In this interview, Professor Michael Shellenberger appeared on 3AW with Tom Elliott to discuss the IPA’s research on misinformation and disinformation laws.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Tom Elliott:
All right, freedom of speech. Now the whole, I’m very passionate about freedom of speech because I’ve been doing what I do and talking with all of you is freedom of speech. I say something, you get to ring up, you say something. Beyond an obvious breach of the law, you don’t get censored. But freedom of speech is under threat. There’s a lot of people these days who bang on about, “Oh, hate speech should be banned.” So if one person says something that another person’s offended by, they seek to have it banned. The Australian Communications and Media Authority, if the Government’s misinformation bill gets up, will have the power to decide what is hurtful and untrue on the internet and demand to have it censored or pulled down. Our next guest is a global free speech advocate. He’s the CBR chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin, Texas. Michael Shellenberger, good morning.
Michael Shellenberger:
Hey, good morning to you.
Tom Elliott:
Thank you for joining us. Do you think in western countries like Australia and the US and the UK and so forth, do you think free speech is under threat? That it’s being restricted in a way that didn’t used to be the case?
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, it definitely is. I mean, this is not an issue that I had worked on until a couple of years ago. We discovered US government agencies involved in demanding censorship by social media platforms of legal speech. It’s worth remembering that there are forms of illegal speech. You can’t lie to steal money from people. That’s called fraud. You can’t lie about people to destroy their reputation and ability to have a career. That’s defamation. Can’t spread, child exploitation, those sorts of things. So we already have prohibitions on what should be legal and illegal.
What’s happening here is they’re trying to ban clearly political speech and as you said, these are legitimate questions. The irony, or maybe not the irony, is that some of the worst cases of misinformation in recent years came from governments. They said COVID definitely came from a wet market in China. Now most US intelligence agencies think it came from a laboratory. They said that the vaccine would stop people from being infected, but we know that that wasn’t the case.
Not saying any of it was deliberate. Reality is complicated and hundreds of years we’ve come to this realisation that the best way to fight misinformation is with accurate information. Censorship can never solve misinformation. It’s suppression, it just suppresses necessary debate. As for this issue of hate, sadly it’s a part of the human condition as much as joy and love. And so this effort to constrain what people can say online, it has a political agenda behind it. It tends to be coming from one side of the political aisle. But if you get these policies in place, then I think any government would use them and abuse them and restrict this remarkable thing that we’ve taken for granted for so long.
Tom Elliott:
Yeah, I mean, for example, I’m passionate about women’s sport because I have a daughter who plays a lot of sport and I’ve got photos. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Australian rules football, but it’s a very physical game and women play it now and didn’t use to. But there are men who identify as women starting to play in the women’s competitions. And I’ve got photos of men who are 6’2, 6’3″, would weigh 95 to a hundred kilos, that’s 220 pounds in your language, competing against women who are substantially smaller.
Now, I think that’s just utterly wrong, but there’s a body of thought out there that says if I tell a transgender woman that is someone born a man who now declares himself to be a woman, if I say that he can’t play in a women’s football league, I get accused of hate speech.
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, yeah, I mean obviously it’s a debate. It should be allowed to happen. But I mean this is totalitarianism. This is the definition of what George Orwell in 1984 described, which is that you must believe lies, you must repeat lies. There’s a famous Solzhenitsyn speech where he says, “Live not by lies,” that you must not go along with this. I think we’re at the beginning phases, but you can see where this is headed.
The other thing the government of Australia wants to do is they’re using protecting children as a justification for creating digital IDs. The Institute for Public Affairs has come out with good research showing just how biassed the fact checking has been. Well, do we really trust this government to put in place a digital ID system? I mean, it’s like a Black Mirror episode, or we see it in China where you get your behaviours are being constantly monitored for whether or not you’re socially acceptable.
I mean, civilization depends on robust debate. Science, scientific progress, technological progress depends on debate, free and open exchange of ideas. Some of our most creative people, think of our artists or inventors or entrepreneurs or comedians or artists. These are people that depend on being controversial. This effort to stamp out controversy, it’s really shocking.
I mean, I’m here really for two reasons. The first is that this Australian effort for censorship, it is aiming to be international. I mean, they already tried to censor content, not just in Australia but worldwide. The Australian court struck that down earlier this year on a dispute around a video that was said to be too violent. They tried to censor it. The Australian court rejected that. They’re trying to do the same thing here.
But the other thing is that Australia’s an important ally to the United States. We see our other allies attempting to do this. Ireland, britain, European Union, Canada. It’s almost as though there’s an effort. I mean, it really appears that there’s a global effort by really a small group of elites to censor what people are allowed to say worldwide. And that’s a terrifying prospect. I mean in the olden days of printing presses, you could still sneak a printing press into some abandoned building, but we only have a few sources of social media and this is a potentially very totalitarian outcome.
Tom Elliott:
Yeah, I agree with you. And it somewhat even starts from good intentions. I mean, the local government here, the federal government’s youth ID scheme has been dreamt up because they want to stop anybody under the age of 16 going on social media. And I’d say that that horse has well and truly bolted. So why are they’re bothering to do it now? I don’t know.
But the point is, if you make a rule saying no one under the age of 16 can access social media, suddenly you say, “Right, well, we have to have a scheme where we can prove everybody’s age,” and then you’ve got to give everybody a card and you go down that path.
Well, look, I think it’s great that you’re talking about this in Australia and it sounds like a lot of what is concerning people in America is similar to what is concerning people here. Can I ask, I mean, you’ve got a new president and new administration in the States. It’s being put together as we speak. Does that suggest that maybe the tide is turning, that we are going to re-embrace free speech rather than censorship?
Michael Shellenberger:
I mean, I certainly hope so. There’s certainly good signs. I mean, you may remember that what is called X today was formally Twitter that it kicked, it banned Donald Trump, so did Facebook. It banned Donald Trump, even though in fact he had not violated the terms of service of Twitter. I was a Twitter files journalist. So we had access to the internal files and we saw that he had not violated. It was a completely political decision. So he’s made some very strong statements against censorship and for free speech. I think he was sensitised to that.
But look, we’re seeing it’s a knife fight in a phone booth, honestly. I mean, we’re on a knife’s edge. We see the British government is literally sending people to prison for things they’ve posted on social media. They sent a 23-year-old woman to jail for nine months for live-streaming unsavoury comments. But nonetheless, nothing that put anybody’s life in jeopardy, it’s after the riots occurred and they’re letting people out of prison, including sex offenders. So it’s a real warping of priorities.
Canada has very dangerous legislation. We narrowly defeated some Irish censorship legislation, but it’s like the Terminator 2 movie, the censorship legislation that keeps coming back from the dead to continue. So there’s some forces in our society that are relentless in demanding greater and greater control of what ordinary people are allowed to say and read online. I find myself continually shocked by it. I probably shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but they just won’t seem to let it go. And so I do think that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and that’s why we’re building this free speech movement here with IPA and Free Speech Union and other groups around the world because many of the people that we thought would be defending free speech have taken the side of the censors. And so we’re having to build a whole new free speech movement from scratch.
Tom Elliott:
All right, thank you so much for your time. I do like that bit of imagery there, that the people advocating censorship are like the liquid metal Terminator in T2: Judgement Day. Keeps coming back. Michael Shellenberger there, global free speech advocate.
This transcript with Professor Michael Shellenberger talking on 3AW 22 November 2024 has been edited for clarity.
