The politics of misinformation

In the aftermath of Saturday’s referendum, allegations of dishonesty and bad faith are flying. Many Yes voters claim the vote was lost on the back of a campaign of misinformation and fear-mongering, while the opposition has suggested that Labor MPs use the term misinformation to disparage opinions they disagree with. Whichever side you supported, there is no doubt that misinformation was propagated by unofficial sources both off- and online.

In this context, consultation on the government’s proposed Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill looks increasingly fraught. Yesterday, No campaigner Warren Mundine said that the bill was designed to silence the government’s opponents, echoing statements made by opposition MPs and some media outlets when the draft was released.

Here we might reasonably ask what effect the bill, if enacted, might have had on the Voice campaign. Would it have provided government with the means to silence opposition? And would it have stemmed the flow of misinformation on social media?

The stated purpose of the bill is not to give ACMA the power to arbitrate truth online, as some have suggested, but only to ensure that digital platforms implement measures to prevent or respond to misinformation and disinformation. If we take this at face value, ACMA would use its powers to assess whether platforms have developed and implemented such measures. It would not have the power to request the removal of online content and thus to silence opposition by proxy.

But the purpose of the bill is one thing, and its actual content another. Even if the bill does not explicitly give ACMA the power of adjudication, this possibility might be implicit in, or at least not ruled out by, the wording of the bill. A more subtle question than whether ACMA can request the removal of content is whether giving ACMA the power to assess industry compliance effectively grants it undue influence over platforms’ content-moderation decisions. Indeed, we argued in our submission, that the bill should be more explicit about the nature of ACMA’s powers, for example, by precluding the assessment of how platform practices are applied in individual cases. We also set out some deeper problems with the scope of the bill.

Would the bill have stemmed the flow of misinformation during the Voice? In a sense, this question is moot: the major platforms are signatories to the voluntary Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, under which they are already required to implement measures to combat misinformation. But that doesn’t mean the bill would have no effect. Instead, by giving ACMA the power to assess code compliance, it would ostensibly promote industry accountability for the measures they put in place. But this is a long-term proposition, and one best directed at general improvement of the online information ecosystem rather than at dealing with particular instances of misinformation, an idea we also explore in our submission.

In this sense, then, both the horror and the hope directed at the bill are overstated.

Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow