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Submissions close today!
It’s better to say something short than nothing at all. Let it be known that we have grave concerns, and far too little time to debate and discuss such far reaching legislation. Please read submissions posted below and add your own here too. Thank you! — Jo
Upload your submission here (button on the right hand side)
Committee Secretariat contact:
Committee Secretary Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications PO Box 6100 Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600 Phone: +61 2 6277 3526 [email protected]
Public submission regarding: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024.
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The Misinformation Bill is not just wholly unnecessary, it’s an abject travesty. How did such a preposterous overbearing, undemocratic, anti-science and dangerous piece of legislation get past the first focus group? It wouldn’t survive a high-school debate, and yet, here it is?
Misinformation is easy to correct when you own a billion dollar news agency, most academics, institutions, expert committees and 25% of the economy. The really hard thing, even with all that power and money is to defend an absurd lie and stop people pointing it out, which is surely the main purpose of […]
The Ministry of Truth will control your every online conversation
By Jo Nova
The Censors are always the bad guys
The only way to fix misinformation is with better information.
Dear Australians, we only have until Monday to lodge a submission against the proposed amended Misinformation bill.
It’s a bill so bad warnings are coming from the far side of the world
The Cato Institute warns that if Tech companies take the simple route and comply with the Australian proposal Americans using mostly American companies may be effectively subject to misinformation rules set by foreign governments (and that may be the point, eh?) The great leftist global machine gets “help” with every country conquered by censorship glue.
Why do the guys with galactic megaphones need to shut you up?
Suppose misinformation was harming Australians, what stops the government giving us the correct information? They have the billion-dollar ABC, the billion-dollar CSIRO, the entire tamed academic sector, every school in Australia (they’re all funded and controlled by the government) — and yet somehow against this, an unfunded mum or dad writing on Facebook or a blog might harm trust in government institutions and therefore must be shut down, before […]
By Jo Nova
A group of arty psychologists has accidentally shown how much skeptics can achieve if they just speak up.
The small, poorly worded study, done by people who have little understanding of the climate debate, or even of the scientific method, doesn’t prove much at all. But if you start with 170 people who have been fed propaganda for years and then ask some random questions, whatever you repeat seems more believable. We could have learnt so much more if these psychologists did not start so confused themselves.
Their big “discovery” was that hearing something skeptical a second time gave it a significant boost in believability, even when the audience were 90% believers. Their big conclusion was the advice to essentially never utter a skeptical word, just repeat the propaganda:
“Do not repeat false information. Instead, repeat what is true and enhance its familiarity.”
They appear to be oblivious that their advice essentially kills the idea of open public debate. They don’t mention public debate or free speech. Possibly, since they are at an Australian university, they’ve never come across it.
But the core message comes through at The Guardian — they are scared skeptics […]
By Jo Nova
We know what secrets they fear the most, by how they overreact
In France, the second largest news network let an economist go on air and declare he thought global warming was a lie and a scam used to justify State intervention. He even went on to say it is a form of totalitarianism. Shockingly (to the regulators Arcom), the CNEWS TV hosts did not contest this, and nor did anyone else in the studio. For this, 11 months later, the TV channel is being fined €20,000.
Too close to the truth then?
A popular French rolling news channel has been fined for broadcasting climate scepticism unchallenged
By Saskia O’Donoghue, EuroNews
During the programme, prominent economist Philippe Herlin shared personal climate scepticism – but was not contradicted by anybody else in the TV studio, including the hosts.
“Anthropogenic global warming is a lie, a scam… Explaining to us that it is because of Man, no, that is a conspiracy, and why does that have so much weight?”, Herlin said. “Because it justifies the intervention of the State in our lives, and it absolves the State from having to reduce its […]
By Jo Nova
Stop Storms with Censorship!
The UN Chief reminds us that we are babies who need an unelected tribal chieftain to protect us from seeing naughty persuasive words. Lord help us if grown up doctors, dentists, economists and people who keep planes-in-the-sky are accidentally exposed to The Word Of Exxon, or Shell, or BP. They might vote the wrong way, or buy the wrong car. They might influence their own children. (They might wonder why they pay money to The UN?)
What looks acts and smells like a global government in waiting? The United Nations wants your money and control over what you read and see. They also want control over the voices of the industry they are proposing to destroy.
