The proposed Digital Duty of Care laws are a clear threat to Australians’ freedom of speech, association, and political participation. They’re measures that correlate closely to what US officials describe as ‘viewpoint-based censorship’ and ‘extraterritorial censorship of protected speech.’
In the latest ‘Australia Censored’ podcast, IPA Research Fellow Margaret Chambers is joined by Michael Shellenberger, founder of the independent news site Public and CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin Texas.
They discuss the vague and expanding definitions of ‘serious harms’, broad rules that encourage excessive corporate compliance, and increased surveillance of internet users.
Below is a transcript of the show.
Michael Shellenberger:
It’s chilling, it’s disturbing. I’m disturbed at multiple levels, but what we’re talking about here that she’s calling unsafe are certain people’s opinions. That’s, I think, the most important part of it. And in some cases, certain people’s facts. You’re not supposed to be protected from people’s opinions. To be a free citizen and not a slave means that you have to be prepared and responsible and an informed citizen, and you can’t wilt when somebody says something that disagrees with you.
Margaret Chambers:
Welcome to Australia Censored. Recently, the Albanese government released an exposure draught of its digital duty of care legislation. Now, the bottom line is that this is just yet another attempt to censor Australia’s internet. The government wants to create a single overarching duty of care where online platforms must create a so-called safe online environment. Now, to do that, they must address seriously harmful material, and the communications minister will even have the power to expand that list of harms in the future. Now, what this represents is a significant and chilling threat to freedom of speech in Australia. Now joining me today to talk about this is Michael Shellenberger, founder of the independent News Site Public and also the CPR Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin, Texas. Now, Michael was one of the leading journalists on the Twitter files, breaking the story of how the government coerced the former platform known as Twitter to remove certain content. Now, he’s provided testimony to the US Congress on free speech, global censorship, and the environment. Michael, thanks for your time.
Michael Shellenberger:
Thanks for having me on.
Margaret Chambers:
Now, Michael, you were one of the leading journalists to break the story about the Twitter files on what was called Twitter, but is now called X. Could you tell us a bit about what you found?
Michael Shellenberger:
Sure. So the Twitter files were opened up by Elon Musk shortly after he bought what was then known as Twitter in around, I think October 2022. Matt Taibbi, another independent journalist, was the first to go in and was under a lot of pressure from Elon to publish something quickly, got something out. Then Bari Weiss, who’s now the editor-in-chief of CBS News, got in and she brought me in as well. And I think there’s sort of two layers. I mean, the first layer of it was discovering that in fact, shadow-banning was real. Shadow-banning, people may remember, it was viewed as a conspiracy theory. That’s very important. That people thought that they were being censored because they would post something, but it wouldn’t go viral, nobody would see it. And Twitter had said previously that they do not shadow-ban. And in fact, when Matt and Bari were there, Elon required the head of Trust and Safety, which is the name of the censorship part of Twitter to see these very elaborate…
Matt describes it as a kind of NORAD, kind of a missile defence, but just a very elaborate multiple screens and that they had many different ways of shadow-banning people. There were ways of basically reducing virality is sort of the idea, but they were actively doing this on many people. Some of the people included Charlie Kirk, who of course was assassinated last year. It included Jay Bhattacharya, who was then a Stanford professor and is now the director of the National Institutes of Health, which is our very large biomedical governmental research programme. It censored Martin Kulldorff, who was a Harvard medical professor. And for him in the case, he said that, “Well, if you’ve had COVID already, then you have natural immunity.” And they censored that even though we’ve known about natural immunity for 2,500 years.
So the censorship was really out of control and it had a partisan bias. And so you saw that over 95% of Twitter staff had donated… Or those who had donated had donated to Democrats. It’s in San Francisco. I mean, it’s an extremely left company, so it was clearly biassed. But then after a while, Matt and I started to notice that we were seeing emails coming in from the FBI, from the Department of Homeland Security, which is the agency that we created after 9/11. We started to see a lot of people asking for things to be censored, including government officials, but also a set of shadowy people who didn’t appear to be the government, but were asking for things to be taken down.
Over time, we learned that really the same operation that had been active within the FBI to first dismiss Hillary Clinton’s email server and then second, begin the Russia collusion hoax, which was a disinformation effort, aimed at suggesting that Trump was somehow controlled by Putin, and then the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop, that these things that all appeared to be separate actually were all part… And we now know this, this isn’t just what we discovered then, this is now what we know now years later, but they were really all part of an ongoing FBI operation that was being done by the counterintelligence part of the FBI out of the excuse that they were identifying foreign interference in our elections and foreign interference on our online platforms. So anyway, that’s just the tip of it, but basically I think the most shocking part of it all was just discovering a significant involvement of, I would say, politicised and highly partisan elements of the intelligence community.
Margaret Chambers:
Right. Now I want to shift your attention more to the Australian context because last week, as you know, my colleague and I, Dr. Andrew Bushnell, called you on the phone and we were telling you about how this draught was about to be released. This is exposure draught on the draught, digital duty of care. As the bill came through, I could hear you on the other end of the line, your reactions to what the bill was. Could you tell us about what your first impressions were?
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, yeah, I mean, we were reading it together on the phone and particularly we saw this clause that said that essentially the government would be allowed to censor anything that “may cause serious harm.” Well, I mean, you don’t have to be an expert in censorship to know that that means that anything can be labelled as serious harm. And not only that, but there’s actually a very large amount of research, academic research, other research showing that the way people define harm has increased significantly. If you think back to our grandparents, harm was being physically assaulted or even the word trauma now, it was really physical abuse over time, that that was considered abuse or harm or trauma. Now people describe their feelings being hurt as serious harm, and that’s not a joke. That is definitely how a lot of people think about it. Unfortunately, it’s gotten worse over time, so younger generations are even more sensitive to it. But essentially, anything causes serious harm.
I think another provision of the bill that was alarming was anything on social media that appeared to encourage illegal actions. Well, this is something that honestly is funny that the left should be worried about because it means that potentially if you’re on X sharing a post or on Instagram sharing a post supporting civil disobedience by, let’s say, anti-Israel, pro-Palestine activists, they could potentially censor you. And I would say the third part that’s the most disturbing is just that because it has such a broad definition and it gives the government such extraordinary powers alongside this insane potential fine of 109 million Australian dollars, means that the companies would have every incentive to censor much more than they even think would be required under the law just to avoid those penalties.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, that’s right. So I guess my next question is, well, why do you think the government is doing this? Why does the Albanese government have this obsession with regulating and eliminating seriously harmful material?
Michael Shellenberger:
I mean, I don’t think it’s a mystery. I mean, I’m not Australian, so obviously I don’t have a complete view and I respect a lot of what IPA publishes and your analyses, but just looking from outside the country, you see the emergence of One Nation, which is a very familiar looking anti-mass migration populist movement, party rather, that is very similar to other anti-mass migration parties in Europe, particularly Reform in Britain, AFD in Germany and RN in France. All of those organisations, all those political parties are also organisations that people have tried to censor or want to censor or are seeking ways to censor.
So we saw obviously this, or you all saw a significant victory for One Nation recently, I think it was over the summer, a surprise sort of victory by One Nation and just a huge increase in public support for One Nation. And then you see the government themselves talk about saying things that intimate pretty clearly that they’re concerned about anti-migrant voices online. I think given the pattern where migration along with things like COVID, climate change, transgenderism, I would say is one of the top four issues. It might be the number one issue now that the people that want to censor the internet, that’s one of the main justifications for it.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, I think that’s right. And I mean, you just mentioned, you’ve written extensively on the situation in the EU, in the States, but also in Germany and the UK. Could you walk us through a little bit how what we have compares to what they have overseas? Because you mentioned this as part of just a broader censorship industrial complex. Could you tell us about that?
Michael Shellenberger:
Sure. So censorship industrial complex is a term that refers to the military industrial complex, which was what our former President Dwight Eisenhower described in his farewell address in… I believe it’s 1960. He was president from ’52 to ’60 or ’53 to ’60. And what he was actually describing, people don’t know this, but he was really describing think tanks and sort of NGOs that received money from military contractors who might use their powers of persuasion to persuade the country to go to wars that they didn’t need to go towards. And so what we discovered when we discovered the significant involvement of the intelligence community, we had the National Science Foundation, which is our biggest funder of academic research funding AI tools for censorship. We saw a lot of the actors like MIT as one of the really bad actors, but also Stanford. MIT and Stanford are two of the biggest, most important universities that work with the Defence Department and the intelligence community.
And it’s also what you would call the foreign policy establishment. So in the same way that the CIA works alongside the US State Department, you have a set of think tanks that we call the foreign policy establishment that work alongside the intelligence community, and they have been the main advocates of censorship. Now, I should say it’s been partisan and ideological elements within the intelligence community and the foreign policy establishment that have been calling for that. But it is better though of as a single thing, the censorship industrial complex. So when you pull back and you look at Australia, Britain, France, Germany, the United States, you see identical arguments being made, identical policies, identical strategies that are all themselves misleading.
And this is an important part of it because in our view, when you look at the big cases of censorship, they were preceded by spreading misinformation and then demanding the censorship on the basis of that. So I mentioned natural immunity, the idea that there’s no such thing as national immunity for COVID is misinformation. The idea that the Russians had something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop was misinformation. I mean, I think it’s sort of say the idea that mass migration has no consequences is misinformation. I think people think with good reason that it does, and now we see in Europe, for example, the crime data, which the governments had essentially hidden or not released the nationality of the perpetrators, it’s significant. It’s significant multiples higher of crime, including of group rapes among foreign nationals that are in Germany, France, and Britain than from the native population.
And so you sort of realise that what you’re looking at are what the technical term of art is information operations that were sort of pioneered by the intelligence community to use in regime change operations, the most important of which were the Arab Spring and the colour revolutions. And I’m not by any means suggesting that the CIA was the most important actor in those or that it played a decisive role, but clearly it played a role. There’s no question about that. And there’s been this conversation in the intelligence community about hybrid warfare for a very long time about using information for warfare. So just to put a fine point on it, there was a meeting at Stanford last year in the fall that included representatives from Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Brazil, and the delegation from Australia included your e-safety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant.
And so it’s not like… They all know each other. They have meetings together, they write reports together. And I think the interesting thing is how much are they still part of the intelligence community? Because Trump, when he came in, he shut down large parts of the censorship industrial complex, but the very nature of the way it operates meant that a lot of those people would then go into NGOs and many of them would go to Europe. And Julie Inman Grant, who famously said that the CIA had recruited her and she claims that she did not accept their offer, she’s an American and I think it’s very suspicious. I don’t have any proof that she’s working for the intelligence community, but I think that what we see are sort of very ideological elements that then find private sector donations and foundations and philanthropies to support them when they’re out of power.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah. So some of my work has been examining the role of the eSafety Commissioner over the past 10 years because she actually began as the children’s eSafety commissioner, and then her role expanded quite dramatically to include policing the entire internet for adults as well. But since 2017, she’s been using her platform and also these global forums to push for the idea of safety by design. And she’s fond of using the metaphor of seat belts and airbags. And she’s like, “Well, these reforms are just part of engineering harm out of these internet products.” What do you think of that analogy? How would you respond to it?
Michael Shellenberger:
It’s chilling, it’s disturbing. I’m disturbed at multiple levels, but what we’re talking about here that she’s calling unsafe are certain people’s opinions. That’s I think the most important part of it. And in some cases, certain people’s facts. And so we have seen them censor, as I mentioned, true facts. And they have various folks, including Katherine Marr, who was working in Yemen during the Arab Spring revolutions and was accused of being part of the CIA, and then later became part of our public radio broadcaster, NPR.
She famously gave a TED Talk where she said that we focus too much on facts and the truth and we really need to be more focused on making things safe. That’s a really creepy Orwellian totalitarian mentality. You’re not supposed to be protected from people’s opinions. To be a free citizen and not a slave means that you have to be prepared and responsible and an informed citizen, and you can’t wilt when somebody says something that disagrees with you. And so they’re also very clever because they will run back… As soon as you accuse them of this, they then say, “Oh, we’re just trying to protect the children.” Well, but you look at the legislation and that’s not what it does. And then you look at the context of it and it’s clearly not driven by that. It’s driven by this rise of populism. So it’s just fundamentally dishonest. I think the other thing that’s so disturbing about it is just that it works on a lot of people.
I think that they really believe it. I just had in terms of foreign… It’s interesting that just literally an hour before I got on this podcast with you, I’ve been in a multi-email correspondence with a member of the French Congress, a federal deputy in Congress who’s an advocate for censorship and him basically making the exact same arguments. And I thought to myself… This is what he was sort of saying, well, in France it’s different, but actually the arguments that he’s made for censorship are no different than the arguments that were made here. And the arguments that are being made in Australia for censorship are really no different from the arguments here, which like I said, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think that they have a very deliberate strategy. And I’ll add one other thing, which is that we do see… We know for a fact that Five Eyes nations, which are all the English-speaking nations, US, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, we know for a fact that we will work with foreign intelligence agencies to do things that we’re not allowed to do.
And there’s evidence that that goes the other way. And so when you look at these efforts in those English-speaking countries to engage in censorship, I think it’s not unreasonable to imagine that this is either Five Eyes or started as Five Eyes or as Five Eyes adjacent. And it makes sense because I think that there’s a lot of reasons why the intelligence community would want to get control over speech and get control over certain issues related to foreign policy. I think most of that got shut down in the United States, but like I said, I think these people move around. And so for me as an American, people might say, “Well, why do you as American care about Australia?” And in fact, many of my friends ask the same question, “Why are you worried about these foreign countries? You’re an American.” And it’s because I don’t think the censorship industrial complex respects boundaries. I think it’s like a single rhizome. It’s like a mushroom that’s a single organism and just pops up here and there whenever it needs to or sees an opportunity.
Margaret Chambers:
Well, I think someone who’s not fond of the whole safety by design kind of argument is your president, Donald Trump. So I mean, we’ve seen some reactions from the White House about this legislation, but there’s a possibility that it could actually get worse because the government needs the support of either the Greens or the coalition to pass it through our upper house. And the Greens have actually called for higher penalties. They want 10% of global turnover versus what is currently over a hundred million dollars in the drafting of the bill. That’s the current penalty, but they want to increase. So I mean, how do you think the Trump administration is likely to react to that?
Michael Shellenberger:
Yeah, I mean, before I answer that, I just would say that I think it’s really important for everybody to be aware that when they make these proposals, they are absolutely counting on them being watered down in the process and having to compromise on things. Because one reason you would ask why do they come up with such extreme proposals? They seem so insane. Well, that’s so that they can make concessions and try to win over partners to pass the legislation. And I think they’re delighted to have the Greens take a more extreme position and Greens are happy to play that role. But ultimately, the real threat is that anything gets through because once you get the camel’s nose, then they’re really going to constantly be seeking to expand it. Look, I think the president was censored. The most important thing you need to understand about President Trump is that he was not only censored repeatedly by the social media platforms, but he was de-platformed, meaning they kicked him off the platforms.
And that decision, particularly Twitter and Facebook, and that decision was so shocking at the time that other world leaders, including ones that favour censorship, reacted quite negatively to that. I mean, imagine you’re a French presidential candidate or an Australian presidential candidate, and suddenly you can’t use X, formerly Twitter. I mean, your campaign might just be over at that point. I mean, you’re just off of the most important communications channel. So he understands that the censorship is a political tool and a political strategy by people who are trying to stop politicians like him. So he obviously hates it. The censorship… His executive order shutting down the major pieces of the censorship industrial complex were among the first executive orders he signed after his inauguration. So he cares hugely about it.
Now he had a sort of on again, off again relationship with Elon Musk, but they are back to being very close allies at this point. Elon Musk has put in tens of millions of dollars into supporting Republican candidates. It was interesting because when I was interviewing you and your colleagues to do my first story on Australia, in between us talking and then me publishing, the White House had already condemned the Australia legislation. So look, I think it’s a really big deal that your Prime Minister Albanese would decide to do something that he knows the President of the United States is absolutely against. Albanese boasted of the trade and minerals deal, which is very good for Australia. I think President Trump obviously felt like it was a win-win. It looked like a victory for Albanese. He must really want to censor his opponents if he’s going to put in jeopardy that trade and minerals deal and his relationship with President Trump.
