without all the pointless plastic.
Amazon crudely saving money as sales and shares fall – wait until ye global supply chains collapse – hopefully taking Bezos’ sick dream of being a Spaceman looking down on the enslaved plebs on Earth with them
That’s just wanky. Best you hope global supply chains don’t’ collapse.
And I’m prepared to bet Bezos will be instrumental in ensuring they don’t.
People like Bezos are instrumental in causing the collapse to happen in the first place. He and Gates and their billionaire mates, who made trillions in increased wealth the past two years.
You think Gates didn’t plan the pandemic with others, then try and impose his totalitarian solutions, none of which actually work??
The vaccine scam was the biggest heist in history. But Pfizer’s reputation is now dead. The biggest financial players have marked Pfizer down long-term because they know that their reputation is dead in the water.
Will hope have any effect on that?
Have a look at marine trackers for shipping parked up outside Shanghai. Best “responsibly stockpile” before the panic buying starts.
Bezos will have more than sufficient wealth to be fine even if Amazon went bankrupt. I get six investment advisories a week telling me to invest in ‘Bezos-backed businesses’. He’s like Bill Gates: made his money as a monopolist and now wants to make just as much as an investor.
This will p*ss off the lefties.
They buy up smaller more wholesome operators and then become the only source of a product, degrading the quality and increasing the price. Many other pernicious mechanisms. If this happened in the human body you would call it cancer. We are moving into a time of greater light. Amazon might seem invincible now but it will be the first on the chopping block.
Bollox. What a lot of shite.
The law of supply and demand prevails, as usual.
Amazon? Oh yes, the company I have not spared a penny towards in the last 10 yrs or so, and will vehemently discourage others from using as a shop for the foreseeable future.
Why?
Do I ask why you why you so regularly shop at Ann Summers on your own?
Stupid comment. As stupid as your first comment.
I asked you a perfectly legitimate and polite question and am met with abuse.
What’s your problem?
But if I need something tomorrow they’ll probably be able to supply it and I won’t have to drive for 30 minutes, sweat in overheated shops and engage with cretinous shop assistants.
100%
Well, if you were more organised and bought before you were down to your last biscuit etc, you wouldn’t need something tomorrow.
The vast majority of non-emergency purchases don’t need next-day delivery, it’s far more important that the product is high quality and lasts for years, rather than arrives tomorrow and goes in the bin within 12 months.
I do a lot of online purchasing and less than 5% of it is through Amazon.
Got to love the ignorant Bezos haters on this site. I don’t like that he’s woke, but I respect his success.
The critical thinkers on this blog, the supposed analysts of covid, and climate change, most of whom know nothing about the subjects, but don’t like the financial consequences staring themselves in the face.
Which is sensible. Climate Change initiatives will make you broke. That’s an entirely sensible position because it’s happening.
It was more intuitive than scientific, but its manifesting itself. Funny that a ‘scientific’ hypothesis begins with an intuitive guess. So more scientists on this website than probably anywhere else.
And right wingers, mostly populating this site, those devoted to individual liberty and the laws of supply and demand. Those embalmed in the concept of success achieved through hard work rather than by sponging off the state.
But “Bezos bad”. And yet Bezos is the embodiment of success by hard work and personal endeavour.
The guy started a book selling site, and told his investors there was a 70% chance it wouldn’t succeed. I read his investment proposal at the time, I had a few bob (not mega bob), and stupidly I believed what he said, so I didn’t invest! What a moron!
So Bezos spent much of a lifetime building a business that attracted global approval in the truest sense of the word, improved innumerable lives, made an unquantifiable number of ordinary people people wealthy, but he’s a bad guy.
I don’t like his politics or his woke virtue signalling, but none of us are perfect and we all make mistakes.
Why would anyone, in their right mind, celebrate the hard times of a business like this? If people don’t like working for Amazon, if they don’t like the conditions, they are free to seek employment elsewhere.
You really are an ignorant f***wit. Climate Change has ALWAYS happened and it’s got bog all to do with human beings. There have been at least three ‘warm periods’ the past 500 years warmer than today and none of them were caused by humans. The Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Climatic Optimum were the last two. Oh, and then there were the cold periods, like the Little Ice Age and the Dark Ages, neither of which were caused by humans.
The warming the past 200 years is entirely beneficial and if you knew how to grow food you’d agree. Frosts in June is not a good look out for feeding yourself, you know.
Hurricanes have always existed and always will. There’s no more of them around now than before. If you claim otherwise, you are simply a liar.
If you say that droughts never existed before, you are simply a liar.
If you say that the greatest floods in history occurred the past 30 years, you are simply a liar.
If you say that arctic sea ice was always enormous, you are simply a liar.
If you say that record heat occurs now, not in the 1930s, you are a liar.
He did say that ‘climate change initiatives will make you broke’ – and YES that really is happening!
A return to normality, that would mean I guess reworking their tv ad showing muzzled up workers out in the open air.
Just cancelled my Amazon prime. Stop supporting companies and people like Bezos, please. Netflix gone months ago, ikea, Tesco same. Do not support companies that do not support you or their employees. It really is that simple.