The latest science decree from the Experts is that fossil fuel companies are the “Godfathers of climate chaos”. They’re probably sneaking around behind you like the mafia, dropping flood-bombs on your children’s school and raining on your Pride Parade. Fossil fuels are just like tobacco now — apart from how they harvest the fields and feed the children and fly us to Barbados for beachy weekends. (Marlboro only did that in the adverts…)
The UN need […]
By Jo Nova
In the last couple of weeks a New Zealand whistleblower came forward with detailed, but anonymized data showing that certain batches of the experimental you-know-what, were associated with shockingly high mortality rates. As this news started to spread, the government could have responded to correct or explain this, instead they arrested him, thus accidentally verifying that the data he showed was not wrong, but real. His crime apparently was not faking-up the data, but “accessing a computer system for dishonest purposes” which seems like a very strange crime given that, as he describes it, he was paid to work with the data, and the results of public health data is — in a free society — supposed to be public.
In the world we thought we lived in, we would assume that the NZ government would already know and track the mortality of all the batches they forced the citizens to take. Unless they were grossly incompetent or inherently corrupted by, hypothetically say, large multinational entities earning a hundred billion dollars — authorities would have the real death rates at their fingertips, surely? So if he faked the data, or misinterpreted it, or he made an […]
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The Government is not afraid of misinformation, they are afraid you will speak the Truth
Add your submission by August 20th
Misinformation is easy to correct when you own a billion dollar news agency, most academics, institutions, expert committees and 25% of the economy. The really hard thing, even with all that power and money is to defend an absurd lie and stop people pointing it out. Like for example if you want to spend a trillion dollars of taxpayer money using power stations, cars and steak sandwiches to change the global weather. For that, you need the Ministry of Truth to force the falsity on the serfs.
The best way to deal with misinformation is to speak better information.
Let the court of public opinion decide. There is something profoundly arrogant about the assumption that 26 million brains are too stupid to figure out the truth when left to their collective free debate.
The proposed Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) misinformation bill is truly the draft that Mao or the Politburo would have admired. Effectively if you are government “approved” (institutional, […]
By Jo Nova
Is the Commonwealth Games just another target of the Culture Wars?
The Commonwealth is the largest cultural union of nations across the globe. It includes one third of the world’s population in a group of 56 nations with 2.4 billion people. It could also be the largest trading block in the world, if only member nations wanted it to be that way. And who wouldn’t — well, obviously the EU and the Chinese Communist Party wouldn’t. For them, The Commonwealth is a threat, a club they can’t control, a sleeping giant. It’s kind of an inverse “Belt and Road” — but one that spread democracy and human rights.
Maybe its nothing, but Dan Andrews (premier of Victoria) who signed up to host the 2026 Commonwealth Games, then abruptly sank it, also once signed the state up for the Belt and Road program, which the Federal government blocked.
So we have to ask — who benefits from the shock announcement to cancel the Commonwealth Games?
Why suddenly was an athletic carnival not worth doing for anything less than $7 billion dollars? As The Australian points out, The Gold Coast hosted the Games in 2018 for $1.8 […]
By Jo Nova
A US judge has finally ruled what we knew all along — that it’s not OK for The US Government to collude with Big Tech to silence critics and political opponents.
It’s a reminder that Australians have no right to free speech. It’s time we had our own “First Amendment” written into the constitution. Instead of a referendum for a Voice for some Australians (which is happening this year) we need a Referendum for a Voice for All Australians — one that guarantees their right to speak, no matter what color their skin is, where their ancestors lived, or which team they vote for.
Newseum Tablet of the First Amendment | Photo by DBKing. Amended.
The US Republican States may yet save us all — the Attorney Generals of Louisiana and Missouri accused the Biden bureaucracy of actively colluding with the Tech Giants to suspend critics or remove comments. Finally, a judge in a District Court has ruled that this must stop.
Judge Delivers Major Blow to Biden Admin in Social Media Censorship Case
By Tony Ozimek, The Epoch Times
A federal judge has made a historic ruling by partially granting […]
Image by Gerd Altmann
By Jo Nova
Matt Taibbi talked in London about what he and Michael Shellenberger found in the Twitter files. He realized the free speech battle has evolved into something new — where reality is altered and people are coached into forgetting what they saw, and censoring themselves. A kind of mass digital brainwashing.
