The Commonwealth eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant (JIG), has banned X and Facebook from allowing certain “violent” videos to be shown on their platforms, and the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has now linked this to the need to stop “misinformation.”
What has JIG, also known on X as “eKaren,” banned?
Footage from the knife attacks at Sydney’s Bondi Junction and in Wakely at the Assyrian Christian church of Christ the Good Shepherd.
I’ve seen these videos and I don’t know what she is on about. Sure, at least in the case of the church, they captured an act of terrorism, but it was pretty blurry and indistinct.
All you saw really was the assailant going into a clinch with the priest.
In both cases, you saw acts of heroism as Australian men put themselves in the way of danger as they went after the assailants.
Where would “Bollard Man,” who warded off the Bondi knifeman with a bollard be, if it wasn’t for the footage that went viral. He’s now on the fast track to citizenship because he has the qualities that we need more of here in Australia.
This was nothing like the Christchurch mosque massacre where the murderer livestreamed it. Both X and Facebook would have pulled that one down before JIG would have even had a sniff of it.
Weaponising ‘Misinformation’
I know little about JIG, except that she worked briefly for Twitter before Mr. Musk bought it, and appears to have a vendetta against him.She also told a World Economic Forum that we need to rethink our attitudes to free speech in the internet era. Who knows what that means, but I doubt she was coming from the direction of free speech absolutism.
Some would suggest that perhaps she, and the prime minister, are happy with the potential propaganda use of footage from Gaza of Israeli carnage, and from Ukraine of exploding Russian tanks, but not footage from Sydney of Islamic extremism.
It would certainly explain why the prime minister describes what are horrible videos as being “misinformation.”
For most of us the videos are just facts, but for others, the facts have a narrative use that don’t suit them. So no matter how true and factual, they must be “misinformation.”
JIG is even trying to ban X and Facebook from showing these videos to international viewers. She may think of herself as a citizen of the world, but she works for a nation state, so her powers to enmesh citizens only apply to those who live here.
Australia has some extraterritorial powers in some legislation, such as when it deals with Australian nationals committing crimes abroad, like child sex tourism in south east Asia.
A Long-Time Coming
There are larger agendas at play here. Not only is there the issue of controlling specific current narratives, but there appears to be a multi-national effort to control the whole political narrative.We’ve just come out of the COVID pandemic with all that entailed in terms of curtailment of civil liberties. We now seem to be entering a misinformation “pandemic” (and I use that term metaphorically and ironically).
Labor has been worried about “misinformation” and internet harm for a very long time, without much evidence that one leads to the other.
In 2007, Senator Stephen Conroy had a plan to enforce a compulsory filter on Australians’ internet browsing so they couldn’t be exposed to harmful material hosted on a secret list of sites nominated by Interpol.
He abandoned the plan in 2012 after opposition from the left-wing Greens and the centre-right Liberal Party.
How times have changed.
While most recently in power, the Liberals set in train a regime for censoring the internet using the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA). They subsequently established the Office of the eSafety Commissioner who has been given additional power to order social media companies to take down material.
While this pandemic is not likely to be as financially brutal as COVID in the short-term, in the long run, it could be culturally ruinous as it attempts to limit thought to government-approved talking points.
Do you remember how the COVID pandemic started as a vague rumour coming out of China of a new and strange disease that killed people in the streets; where the authorities were welding people into their houses so even if they contracted it they couldn’t pass it on; and masks were mandatory and pharmaceuticals yet to be invented?
And then suddenly the whole world seemed to be following suit, closing borders, locking people inside, covering their faces, rushing vaccines into production, and keeping us “safe.”
Hourly, we were assailed with COVID fearmongering on our TVs and in our newspapers—coloured graphs showing the relentless rise and destructiveness of this novel virus—and all the governments and the media aligned and supported each other, as you must when everything is on a virtual war footing.
Misinformation Creeping Into the Public Consciousness
This time around, the role of CHO, or supreme military commander, appears to have been commandeered by JIG, the eKaren, or eSafety commissioner.It was during this first pandemic that the second started to become visible.
It’s a world-wide phenomenon as can be seen as Google searches for “misinformation” rose above background noise in January 2020, in both Australia and the United States, before there was any virus in the wild in either of those countries.
It peaked in Australia in October 2023 and has maintained a very high level since. The United States peaked earlier but is currently at similar levels.
While correlation isn’t causation, this can’t be an accident—someone started talking and thinking about misinformation seriously just as the virus was knocking on the door.
Our response to the COVID pandemic certainly taught me some practical lessons in human psychology, particularly moral panics.
I don’t think I was the only one. Political operatives were learning as well.
Claims of misinformation were the favoured way to shut down disagreement with the official line on COVID.
This Sounds Very Familiar ...
The framing is eerily similar.If you didn’t follow the health recommendations during COVID, it wasn’t that you were putting yourself at risk, it was that you were putting granny, the immunocompromised, and maybe even the kids, at risk.
Now, Ms. Inman Grant claims that there are harms lurking on the internet that can only be controlled through censorship.
What are these harms? The industry standards, which Ms. Inman Grant administers, run from child abuse through to hate crimes, giving us a sense of what they might be—serious to trivial.
Who can argue against protecting from child abuse? But if there is child abuse on social media, shouldn’t the police be doing something about it rather than requiring social media to merely remove it?
Shouldn’t police be monitoring what is put up, who watches it, and then make some arrests at least in the case of child abuse?
If it’s a hate crime, like someone being abused for their race, shouldn’t the abused be responsible for making a complaint? How can the platform be asked to interfere preemptively?
They are an online commons—it would be like asking the hosts of a dinner party to bounce any of their guests who tell an ethnically coloured joke, outrageous and absurd.
Did We Not Learn From the Pandemic?
We seem to be making all the pandemic mistakes again.Overbearing legislation, untethered from legislative oversight; a suite of precautionary powers, ill-suited for their purpose and subjectively applied by a functionary who may or may not be qualified, again without proper oversight, but with wide-ranging and draconian powers.
Coverage in the legacy media has been appalling with front page images of Mr. Musk and Mr. Zuckerberg headlined “Social Enemy No. 1.”
And there would be an anti-competitive element as the ability of social media to show videos and images in real time makes them more attractive than their establishment competitors.
The combination of mainstream media and politicians is a dangerous combination as we saw during COVID. They can actively suppress information that would have dealt with the pandemic more effectively, if they think it is in their interest to do so.
As the graph demonstrates, there is something more than just Australian going on here.
There is an alliance of actors that wants to snuff out the potential for the internet to be the new public square, whether because they want to control the narrative, whatever it is, or to control even what you can choose to talk about.
In this age, we are all digital natives, which means that we will be deprived as a society of the tools we need to think. You can’t think if you are only allowed to talk about the facts that the eKaren says you can.
There can be no greater harm than that.
