In this interview, Professor Michael Shellenberger appeared on FiveAA Mornings 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.
Matthew Pantelis:
And on the line is Michael Shellenberger. Now, he’s an author. He’s a champion of free speech books such as Apocalypse Never, San Fransicko, Publisher of the Twitter Files and Global Free Speech Advocate. He’s concerned about the misinformation or disinformation or both laws that the federal government wants to pass. A lot of people are concerned about this, concerned particularly that the federal government under this legislation will censor views that criticise it for its policies. So free speech being silenced is the concern. Michael, good morning.
Michael Shellenberger
Hey, good to be with you.
Matthew Pantelis:
Yeah, likewise. So these laws, you see them as a threat obviously to our ability to communicate freely?
Michael Shellenberger
Well, yeah, and I mean, honestly, we have a selfish motivation for this because the Australian law would allow for the global censorship of the internet. The idea is to censor social media platforms globally. In fact, the E-Safety Commissioner tried to do that earlier this year. Of course, I’m also concerned about the free speech rights of the Australian people, but we see this as part of a global effort by governments in Europe and Britain, Ireland, Canada, Brazil. Eerily similar efforts to censor legal speech, political speech under the idea that it’s misleading, which means that the Prime Minister would have the power, his communications minister and him would’ve the power to censor effectively whatever they wanted to. I mean, it’s really quite an extraordinary, and I would argue, totalitarian piece of legislation. We’ve never quite seen anything like it. It’s really dangerous and terrifying.
Matthew Pantelis:
The idea is, I understand to take down the scams and the fake news, the real fake news that you’ll see on social media. And you’re probably aware, and it must happen in the US as well and other places around the world, but here in Australia, celebrities and leading business people are being used in deep fakes to encourage people to invest in Bitcoin, and their money will triple immediately and all the rest of it. And you look at the videos, and it’s the voice of the person. It’s the image of the person speaking, but it’s not them. It’s a deep fake, and they’re damn good. And when you look at the likes of David Koch and Dick Smith and Andrew Forrest and Gina Reinhardt and others that are used in this way, well, of course that’s got to come down and Facebook should be meta, should be acting on that very, very quickly themselves. But they don’t seem to want to do that. Is that not right to get rid of that level of fake news?
Michael Shellenberger
Well, I think that you’re then criminalising satire. I mean, what about your comedy? What about your spoofs, your sarcasm? In social media platforms, you can reply, and people can reply and say, “This is not true.” X, formerly Twitter has something called Community Notes. The only solution to misinformation is more information. Censorship is never the solution because it doesn’t allow for the information to be corrected in public. So this has been debated for hundreds of years. It would’ve made a modest proposal by SWIFT Illegal, which was a parody. So no courts including Australia have long upheld the right to do parody, to have sarcasm, humour, and people need to respond and say, “That’s not real. It’s a joke.” Otherwise-
Matthew Pantelis:
There’s a difference, isn’t there? There’s a difference between a line between satire and humour and somebody saying, “I disagree with the government’s immigration policy because it’s harming Australia in X, Y, and Z ways.” And that’s fair criticism. If the government took that down, that would be appalling. But to take down deep fakes where people are trying to scam innocent people out of their money, well surely there’s nothing wrong with that. I’d be a hundred percent supportive of that.
Michael Shellenberger
Well, that’s already illegal.
Matthew Pantelis:
Yeah, exactly.
Michael Shellenberger
That’s already illegal. It’s fraud, so you don’t need a new law. I mean, it’s already illegal to commit fraud. It’s already illegal to lie.
Matthew Pantelis:
They’re there. They’re not being taken down. That’s the issue.
Michael Shellenberger
Well, then you’ve got a law enforcement problem, not a lack of legislation problem. You just need to enforce laws.
Matthew Pantelis:
That’s true.
Michael Shellenberger
You don’t need to pass. I mean, this is legislation that demands that content be taken down for being misleading. Well, you can call anything misleading. If I say climate change is real, but it’s not the end of the world, somebody could say that’s misleading because it could mislead people into not wanting to take more drastic action. Peter Ridd, who is the scientist in Australia who documented that the coral was growing on the Great Barrier Reef that was censored by Facebook alleging that it was misleading. Well, it was accurate. So you do not want the government getting in the power of deciding what’s misleading. You have very strong laws in Australia. They’re much stronger than ours on what counts as defamation. It’s much more similar to Britain. You have laws against fraud. You’re not allowed to lie to people to steal their money. This legislation is a gross abuse of power. I mean, if you read it, it says you can’t vilify anybody. Well, what is the difference between vilification and criticism? It’s in the eye of the beholder.
Matthew Pantelis:
I think-
Michael Shellenberger
You even saw the-
Matthew Pantelis:
I was going to say, I think you touched on the whole problem here with Facebook, particularly in that they’re happy to sanction a post on coral reefs more so than they’re happy to sanction fake news on their own website, on their own platform.