I think the only reason we haven’t seen more being said by the Trump administration on this is that it all happened in the middle of their midterm convention last week, and they were just all swamped on that. And obviously there’s a lot going on between now and our elections in early November. But look, basically what happened to the United States is that censorship was a progressive, left-wing, what we say liberal, progressive issue for decades. I mean, it was the ACLU, our famous free speech organisation that supported the right of neo-Nazis to march in Illinois, which is a standard that no other country has ever come close to. And that was the Democrats, were the pro-free speech party. And so I think the Republicans took that free speech issue away from Democrats.
And I know for a fact that certainly it wasn’t as important as inflation or closing the border, but it was close after that. Free speech is something that is extremely important to the American people. It’s something where I think that the Republicans felt like they were able to gain an advantage and win votes from what we would sometimes call anti-woke liberals or sort of disaffected progressives who were sort of fed up with how extreme the left had begun. So look, I think it’s a big deal. I think the fact that Albanese decided to do this, given how important the trade and minerals deal for him was, shows a sign of how much they really feel like they need censorship because I do think it puts in jeopardy the relationship with the president.
Margaret Chambers:
And I mean, it wouldn’t be Albanese’s first time trying to get up a censorship suite of laws. A couple of years ago, you came over to help us defeat the misinformation laws. And I think one of the issues that we’ve had, especially with regard to the digital duty of care, is that the mainstream media has really been pushing the government’s line on it. So I remember when you were over here for the misinformation laws to help us with that project to get it defeated, I remember we were in Canberra and there was a press conference that you were a part of and a journalist there asked you, she was like, “Oh, so what do we do about all of this misinformation?” And I remember you saying, “Well, that’s your job. What we need is more speech to combat bad ideas.” But I mean, what do you think has happened to the mainstream media? Has it always been like this or what do you think has gone wrong?
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, Margaret, I’m so glad you reminded me of that because that just shows how lost I think journalists are where they would… For me, misinformation, I’m a working journalist, that’s how I make my income, that’s what I do. I fight censorship off the side of my desk and because it’s in my interest to fight censorship, and of course because I believe in it, but the idea that journalists would look at misinformation as something that’s the responsibility of the government to censor, that’s not the spirit of… For me, when there’s misinformation, I’m like, “Well, this will be an amazing story to write about because the facts are all on my side and I can just debunk this widespread myth.” And that’s how you grow your subscribers, and that’s what ambitious journalists have been doing for hundreds of years is discovering various forms of misinformation and debunking them and revealing things.
So yeah, I thought that was sort of a sad statement on the mentality of folks in journalism, but it’s just what you said. I mean, journalism is just not what it was. We like watching these old movies where you see the journalists just really fighting the power, standing up to the government, being on the side of the people, and traditionally it was a working class job because reporting is not something you need a PhD for. Reporting is can you get people to talk to you? Can you go call people up and get them to give you an interview or reveal information? These are skills that don’t require an advanced degree or even a college degree, but the profession became… Well, journalism became professionalised and it became very arrogant and very censorial.
