Earlier this year, the Labor government proposed a well-intentioned yet somewhat murky draft bill aiming to combat the spread of misinformation. Since then, a number of people and organisations have spoken out against it, including constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey, the Victorian Bar and the Australian Human Rights Commission.

The main critique is that the bill, if passed as-is, could lead to online censorship. This would endanger the very democracy it purports to defend, as RMIT lecturer Jay Daniel Thompson explains.

The bill’s main issues stem from the vague way in which it defines important terms such as “misinformation”, “disinformation” and “harm”. We can’t talk about free speech online without addressing these concepts, yet Thompson points out they need to be firmly defined in order to avoid censorship of things which ought not to be censored.

Protecting the public from misinformation is a worthy goal, as is ensuring people can – as far as is reasonable – express themselves freely online. One shouldn’t come at the other’s expense. The good news is the bill has yet to be debated in parliament. A useful debate would ideally consider how we can balance our value of free speech with our desire to protect people from harmful content.

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