Jack of all trades, Master of none.🇦🇺

Two years ago, the people of Australia rose up to defeat sweeping censorship legislation. It was a momentous victory for free speech everywhere and a terrible defeat for the Albanese government. Today, the Albanese government has proposed an even more extreme regime, arguably the most radical censorship bill ever proposed in the West. I’ve returned to raise the alarm with the IPA, and, at the same time, try to understand why in the world anyone would want the government to be able to silence practically any citizen online. Now, someone told me on X that an American has no business telling Australians what they can say online. I agree completely. So when, exactly, is Julie Inman Grant returning to America? The government implies its bill would give it important new powers to deal with traumatic real-world events. So, for instance, if a migrant rapes or kills someone, Julie or her replacement as eSafety Commissioner will finally be able to ask vital questions like “Who posted about this?” “What was their tone?” “Did they have a ‘hostile attitude’?” Prime Minister Albanese’s censorship bill after all would allow Julie to attack “hostile attitudes” online. But Mr Prime Minister, with all due respect, I have read the hostile replies to your social media posts. Even the strictest censorship law in the world isn’t going to be enough. You’re gonna need an entirely new internet. Neither the Prime Minister nor his Communications Minister can clearly explain what the bill is for. Don’t take my word for it. Watch one of the many viral videos of them trying to explain it. At the UN, Albanese said it was for fighting misinformation. The next day he denied making the connection. If Albanese really wants to stop the spread of misinformation, he might consider not talking. The Prime Minister says it “is not about giving government control, it is about giving people control.” But the bill says every online service must ensure “a safe online environment.” And who decides what is unsafe? One person. The Minister of Communications, in consultation with Julie or her replacement. She may add to the list of harms any material she “is satisfied may cause serious harm.” She does not need a new act of Parliament to do it. The list already includes “material or conduct that encourages or promotes hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality.” Ask yourself who will define a “hostile attitude,” and who will decide what a “woman” is. If what happened to Sall Grover is any indication, we know exactly where this is going. Do Labor and Green voters really believe a right-wing government in the future wouldn’t define hostile attitudes in a way that would be significantly more hostile to the attitudes of Labor and Greens? The left says its political rivals are fascist and even Hitlerian. Either it doesn’t believe what they’ve been saying, it doesn’t think fascism entails censorship, or, most troubling, it thinks they will remain in power forever. Then there is the price. Under this bill, Julie or her successor can seek a fine of up to 109 million dollars against any platform that fails to keep you “safe.” At that price, the platforms won’t stop to ask whether your post is harmful. They will err on the side of caution and delete your grandmother’s recipe for lamingtons. Buried in the bill is a power that lets Julie, or her successor, operate fake social media accounts. The bill calls them “sock puppet” identities and defines one as “a false or fictitious identity.” A government official could go online under a fake name and pose as an ordinary Australian. Albanese has never said he’s trying to censor the entire world, and I give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he just wants someone to say something nice about him online. And under his bill, an eSafety Commissioner sock puppet no doubt will. The bill authorizes her, “without limitation,” to “generate material using an online service (including by means of artificial intelligence).” It overrides bans on fake accounts by social media platforms, including X, gives the government immunity from lawsuits, and does not require any transparency about how many sock puppet accounts the government is operating All of this is strange when you consider that the Albanese government proposed to crack down on fake accounts in its 2024 censorship bill. It targeted any “bot network” used to mislead people about “the identity, purpose or origin of the person disseminating the content.” Pull back, and you can see a consistent, terrifying position. The government is saying fake accounts are a menace to democracy when citizens run them and a public service when the government does. So under the Albanese government’s new censorship bill, Julie or her replacement has two jobs. Job one, decide what you’re allowed and not allowed to say. Job two, log on as Dave the crocodile hunter and thank herself for it. I asked Tom Sulston, the head of policy at a group called Digital Rights Watch, which broadly supports the bill, about the sock puppet powers. He told me the sock puppets are “not allowed to be used to surveil or censor the public.” So I sent him two sections of the bill. The first authorizes “observing, downloading or making a record of any material observed in using an online service.” The second lists among the Commissioner’s functions “educational, promotional and community awareness programs,” and the power ‘to do anything incidental to or conducive to the performance of any of the above functions.’ I asked him which provision stops the Commissioner from using a fake account to record what Australians post, or to post material to them. He wrote back that his reading “would restrict the use of a sock puppet to posting of material to users, or ‘friend requesting’ them.” Pause for a moment on this. The bill’s own supporter has conceded that the government’s fake accounts may post to Australians and send them friend requests. As for the section that lets the Commissioner run deceptive propaganda efforts in the form of “educational, promotional and community awareness programs,” he said nothing. And when I asked why a regulator needs to generate material by artificial intelligence under a false name, he answered, “That’s a question for eSafety...” I agree. So I have asked the eSafety Commissioner. I haven’t heard back yet but will let you know if Dave the genuine and authentic Australian crocodile hunter writes back. Julie likes to talk about safety. But she wants to watch you, record you, and talk to you under a fake name. That shouldn’t qualify you for a government job. It should qualify you for a restraining order. Who is this woman who would hold this power? She is an American, now naturalized. She worked in Congress and then at Microsoft and at Twitter, which, as we discovered through the Twitter Files, censored populist and conservative voices, before she took the job here in Australia. In 2024, she demanded that X delete a video of a terrorist attack in Sydney, not just for Australians but for all humans on earth. Last year she gave the keynote at a closed-door meeting at Stanford, where officials from Europe, Britain, Brazil, and Australia met with American censorship advocates. We can’t get the minutes from that meeting. And so the woman who wants to read everything you post would prefer you not know what precisely she is secretly plotting with other government censors. Julie said the CIA offered her a job out of college. She says she went to work for a congressman instead. And I believe her. A scenario where the CIA spends decades guiding the career of a blond bombshell, from college to Congress to tech to a foreign government, so she can eventually censor the entire planet on behalf of a group of shadowy billionaires who meet annually in Switzerland doesn’t at all sound like an amazing Hollywood spy thriller-horror movie I really want to watch. Besides, the CIA hires people who are better able to hide their lust for power. The digital Duty of Care has the same sales pitch as the masters of the universe in Davos. The world is dangerous. You are fragile. So hand over control of what you’re allowed to see and say online to the people who know better. I can tell you where this leads, since my country went there first. After Donald Trump won in 2016, the American establishment told the public that Russian bots had swung the election. It was never true. Facebook’s own lawyer testified to the US Senate that the Russian posts amounted to “approximately 1 out of 23,000 pieces of content” in the news feed. But the panic built an industry of experts who claimed that fake accounts threatened democracy and that only they could protect us. Then we learned what some of those experts were doing. In 2017, Democratic operatives created fake accounts, sock puppets, to smear a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama as backed by the Russians. Their internal report said, “We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.” And here is the part you could not make up. That same firm wrote a US Senate report on Russian bots. So the people who warned us about fake Russians had invented fake Russians of their own. Here’s the lesson we’ve learned over and over again. Whatever the censors accuse their enemies of doing is the thing they want the power to do. When they say they want to stop anonymous accounts from interfering in elections, it means they want a monopoly on using anonymous accounts to interfere in elections. Today the Coalition opposes this bill, so the Greens may decide the fate of the bill. I have a question for them: Are you really not worried that, once your allies are out of power, your enemies will use these powers against you? Are you not aware that, throughout history, the censored have turned around and censored their censors? Or do you believe you will never be out of power? Since the bill’s supporters aren’t being honest about why they are so desperate to censor their fellow citizens, I will offer my best guess as to why the Albanese government is moving forward with this. One Nation has gone from 6.4% of the vote in the last election to first place at 30%, ahead of Labor, in the polls. Labor and the Coalition together drew less than half the country. I think everyone in this room can see why a government in the position the Albanese government is in wants the power to decide what Australians may read, and the power to speak to them through fake names. A confident government argues with its critics. A frightened government seeks to silence and artificially counteract them. We’ve seen this in America under Biden. We’ve seen this in the EU and UK, and now we’re seeing it here. The good news is the censors are weaker than they have been in a decade. They lost the argument in the United States. And now they are showing signs of desperation. This week the European Union financed a conference that labeled the United States a “foreign information manipulation and interference” threat. When I asked who was paying for that conference, sponsors took their names off the list. These people retreat when the public is watching. The government wrote the sock puppet clause for a public that was not reading. The bill could pass but need not if we explain to the people of Australia why it is the most sinister, sweeping, and totalitarian piece of censorship legislation in the history of the West. It would effectively let one or two people censor the Internet while waging informational warfare against the public. It cannot be salvaged with amendments. No amount of tinkering is going to fix it. It needs to go in the bin. No government should ever try to censor citizens for political speech. No government should ever speak to its citizens through a fake name. Australians used to be famous for wrestling crocodiles. Now your government says you need protection from mean tweets. I believe Canberra has badly underestimated you, and that you know the West, and its unique protection of free speech, is worth fighting for. Thank you very much.

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