Many governments feel threatened by the rise of bottom-up media — the many Substacks, YouTube channels, monetized Facebook pages and X accounts that are stealing users away from traditional legacy media. So many outlets, so little time.

For several years now, the term misinformation has been thrown around by way of expressing the concern and explaining the policy makers’ sense of the need for action. Sometimes it goes beyond words. The U.S. government proposed a Disinformation Governance Board in 2022 but had to back down after widespread protest.

Recently, the government of Australia proposed big fines for social media giants whose users were found guilty of misinformation. But Australia has had to back down too. From Reuters,

Australia’s government said on Sunday it had dropped plans to fine internet platforms up to 5% of their global revenue for failing to prevent the spread of misinformation online.

The bill was part of a wide-ranging regulatory crackdown by Australia, where leaders have complained that foreign-domiciled tech platforms are overriding the country’s sovereignty, and comes ahead of a federal election due within a year.

“Based on public statements and engagements with Senators, it is clear that there is no pathway to legislate this proposal through the Senate,” Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said in a statement.

Rowland said the bill would have “ushered in an unprecedented level of transparency, holding big tech to account for their systems and processes to prevent and minimise the spread of harmful misinformation and disinformation online”. “Australia dumps plan for fines for social media giants enabling misinformation” November 23, 2024

The Hard Problem

The critical problem, of course, is that government is as likely as any other entity to spread misinformation. That became strikingly clear during the COVID pandemic, in terms of the experts whose opinions government broadcast and legislated. As science writer Matt Ridley notes at The Spectator,

They told us that the virus was NOT airborne (the World Health Organization used upper case letters), so we should stay indoors and wash our hands thoroughly. This turned out to be wrong. They told us that masks were ineffective, then changed their minds even though no good evidence emerged for masks making a difference. They demanded compulsory, draconian lockdowns despite the growing evidence from Sweden that these were doing more harm than good. They told us lockdowns would last for just a few weeks when they went on for months. Here, the models of what would happen without lockdown in December 2021 proved wildly wide of the mark when Boris Johnson at last called the modelers’ bluff.

They told us that “natural immunity” acquired after infection with Covid did not obviate the need for vaccination, or even that it was a myth. They told us it was nonsense that the Omicron variant was milder. As the Kansas-based biotech professor Andrew Torrance put it to me, such misinformation “spread faster than any virus, leaving in its wake herd immunity to the truth.” Last week the entrepreneur Peter Thiel said: “In the Covid pandemic we cut off skepticism so prematurely so many times where not only was the skepticism healthy but the skeptics were right. The science establishment is way too far on the dogmatic side.”

“How ‘experts’ led to the rise of RFK Jr.,” November 25, 2024

This is a Hard Problem because in many situations, government expert sources are no better informed than non-government expert sources. When government acquires the right to ban the other sources of information, the effect of its own misinformation is greatly multiplied. And any basis for trust is greatly reduced.

Misinformation as a business opportunity

A second problem is that the obsessions of government become opportunities for non-government organizations and private corporations. Again, COVID provides a lesson, as Steven Nelson and Josh Christenson explain at New York Post:

President Biden’s administration used $267 million of your money to study “misinformation” since he took office, a new report reveals — as President-elect Donald Trump vows to purge the term from the federal lexicon and make sweeping spending cuts.

The cash doled out to universities, nonprofits and companies peaked at $126 million in 2021 while US public health officials were imposing mandates they later admitted had no scientific basis, the taxpayer-transparency group OpenTheBooks said in its report Friday…

Critics also note that much of what is initially deemed “misinformation” later turns out to gain evidentiary support, such as the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab that was doing risky US-funded “gain of function” research.

“Feds blew $267M fighting ‘misinformation’ under Biden — as Trump vows to ban ‘censorship cartel’,” November 22, 2024

This is another Hard Problem in the sense that it is baked into the situation. Once government wants to hear about misinformation other than its own — along with proposals for “doing something” about it — the huge outlays for interest groups follow.

So what should be done?

We should begin by recognizing that a certain amount of misinformation is inevitable in an information society, for the same reasons as a small number of bad restaurants (by the critics’ standards) is the inevitable price one pays to have a vibrant restaurant culture in a city.

Apart from that, we should continue to give information competition a chance. Organizations on all points of the political and cultural spectrum have a vested interest in taking down the less tenable claims of their opponents and competitors. And they are not slow to exercise it.

Most nations have an entire court system to deal with issues like threats, libel, false advertising, etc. Further “misinformation” bureaucracies will contribute nothing but expense, corruption, and the banning of embarrassing facts. Good on Australia for recognizing that.