Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Have you ever wondered why the government is so adamant about shielding you from online content, or why the media is always in total lock step? I've no doubt it's quite comforting to believe that the government knows what's best for you and that they've got your back, but, if you're anything like me, alarm bells go off when you hear that the government are safeguarding your interests, especially when it comes to censorship. Whether you call it the mass media, the legacy media, the mainstream media or the free press, journalists of the past bravely exposed scandals without fear or favour. Some still do today, but they're often met with backlash, ridicule and diatribe.

The media once hailed itself as the fourth estate—the crucial check against government overreach and corruption and an indispensable peer for the pillar of democracy. Journalism was an honourable pursuit driven by ethics and a commitment to the truth. However, control over traditional media outlets soon became consolidated into a few hands, and, over the past three decades or so, journalism has drastically declined. Journalists today are pressured by their employers to craft narratives rather than report facts, with those narratives commonly aligning with corporate and government interests.

In the 1990s, the internet promised to fix it with decentralised control and genuine freedom of expression. In those days, the internet was merely a strange meeting place for gamers and Star Trek fans, but eventually it transformed our media consumption habits, with social media platforms emerging as influential players in news, information and entertainment. What should have developed into a space for a diverse and free dialogue has degenerated into a weapon of mass deletion.

Twitter, now X, was perfectly acceptable to the establishment when it was populated for and curated by aggrieved academics giving each other virtual back rubs over the horrors of cheap coal-fired power and colonialism. But, as soon as Elon Musk turned it into a mainstream, free speech platform, the discourse returned, the bots were eliminated and the warning sirens went off. If only we'd had Elon Musk's Twitter during COVID—a period in which the media was the greatest purveyor of misinformation and disinformation on the planet. Instead, we had the mainstream media and social media quarterbacking the establishment's narrative and removing opinions that contradicted them. The Twitter Files scandal in the US exposed the cosy relationship between these platforms and government agencies, echoing past instances of media manipulation, and the domestic Home Affairs censorship saga I exposed last year did a similar thing right here in Australia.

If you think this sounds too far-fetched, remember that, in the 1960s, the CIA ran Operation Mockingbird, a clandestine venture designed to influence journalists and media organisations in order to affect public opinion and control the news cycle. And how about Google? The company's wistful origin story is that it was the brainchild of two young go-getters at Stanford, but missing from that magical story is the part about how it was reportedly started in 1995 as a DARPA-funded project for the CIA and the NSA.

Many social media platforms, to this day, hire former intelligence employees, most of whom work in trust and safety teams determining what content gets amplified or fact-checked and what gets taken down entirely. Big tech is the perfect intersection between government, the ruling class and the intelligence services, along with their mates in big business. You see what they want you to see.

Australia is at the tip of the spear of a global censorship movement, and I suspect that many who are involved are blissfully unaware and think that they're doing the right thing by shutting down and deleting so-called mis- and disinformation. But let's be clear: the government isn't thinking about your safety, and it doesn't care about misinformation. What it cares about is making sure that you see an approved message at all times.