And it’s weird, but it is like much of the censorship really is from the media. And we kept discovering this, including in the Twitter files where you would see Twitter employees saying, “Oh, so-and-so from NBC News or so-and-so from some mainstream news media outlet wants to know when we’re going to take this stuff down.” I mean, it’s very weird for me. I’m a Gen Xer and came from the left, was on the left for most of my career, and it was just accepted that we were the free speech side. And it has never occurred to me when I encounter terrible misinformation out there that I’ve reported on that I would want somebody to censor it. I mean, it’s just a bizarre view, and I think it is part of the safetyism, this idea that, oh, people that are saying these things that they think are mean or something should be censored. That’s not the spirit or the ethos of true journalists. Journalists are eager to publicly debunk misinformation. We’re not going to go call on the big government or the nanny state to censor the things that we should be reporting on.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, and I think these are the people who claim to care about the safety of children are the same people who said nothing when Melbourne was in lockdown for months, what felt like years. They said absolutely nothing. They were complicit in that whole system of control. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk just a little bit about AI, because a part of this proposal is that AI chatbots and also their data centres will be caught up in this duty of creating a safe online environment. I know you’ve given testimony before Congress about the role of censorship and AI. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Michael Shellenberger:
Sure, absolutely. I mean, AI is already revolutionising how we use the internet. I personally use AI for probably 95% of my searches. The ability to do searches that result and summarise from multiple sources is absolutely extraordinary. And then social media, that was funny because I was actually thinking about this last night. I love social media. It’s wonderful. It’s a major technological revolution. Sometimes I just find myself using AI because I find the information I get from AI better than what I get from social media. And so of course they’re going to want to censor AI. And we’ve seen the very same dynamic that I was describing at Twitter, the very famous that when Google first rolled out its AI, I believe, I want to say 2024, don’t quote me on that, but they would ask things like draw a picture of the American founders and they were all African American or they couldn’t get them to draw a picture of a white founding father.
Just very woke stuff built into those AI systems. The people that work at those companies are extremely on the left. Again, it’s like 95% or more donations to Democrats. So it’s already bad. And so then you’re going to have the government getting in there and saying, “Oh, certain kinds of things have to be labelled unsafe.” And there’s a second reason here, Margaret, why I think that’s so dangerous, which is that there are dangerous things that AI should not help people to do. AI should not help people to create a bioweapon. They should not help people to plan a terrorist attack. And I should say, because people misrepresent my views on this, I am not against censorship in all cases. I’m obviously against a lot of forms of speech that should be illegal, chief among them, child exploitation, but also the immediate incitement to violence. So for example, Britain censored a woman who said we should go burn down all the migrant hotels after there was a stabbing of a bunch of little girls at a Taylor Swift event.
And they ended up putting her in prison, which was too extreme, but I think that her post should have been censored and I don’t think that that’s okay to do. I think that immediate incitement, and I think it’s got to be immediate, by the way, that’s the test that our Supreme Court uses. I think that should be censored. And likewise, there’s a big debate happening at the same time as all this on AI safety. So you can see how bad it would be if somehow the people just lowered the bar more and more on AI safety. We need really radical levels of free expression and free though and free searches on the internet. But I think everybody in the society agrees that we don’t want AI to help people to create super weapons or to commit crimes. I mean, this is just obvious. We don’t want them to commit crimes.
And that’s what they’re constantly doing. This is the work that the censors are doing that is… The hidden danger is that they’re constantly trying to blur the line between criminal behaviour, criminal speech, and what they call hatred. Hatred is a universal emotion and it’s ugly, but it’s like nobody’s free of hatred and one person’s hatred is another person’s criticism. So I find it quite disturbing, quite chilling, and it is notable that the censorship industrial complex in the United States was actively funding AI censorship tools that… I mean, get this, they were developing these tools at these various universities, including MIT, that the whole idea was to give the tools for free to the social media companies so that they would use them. So look, I think it’s a huge issue and we probably don’t even talk about it enough.
Margaret Chambers:
That is disturbing. Michael, in the United States, you obviously have constitutional protections for freedom of speech, which is something that we just don’t have in Australia. So last time it was the misinformation laws, now it’s the Digital Duty of Care. And I think if this doesn’t pass, they’ll just reinvent themselves and come out with something else in the future. What do you think in Australia, what can we actually do to stop this sort of onslaught from the census?
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, I think the first thing that is important for everybody to remember is that language is so powerful and that the people that want censorship are always trying to manipulate language to call what they’re doing something else. So for me, I think it’s always very important to call it censorship legislation. I don’t think it’s accurate to call it Digital Duty of Care. The people that are sponsoring it are not doing it because they care. They’re doing it because they want to censor their political enemies. And so I think it’s very important to just call it what it is, which is censorship legislation. And we know that that’s really important and powerful. When we first started talking to people in Brazil, we asked them what works to try to stop this stuff. And they said, “The first thing is you just have to call it what it is, which is censorship.”