In the Twitter Files there was a sinister pattern of “deamplifying” people’s true stories, their experiences, and then deamplifying the person themselves. Running parallel with this was a program to reduce our language, our world into a polarized one-nil, good-bad, us-them division where all shades of complexity were extinguished — so people who had vaccines but didn’t like mandates were anti-vaxxers, and people who had some vaccines, the injured, the unvaccinated — were all “anti-vaxxers”. This was a dystopia George Orwell predicted — the binary existence where there are no shades of gray. There is no safe middle ground. There is only rightthink and wrongthink.
The Elite War on Free Thought
Matt Taibbi, Racket News
Michael and I are here to tell a horror story that […]
By Jo Nova
Exxon was told to jump through circus hoops like a performing seal and report the risks of NetZero to Exxon shareholders. But Exxon pushed back by pointing out that NetZero-by-2050 is so impossible it will never happen, and therefore the risks are not even worth assessing. Furthermore, and rather damningly, Exxon said, society would be unlikely to “accept the degradation in the global standard of living required“. Exxon has taken was was supposed to be another PR win for the narrative and turned it into a media weapon.
This is exactly why the Big-Gov-Corporatist cartel wants to co-opt or destroy independent profitable corporations. In this case, companies that don’t need Big-Gov are free to point out the hypocritical inanity and absurdities which the lap-dog dependent industries like wind power and solar cannot.
Sadly, companies like Exxon still need to be brave because Big-Gov is so big, it is always the largest potential client and holds the sword of mendacious legislation, licensing and regulation as well.
Exxon Crushes Progressive Dreams That “Net Zero” Has Any Chance By 2050: It Would Mean Collapse In “Global Standard Of Living”
By Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge
The US supermajor […]
By Jo Nova
Peer Review has been a sixty year experiment with no control group
It’s touted as the “gold standard” of science, yet the evidence shows Peer Review is an abject failure.
There are 30,000 scientific journals that publish nearly 5 million articles a year, and the only thing we know for sure is that two-thirds of papers with major flaws will still get published, fraud is almost never discovered, and peer review has effectively crushed groundbreaking new discoveries.
By Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History
The rise and fall of Peer Review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, instead it was just rubber stamp to keep the bureaucrats safe. As government funded research took over the world of science after World War […]
By Jo Nova
Matt Taibbi and a team of writers have created a 70 page report on the “information cartel” — the new conglomerate cabal of Big Money, Big Government and Big Tech that wants to censor and nudge you into servitude and obedience. Facebook promptly censored his report on censorship. Taibbi tweeted that out, and Facebook realized they were proving his point, and reversed it. It was “just a bug” said a Facebook executive, unconvincingly.
Click to enlarge (twice even) Illustration by mrmooremedia.com
Matt Taibbi, Racket News
Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex
The citizen’s starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel
Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said, adding:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power […]
By Jo Nova
Tucker Carlson released a small statement on Twitter seventeen hours ago, and so far 17.7 million people have watched it.
With 77,000 comments under one two minute video it is the World’s Public Town Square.
And it’s a great speech:
“One thing you realize when you step outside the noise for a few days is how genuinely nice most people are…”
“The other thing you notice is how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are… they are completely irrelevant… and yet at the same time the undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future… get virtually no discussion at all: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, natural resources… when was the last time we heard a legitimate debate about any those topics?
Debates like that are not permitted. Both political parties and their donors have reached consensus on what benefits them, and they actively collude to shut down conversation.
Suddenly the United States looks very much like a one party state.”
“That’s a depressing realization… but it won’t last. This moment is too inherently ridiculous to last, so […]
By Jo Nova
Why would a network axe its most popular show?
Just like that: Fox News and Tucker Carlson have “Parted Ways”. His last show was last Friday, and he did not know at the time. There’s no farewell for the top rating show in America and no replacement host, just a “rotating” generic vague fill-in show. It doesn’t look like this was planned for months in advance? Fox News stocks immediately fell 4%.
Tucker Carlson Tonight was the most watched cable news show in the US. His audience was over 3 million people in the audience every day (not to mention the rest on social media). It’s not clear why this happened but there is speculation that it’s related to the Dominion case settlement.
There is no one more influential in US media. Tucker interviews anyone he wants for as long as he wants in the most powerful nation on Earth — in the last two weeks, for example, Trump for 40 minutes, and Elon Musk for an hour (on Artificial Intelligence).
He shapes the news. If they can silence Tucker, they can silence anyone. It may define a pivot point in US history — the end of […]
By Jo Nova
Imagine if the national postal service had secret blacklists of people whose mail “should be lost”?
