In this interview, Professor Michael Shellenberger appeared on The Rita Panahi Show Sky News Australia 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.
Rita Panahi:
Joining me now is author Award-winning independent journalist and CBR chair of Politics, Censorship and Free speech at the University of Austin, Michael Shellenberger, now Michael’s, the man who exposed the Twitter Files and is currently in Australia on a quest to quash Labor’s dangerous misinformation bill. Thank you so much for your time. You’ve been in Parliament House talking to the politicians. Tell me what you’ve learned and will this bill pass the upper house? Is this going to pass the Senate and become law?
Michael Shellenberger:
Hey, Rita, it’s great to be with you and it’s great to be in Australia. I don’t think this legislation will pass. It’s just too crazy. I don’t know what else to say about it. It’s so sweeping. I mean, it basically would allow the Prime Minister and the Communications Minister to criminalise any kind of speech. It has a provision that allows them to censor misleading speech, which is just speech where people might get the wrong idea from true facts and accurate information. I think people forget that we have this wonderful solution to misinformation already. It’s called freedom of speech. It’s called correcting misinformation.
As you know, in our conversations in the past on everything from climate change to crime, the media itself and the government itself are the main purveyors of misinformation. We saw it on Covid origins on the Covid vaccine. So the solution to misinformation is to correct the information. Censorship is never about the truth. It’s always about power and control, and that’s clearly what this government feels like it needs. It feels like it needs to exercise control over the people. I think people see that it’s a sinister approach. The senators that we talk to, including the crossbenchers, the unaffiliated senators, were adamant that this is not something that the Australian people want. And it appears as though the Australian people themselves have now weighed in with a significant number of negative comments to the Senate.
Rita Panahi:
Now, amongst those crossbenchers, did you get a commitment from them that they won’t vote for this bill?
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, it certainly, at least from David Van, who we met with, Senator Van absolutely committed and agreed to take a selfie with me to affirm that. And he said he had heard from a lot of his constituents on X, formerly Twitter, objecting to this. I mean, universally senators said that this had really triggered a firestorm of opposition and concern from ordinary folks in Australia. People particularly I think on X, have been alarmed by the amount of censorship that’s been demanded by governments around the world, the European Union, Ireland, Brazil, Canada. Even in the United States, we saw these efforts from sort of deep state agencies to demand censorship. I think that this has kind of made people more aware of the threat and more resistant and much more active in opposing it.
Rita Panahi:
Now, your reporting on this bill has brought the legislation to the attention of people around the world, many Americans, including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. What has been the reaction in America to what’s happening here? I’ve seen it described as Soviet style assault on free speech. Is that how they see this, and are we being perceived as a country that’s lost its way when it comes to free speech?
Michael Shellenberger:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Americans love Australia. I mean, we’ve certainly come here to visit as tourists. We have a real affection for the Australian people who come and visit us in the United States. I think we’re all really shocked. What’s happening Down Under has sort of been the question for people. It’s disturbing is that many of the similar tactics that this government is proposing, including the use of supposedly unbiased fact-checkers, who in fact are very biassed, it’s been proven by studies, by the Institute for Public Affairs and others. They’ve evaluated this in an objective way.
So, I think we’re all really shocked. I mean, we think of Australia as a free country as part of the Five Eyes nations. We have a very close national security and intelligence relationship, and that is part of the concern as well, is it appears that some of this is coming from the intelligence and security agencies between our governments, and that’s obviously completely inappropriate and illegal. And so any whiff of that, and I think you start to really trigger some serious concerns both in the United States and here in Australia.
Rita Panahi:
Michael, what do you make of our E-Karen, the E-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who has politicised her office repeatedly and even sued Elon Musk’s ex in an effort to censor content? How responsible is she for what we’re seeing right now?
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, obviously it’s a huge concern. I mean, this is an American in Australia working for the Australian government. She came under pretty mysterious circumstances. She sort of confessed when she came that she had been recruited by the CIA but was supposedly not working for the CIA. We had seen other supposedly former CIA people involved in censorship in the United States. We can’t really get to the bottom of what was going on here. It appears though that this is a counter populist reaction after 2016 to Brexit and the election of Trump, where you see either current or former intelligence officials in government agencies feeling that they somehow have the right to tell people what they can say and hear online.
One bright note here is of course, as you know and your audiences know that she tried to ban a video from being on X, Twitter and other social media platforms, not just in Australia, but around the world. And an Australian court ruled that that was unconstitutional and that that was not right and she couldn’t do that. So, I think chalk that up as a victory for free speech. But Rita, it’s just amazing because we will have a victory somewhere, we’ll beat something back like in Ireland and like Terminator Two, it just keeps coming back and demanding more, the censorship industrial complex just keeps demanding more and more control over the discourse. It’s as though there’s sort of a dark force behind these characters that’s just insisting that there be this level of government control over speech. It’s just there’s nothing like it. There’s never been anything like it in the history of the internet. It’s really reminiscent more of the inquisition or the government reaction to the printing press than it is to anything that we can remember in recent history.
