David Inserra
David Inserra
Last week, Australia dropped its revised Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill 2024, and it’s about two sandwiches short of a picnic. The bill appears to draw some of its inspiration from the EU’s Digital Services Act in terms of creating significant responsibilities and regulations. And if past is prologue, what happens in Australia doesn’t stay in Australia—such as when Australia passed its “link tax” bill, which taxed social media companies when users shared links to news articles. That link tax spread to Canada and has been actively considered in the United States. Canada is also considering replicating Australia’s eSafety Commission, despite various cases of significant censorial overreach.
But whatever the rationale or history here, this bill not only will restrict Australians’ free speech and access to different online services, but its influence may spread and threaten American speech as well.
Let’s first look at how the bill defines misinformation and disinformation, a challenge for any bill or organization in this field. The bill defines misinformation as content that is
“reasonably verifiable as false, misleading, or deceptive;” and
“is likely to cause or contribute to serious harm.”
The definition also carves out some space for satire and parody, professional news content, and “reasonable” dissemination of content for “academic, artistic, scientific, or religious” reasons. Disinformation uses the same definition and adds that there must be grounds to suspect that the content was shared with the intent to deceive others or otherwise involves inauthentic behavior.
There is enough to unpack in these definitions alone to fill multiple blogs, but I’ll focus on three points:
What is verifiably misleading? There are claims that are objectively true or false because we can verify through evidence and logic that is available for anyone to interrogate. But how does one objectively verify that something is misleading? » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/australian-bill-targets-harmful-misinformation-online-hits-free-speech-around-world