Michael Shellenberger
Well, that’s right. I mean, Greta Thunberg said that we only have 10 years to take action. You have Greta Thunberg blaming climate change for flooding in places like Pakistan where the floods are caused by lack of flood management, by lack of proper water management systems. That’s disinformation or misinformation. But the solution to it, and this is why I wrote my book Apocalypse Never, the solution to it, I would never think the solution to it is censorship. That’s absurd. The solution to it is to publicly correct the misinformation. Write a book, write an article, create a video, talk into your phone and post it to Instagram or Facebook and correct it that way. This idea that you need the government to secretly go and censor disfavored views, it right out of Black Mirror episode or the Twilight Zone.
Matthew Pantelis:
Yeah. Clearly, when a government says, “We know what’s best for you,” there’s a problem right there in that, isn’t there?
Michael Shellenberger
Well, I mean, yeah. Obviously we agree on laws that your freedoms cannot hurt other people or deprive other people of their freedoms. It’s pretty straightforward. That’s why we don’t allow people to lie in order to steal their money, but we allow a wide variety of views. Certainly, Australia has more restrictions than we have in the United States, and that’s fine. There’s some differences, but you need a robust exchange of views. You need this idea that you shouldn’t allow people to express hatred. Well, hatred is a core human emotion. I mean, what are you going to disallow people to express their intense anger or their prejudice? I mean, we’ve seen people abuse this idea of prejudice. They say things like a man can identify as a woman, and if you deny that he’s a woman, then you’re a bigot.
Well, that itself could be viewed as hatred. So we have a difference of opinion about what’s hate speech and what’s the difference point of view. You have to let these debates happen. In fact, we actually learn through debate. Conflict is healthy. In a totalitarian society, the government is eliminating disagreement. It’s eliminating conflict. There’s secret committees of experts who decide what we can disagree about. That’s not the tradition in Western civilization. For hundreds of years. We’ve allowed very intense disagreement about all manner of things. That’s how we learn. You can’t have science without disagreement. You can’t have democracy without a disagreement. What the government is trying to do is impose a system much more similar to China in creating digital IDs, monitoring people’s speech. This is creepy totalitarian stuff. And I think the people of Australia should be alarmed. We’re certainly alarmed.
We see efforts around the world by people wanting to censor what’s set on social media platforms at a global level. People have lost their minds. We saw your Prime Minister say, “Oh, I saw somebody attached my head to some parody video.” He needs to grow up. I mean, you’re in public life. You’ve been given this incredible honour of representing the people, and you’re so thin-skinned that you can’t stand being made fun of, well, you have no business in public life. I think there’s an intense paranoia and anxiety that’s created by social media. The politicians felt like they could control the media before the rise of social media. Now they’re being reactionary and trying to censor what ordinary people can say on the internet.
Matthew Pantelis:
It’s not new to some degree, is it? Because, I don’t know if you’re aware of the case here with the cartoonist of the Australian Bill Leak some years ago who did a cartoon and was basically hounded into a heart attack over it, a fatal heart attack, where he had depicted an Aboriginal child being returned to his father by a policeman, an indigenous policeman saying, “You need to have a chat with him about his anti-social behaviour.” And the dad was saying, “Right, oh, what’s his name then?” And Bill Leak was just hounded to that by the Human Rights Commission and others, and certainly many would argue that his heart attack was triggered by the pressure he felt from that. So this is not new. This is not new. It is just now we’re talking online.
Michael Shellenberger
Right. Well, it’s funny because that story is a very funny story because, of course, he was being hounded. But, of course, people have a right to criticise the cartoonist, and the cartoonist has a right to publish his cartoon. And, look, people say terrible things about me on the internet. I don’t read it. There’s a solution to this. You don’t have to read what obnoxious people write about you. There’s a growing up that needs to be done. When the printing press was invented, the Catholic Church benefited from the printing press, and then Martin Luther got a hold of it and printed his speech, and the Catholic Church spent hundreds of years trying to control the printing presses of Europe.
Eventually they realised that they just needed to allow it in a free society, there needed to be a debate about religion and politics and science, and the result was democracy. The result was the scientific revolution. The result was the industrial revolution. The printing press allowed for open and free communication in a way that wasn’t possible before. And social media is having the exact same impact. Now, ordinary people, citizens can become journalists. They can publicise their art, they can make videos. It’s really a wonderful thing, but you’ve got some rather old-fashioned-minded, reactionary politicians who obviously can’t handle it and who are trying to deprive the Australians of their free speech right.