Rita Panahi:
And as you’ve demonstrated, it was so dangerous at a really crucial period during the pandemic when voices were silenced, expert voices leading infectious disease experts and wrong decisions were made because of that. There was all sorts of harm that occurred across a number of countries, and particularly here in Australia because of that. So to be going down this road and ignoring those lessons is even more shocking.
I want to ask you about the government’s move to ban social media for under 16’s in this country. The platforms set to be under restrictions include Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, and now Snapchat has also been added to the list. Do you have any reservations about this kind of law?
Michael Shellenberger:
I do have reservations about it, and I should say I’m a father of two wonderful children, and I am concerned about the effect of social media on kids. So I think it’s a real issue. On the other hand, I worry that it’s a Trojan horse to get digital ID, which is something that really should scare us. It’s like a Black Mirror episode where you can see it kind of totalitarian government wants to control and see everything that its citizens do, maybe create some sort of social credit scheme like they do in China. So, I do worry about that. There are alternatives. There’s phone free schools are being pursued in the United States and around the world, but we just keep seeing the government wanting more and more control. It’s more and more intrusive, more violations of our privacy, more demands over what we say, and we may forget, but the worst misinformation has been by the government.
They said that Covid came from a wet market into China. Now, most intelligence agencies believe it came from a lab. They said that if you took the vaccine, you wouldn’t get sick. We know that you do get sick. We’ve seen this over and over again of the government actually promoting disinformation and then demanding censorship on the basis of that disinformation or misinformation, certainly misleading information. So there’s something going on here. We don’t totally understand it, but it’s something quite creepy. It involves the World Economic Forum constantly demanding more censorship, saying that misinformation is the number one problem in the world. We see the United Nations supposedly going after misinformation. I mean, if there’s any hope at all, it’s just that we now have the world’s richest man who’s really created a free speech platform out of Twitter in the form of X, and President-elect Trump has made very strong commitment to restoring freedom of speech to the online world, in part response to the fact that he was illegitimately deplatform, even though he had not broken any of Twitter’s rules.
And of course not to get into the Hunter Biden laptop and so many other efforts that actually led Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Meta and Facebook to apologise a few months ago for him censoring the Hunter Biden laptop, for the censorship of Covid origins, for the censorship of the Covid vaccine. Mark Zuckerberg said it was inappropriate what the government’s actions were, and certainly Elon Musk thinks that. So to see the governments of the world keep coming back for more censorship, more invasion of privacy, it’s very disturbing. And I think that’s part of why I wanted to be here, is to show some solidarity for free speech lovers here in Australia.
Rita Panahi:
Well, before you go, I want to play you a clip from the Greg Gutfeld programme. Our ambassador to the U.S, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s antics have made Gutfeld’s programme, and I don’t think Kevin Rudd’s going to like this too much.
Greg Gutfeld:
Trump’s triggering lefty foreign leaders like a Quarter Pounder at a PETA rally. Now, foreign leaders are suddenly making nice. Australia’s ambassador to America had previously called Trump, “The most destructive president in history,” but now he’s congratulating him and looking forward to working closely with Trump. No wonder the Aussies invented the boomerang. I kind of like the fact that they went from, “He’s Hitler,” to, “Hey, we could probably work with this guy.”
Rita Panahi:
Oh, Michael, there are a lot of Never Trumpers and people who were very, very bold in saying all sorts of terrible hyperbolic things about Donald Trump who are now trying to backtrack. Certainly there’s a few of them in the British government, but also right here in Australia. Tell me about that phenomenon, because it’s, I think, evident in the US as well. You’ve got the MSNBC hosts having meetings with Donald Trump after seven years of calling him Hitler.
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, there you go. I mean, and it’s not the first time that we’ve seen this. I mean, we all remember the summer when the media insisted that Joe Biden was fine and he was youthful and vibrant, and then 24 hours later they said he had to drop out of the race because of his poor performance against Donald Trump. The mainstream news media has lost so much credibility. We now know that Comcast is selling MSNBC because it’s just been a failing network. It’s lost a huge amount of audience share since the election. It misled its own viewers into thinking that Kamala Harris was winning in the polls and was poised to win, turned out to be badly wrong. And I think that we’re seeing a reaction that people have a chance now to get truth from other places, including from social media.
So yeah, I mean, you see that kind of behaviour. It’s sad, really. I mean, you see these Australian politicians who were just disparaging Trump and then now flip-flopping and saying that they want to work with them. How can you trust somebody like that? And how can you trust a government that’s trying to censor social media platforms, not just in Australia, but around the world? I mean, there’s this provision in this misinformation bill where they want to censor what people see everywhere. It just feels so aggressive and so hostile. It’s not starting the relationship with the incoming Trump administration on the right foot. I think they’re probably going to need somebody else to restart the relationship, just given the terrible things that the ambassador to the United States has said.
Rita Panahi:
I think you are absolutely right. I think that is untenable that appointment. I think Kevin needs to come home. Michael Shellenberger, thank you so much for your time tonight.
Michael Shellenberger:
Great to be with you Rita.
This transcript with Professor Michael Shellenberger talking on The Rita Panahi Show Sky News Australia 21 November 2024 has been edited for clarity.
