MICHAEL USHER: What is the Albanese Government really trying to do with proposed misinformation laws?

The Government lit a bin fire this week with proposed new misinformation laws, to pull social media and internet platforms into line and stop fertilising lies and propaganda.

The law would fine those giants like Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) 5 per cent of their global revenue for failing to prevent all sorts of misinformation that leads to harm, damages national interest, defames, or is rude and mean and all sorts of other side effects of the ugly, unfiltered commentary that litters these sites.

“Fascists”, replied Elon Musk in his one-word message on X. And that was followed with similar outrage from his followers describing the Australian initiative as Orwellian, “1984 is real” and “censorship from a Government that is the main spreader of misinformation”.

So, the bin fire outrage is about to go bonfire, that much you can guarantee. The “free speech” crusaders will flood all their favourite platforms to decry the move, saying their liberties are being stripped and government censorship is out of control. Ironically, they’ll do this on a wide range of open, unrestricted platforms that give them more space and fewer rules than ever before, to shout and rage and stamp their feet.

So they now have a new target to protest, but let’s look at what the Government is trying to do, and see if the lawmakers and backroom bureaucrats have hidden some devil in the detail.

Conservative Queensland Senator Matt Canavan thinks there’s a landmine in the fine detail of the proposed law. Taking to his social media accounts, he highlighted a subsection under what constitutes “serious harm”. The law would prevent commentary about “harm to public health in Australia, including to the efficacy of preventative health measures in Australia”.

Mr Canavan said: “Now we get to the part of the misinformation Bill which shows what it is really about.” That part of the Bill as best I read it, is you can’t spread lies about medical advice that the government is supporting, or in a most recent example, spread misinformation about vaccines.

Now that’s going to really rev people up. That whole issue is still febrile. But what the Bill proposes, I think, is to not shut down debate about that touchy subject, but if you’re Elon Musk and X, you must employ an army of fact-checkers and exercise editorial control like traditional media platforms, to let your subscribers know what is true or false. If it’s false, you get fined. You can’t just sit back like Caesar at the Coliseum and drool over the blood sport below. You must let the masses know if what they’re watching is baited in favour of the lions or the gladiators.

Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones on Friday hit back at the haters of the proposed misinformation Bill.

“This is crackpot stuff, it really is crackpot stuff,” he said.

“I can’t see how Elon Musk or anyone else, in the name of free speech, thinks it’s OK to have social media platforms publishing scam content.”

And there’s the crux of what the Government is trying to crack down on.

The scams.

They are vile and prolific and the social media giants have been turning a blind eye because they make a lot of money and sometimes, more importantly for their business models, generate clicks and engagement.

But those scams are fleecing hardworking Australians, stealing the identities and good reputations of high-profile Australians and in the most extreme examples, are causing young Australians to kill themselves.

In these heartbreaking cases, sextortion on social media sites traps a young person, mostly teenage boys, into believing a girl is interested in them, intimate photos are swapped, then the scam begins as the gullible kid is hit up for extortion payments. It’s vile and has ruined Australian families.

But the billionaire owners of these sites sit back and scream free speech violations when regulations are proposed for the way they operate. I should add that Elon Musk’s X platform hasn’t been at the centre of sextortion accusations generally, but certainly Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram and Facebook sites have been. Only recently have they begun shutting down accounts linked to the scams in Nigeria.

To use another example, famous Australians’ names and faces have been hijacked on these sites to convince people to hand over their money for all sorts of dodgy and illegal scams and investments. An image of me reading the news was used as a front for one of the scams. Likewise, David Koch. Kochie has been fighting this legally, but as he’s discovered it’s a David and Goliath battle: a local lawyer in a Sydney courtroom taking on a multinational behemoth that respects few international legal jurisdictions.

It’s why governments have stepped in. New laws seem to be the only way of keeping the social media giants in check. Europe has already gone down this path with laws to push back on misinformation and put the onus of fact-checking back on the owners who operate these sites. They can’t just hand everyone a megaphone to say what they want, hurting whomever they want with lies, caring little about the consequences.

Now from my point of view, those consequences are about you and me and all the people we love, not about the standing of the Government or its policies or grander issues like sovereignty as the proposed Bill makes out. The government machine is big enough and ugly enough to protect itself from angry objectors or conspiracy theorists online. So, we might well need to have a look at the fine print and see what’s snuck into the proposed law so we can have a crack at the government when we want and not risk prosecution.

But in principle, the law is overdue. Elon Musk is going to hate it, but it’ll rev up his X subscribers who’ll take to their keyboards and post angry messages galore and drive a lot of numbers for Elon. So for him, misinformation and fighting laws to stop it, is a win-win.

Michael Usher is a news presenter for the Seven Network