Matthew Pantelis:
The question, I suppose, it boils down to, if somebody says this is misinformation, what right do they have to make that determination? How do they judge it? And what criteria do they put in place? Who says it’s misinformation? Now, if somebody’s wanting to argue the earth is flat, well, I think we can disprove that reasonably quickly. But when it comes to a viewpoint, a belief, that’s much harder to challenge.
Michael Shellenberger
Yeah, think of it. Atheists think that Christianity is misinformation. Christians think that Islam is misinformation. We actually allow people to talk about their religion in social media. We allow people to say that the earth is flat and that nobody landed on the moon because you know, why not? I mean, if you want to argue with people that think the earth is flat, go ahead. I think it’s a waste of time, but don’t censor them. That’s absurd. People have a lot of myths around this idea. People think, “Oh, if we had censored the Nazis, then there wouldn’t have been Nazis.”
Actually, they did censor the Nazis. Censorship doesn’t achieve the goal that you want it to achieve. If you want to argue against bad ideas, if you want to correct bad ideas, as I do as a working journalist, I publish three to five articles a week, my books are 400 pages long, of which a hundred pages is end notes, the way that you correct misinformation is with more information. It’s with free speech. And that’s been the solution for hundreds of years. This idea that we need to adopt the tactics of the Nazis, of the communists, of totalitarian regimes and engage in mass censorship with secret committees of experts that decide what’s true and false, that’s a recipe for totalitarianism.
And that’s not the tradition of Western liberal democratic countries that we’ve had for 200 or 300 years where free speech rights have been protected. So I think people don’t realise how terrifying this is. Even with the printing press, you could hide a printing press here or there, but there’s only a few big social media networks. And if you let the government censor what’s on them, you’re in a very terrifying new reality. That’s why I say it’s like a Black Mirror episode.
Matthew Pantelis:
I recently gave a speech to a graduating class at my alma mater, and I was asked to talk about telling discerning fake news from real news, and it boiled down, in my view, to educating yourself, to learning, to querying anything you don’t know about, to watching your validating beliefs where you read something and agree with it because that’s your point of view. So seek out alternative point of views and basically educate yourself about the topic at hand. And that’s to me, the crux of it. The more info you have about a topic, about an issue, the more likely you are to be able to respond to it, to weed out what is right and wrong and move forward accordingly. Would you agree?
Michael Shellenberger
Well, that’s right. Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, if your instinct is to silence, to want to silence somebody rather than to disagree with them openly, I think there’s something wrong with you. Look, the worst misinformation over the last few years has come from the government. The government said that we know that COVID came from a wet market. Well, most intelligence agencies in the United States now think it came from a laboratory. They said that the COVID vaccine would stop people from getting the infection. That turned out not to be true. So often what we see are efforts to censor true information by governments. So this impulse that people have to silence others rather than to have free and open debate, I think it’s pathological. I think it’s a kind of narcissism. I think it reflects the kind of insecurity. On the one hand, you’re so confident of your beliefs that you couldn’t consider that you might be wrong, but on the other hand, you’re not confident enough to have the argument to go on the radio or to go onto a social media platform and have the argument or make your own video.
There’s a pettiness to it. There’s a pettiness to all totalitarian societies that are always trying to control other people’s behaviour, control what they say. Allow the debate to exist. We need to be grownups about this. We’ve been handed this beautiful society by our ancestors who fought and died for the right to speak freely. You’re not a full human being if you’re not allowed to express your views and to hear other people’s views. You’re no better than a slave. You’re no better than a serf. And humans, for most of our history, were not free. We’ve had this beautiful, really just 200 to 300 years where ordinary people could speak their minds and not be thrown in prison by the king or arrested for their views. We have to fight for it. We have to protect it. It’s something that’s for all of us. It’s not for a small group of people. Free speech is for everybody including and especially the people that we disagree with.
Matthew Pantelis:
Indeed. Michael, well said. We’ll leave it there. Thank you for your time this morning.
Michael Shellenberger
Thanks for having me.
Matthew Pantelis:
Michael Shellenberger who is Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin in Texas, free speech advocate obviously, publisher of the Twitter Files, author of Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko, and he’s here to lobby politicians in Australia to vote down the misinformation bill the government wants to put forward that would censor the internet. Now, who determines what’s right and wrong? You can read stuff and, okay, if people want to ring up and argue the earth is flat or jet streams overhead are poisoning us, go your hardest. But I’ll argue you wrong.
But you believe that, that’s the thing. You’ve read stuff and you believe it. I’d say you’ve read the wrong things, but, okay, you’ve got to believe. Good on you. But to say you shouldn’t go to where because your view is wrong, or you shouldn’t go online and say that because your view is wrong, well, who am I to say that? You go your hardest, and people will jump on and either agree or disagree, and probably vehemently in both cases. It’s 28 past 10 on-
This transcript with Professor Michael Shellenberger talking on FiveAA Mornings 21 November 2024 has been edited for clarity.