So this is the great lessons of the very wise George Orwell and the way that totalitarians will try to manipulate language. So I think we have to call the censorship for what it is. I don’t know the internal politics of Australia. I hear about it. I know that the left is supporting it. I would just say directly to them, and it may not work, probably fall on deaf ears, but if you support these anti-Israel pro-Palestinian protests, many of which are engaged in civil disobedience and illegal action, you should be very afraid of this legislation. If your enemies are as terrible as you say they are, then imagine what they would do when they come into power against you. So I would just say, I don’t know that I’m the right person to communicate this to them. I don’t know who is, but it is incredible.
One of the things we discovered in the research, this is universal, is that the people who want the censorship literally never consider that they might be censored. It’s actually a kind of blindness. There’s actually a psychological term for it. They study it where people that are often guilty of the thing that they’re accusing others of are not aware of it. It’s just this very unconscious thing. So just to say, look, these tools are extremely dangerous, they’ll go after anybody. And then I think you have to point to the real motivations. I just think it’s transparent that this government… I mean, you all know better than anybody, you’ve done the research on it. They’re not presenting any evidence of online speech that’s causing real world harm. And anybody who doesn’t believe it, just take a couple of hours or an hour and go online and see if you can find evidence or scholarly evidence, university evidence showing that things that people say on the internet cause real world harm.
It basically doesn’t exist. There’s nobody out there that says something like, “Oh, somebody was just peaceful and normal and then they read something online and then they went and murdered somebody.” It’s absurd. And not only that, but those exact same arguments had been made about violent movies, about violent television shows, and all of that science had been debunked long before the internet was ever invented. So there’s really no case, actually there’s no evidence or reason to think the kind of censorship that they’re proposing has anything to do with real world harm. Your institute obviously wrote a very important piece after the Bondi attack, predicting that the government would use the Bondi attack to censor, and not to censor Islamic fundamentalism online, but to censor people that were critical of mass migration.
So imagine this dystopian Black Mirror future where you’d have people being victimised and not being able to talk about it online. And again, that’s what we see all over the world. We’re just not allowed to say that these policies might be hurting people. And so I don’t think that this is good intentions gone bad. I think the people that are pushing this have bad intentions. I think their intentions are to hurt their political enemies, really anybody who’s critical of mass migration, not people that are inciting violence. And beyond that, I mean, I think they’ll go after people that have critical things to say about the apocalyptic climate change discourse, critical things to say about renewables, critical things to say about trans-identified people.
We know that… People sometimes say it’s a slippery slope, but really what happens is once the government gets these powers to censor, they love to use them right away. And the final thing I’ll say is that the Australian eSafety Commissioner really wants to censor everybody. And she made that clear when she tried to censor the stabbing video, not just in Australia, but worldwide. Blessedly, an Australian judge struck that down. So we’re rooting for the independence and free thinking nature of the Australian judges, but I think the Australians have a very… The Australian eSafety Commissioner and the Communications Minister, I believe it’s Alexandra Wells, is that right?
Margaret Chambers:
Anika Wells.
Michael Shellenberger:
Anika Wells. We watched these videos by her, I think it was a day after you and I were talking, and she was not prepared. I mean, it was really shocking. Reporters asking her basic questions about what her bill would censor, and she did not have good answers. And I think that she did other interviews like that where she could not really justify their legislation. They’re not able to use reason and evidence and logic to justify what they’re doing. So huge red flag. I think continue to… IPA is doing such amazing work, so keep up your work and I hope you’re mobilising your supporters and members. I would also just say, look, I think the free speech cause is a righteous cause. I think it’s a sacred cause. I think it’s the most special issue I’ve ever worked on. I view it as a spiritual issue because I would rather die than live without being able to express myself. And I think there’s many, many other people in the West, millions of other people that feel the same way.
Margaret Chambers:
Well, Michael, we’re so grateful that you join us today, and thank you for all your work to fight censorship globally.
Michael Shellenberger:
Thanks for having me, Margaret.