What if the FBI, CIA, or Department of Defence was talking to the postie, and the postie read your letters and threw some out, but not others, and none of the institutions told you they were doing this? Or perhaps the post-office told you point-blank you were banned from sending mail now “because your letters were wrong”.
In this case the “posties” are private organizations, but to all intents and purposes, their network connection and obedience to Big-Government made them, in effect, another branch of the government. The government wasn’t paying the postie direct, but it protected the monopoly of the corporate postie team and gave them a legal loophole to hide in, and the media outlets stopped anyone criticizing the government. It was a Pravda-KGB consortium with filters that worked at light speed, but hidden.
“Undeniably, the making of such lists is a form of digital McCarthyism.”
Where would we be if Elon Musk hadn’t bought Twitter?
In the latest round of Twitter Files, Matt Taibbi shows how Twitter was not just censoring things that would later turn […]
By Jo Nova
What if the news media formed a global monopoly to control the news?
Imagine if the media and tech giants of the world banded together behind-the-scenes to rule certain stories were “misinformation” and all their agencies thus reported the same “news”?
That’s what the Trusted News Initiative aimed to do — decide what ideas were and were not allowed to be discussed.
It’s like “free speech” but without the free part.
Not only could the media bury things but they could get away with it if no upstart competitor could red-pill their audience.
It would be the death of the Free Press
In a world like that the people would be ruled mostly by whomever it was that decided what was “misinformation”. Those controllers would be the defacto Ministry of Truth.
We all saw it happen over the last three years, so it’s good to put a name on the beast, but even better, Robert F Kennedy is suing them for anti-trust violation.
Trusted News Initiative, TNI,
The Trusted News Initiative is everything journalists should hate. It’s basically there to “protect” voters from hearing about things like the Hunter-Biden Laptop, good climate news and […]
By Jo Nova
The cannons are all swinging around to point at Elon Musk. The former darling of the left is holding Kryptonite — today he recklessly encouraged people of different political views to engage in civil debate. He also promised to drop “The Twitter Files” soon, showing exactly how Twitter suppressed free speech, saying “The public deserves to know what happened”.
Twitter, after all, may have affected the 2020 US election by protecting Hunter Biden and the FBI. It also may have protected Big Pharma by suppressing bad news on vaccines and good news on cheap antivirals. There is a body count in this free speech debate… and Elon Musk recognises the gravity of the situation.
In reply to this dangerous free speech concept new signups at Twitter are at an all time high, but Apple has withdrawn advertising on Twitter. To which Elon Musk asks “Do they hate free speech in America?” And apparently they do, because they are also now threatened to withhold Twitter from their App Store and they’re not even trying to explain why.
Apple similarly deplatformed Parler from its App store in Jan 2021. Twitter had banned the President of the US and […]
Far from being destroyed overnight as the Australian ABC told was possible, Twitter has come to life. Banned Twitter accounts are reappearing like Jordan B Peterson.
Elon Musk ran a poll on reinstating Donald Trump which was pulling in a million votes an hour at one point. Elon Musk then declared that Donald J Trump’s account will be restored. And it appears to be live, though missing 75 million followers, and Trump himself, who still says he’ll stay on Truth Social.
Elon Musk tweeted, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which means “the voice of the people is the voice of God.’
….
It’s is encouraging the vote was evenly split. It suggests Twitter might be able to be able to be a “town square”.
However the Corruptocracy that depends on censorship are not finished yet, and an EU spokesman said Musk will have to open his algorithms (did the EU demand this of the last owners?). Thierry Breton the EU’s internal market commissioner said Musk will have to “fly by our rules” and that he will have to increase the number of moderators in Europe. Breton said “we will have control, we will have access, people will no longer […]
The deal has officially gone through in the last hours. Twitter belongs to Elon.
He’s calling himself the Chief Twit. He has 110 million followers, and he is enjoying himself.
Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in! pic.twitter.com/D68z4K2wq7
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 26, 2022
Meanwhile there is apoplexy in some corners of Twitter with warnings that the Nazi dogs of the Right are about to return.
But Elon says:
““A beautiful thing about Twitter is how it empowers citizen journalism – people are able to disseminate news without an establishment bias.”“
Restoring free speech on Twitter is not necessarily a given. There are plenty of political players that are afraid of uncontrollable citizen journalists and they will fight back.
But Musk at least, is clear on what he hopes to achieve:
The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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