Thursday, 31 July 2025

Freedom of speech

David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (09:53): In 2019 the BBC launched the Trusted News Initiative. You may not have ever heard of it, but it controlled a lot of what you saw and heard during the COVID-19 pandemic. Started as an initiative to combat election misinformation, it pivoted during COVID to being the centralised global body that shaped what appeared in the public digital space. Partners included Google, Microsoft, Meta and Twitter. This handful of people were responsible for suspending accounts, removing posts and shaping the global narrative into a small list of acceptable opinions. It was our first experiment in global censorship and information control. Governments around the world had a taste of it, though, and we have since seen an explosion of censorship laws, usually labelled as combating misinformation, online safety or combating hate speech. The censors at TNI got a lot of things wrong too, such as the lab leak theory, whether vaccines prevented disease transmission and much more.

The Australian Online Safety Act 2021 was quietly passed into law by the Morrison Liberal government in 2021, granting the eSafety Commissioner extraordinary powers. She has wasted no time in trying to censor the internet globally and implement social media bans which would require universal online identity checks. I urge all Australians to remain vigilant to these emerging threats to freedom and democracy.