Mission creep

Jacinta Ardern’s call to limit online misinformation may be made with noble intentions. But as with many progressive ambitions, the risk of mission creep is very real. By Nick Cater.

Jacinda Ardern’s pitch to turn New Zealand into the world’s leading manufacturer of bad ideas received fresh impetus last week in an address in New York. Her speech to the UN was a masterpiece of muddled-headed moral equivalence. It wove terrorism, nuclear war, the invasion of Ukraine and climate scepticism into a single threat to humanity demanding global action.

Ardern aspires to turn the country she leads into the conscience of the world. That NZ led the world in nuclear non-proliferation is an established myth within its shores. That it led the world in pandemic management was a myth established by the Economist Intelligence Unit in June 2020, four months before Ardern’s announcement that NZ had eradicated the virus.

Now, Ardern proposes to lead the world in a global response to misinformation on the internet cast in militaristic terms. “The weapons of war have changed,” she told the UN. “They are upon us and require the same level of action and activity that we put into the weapons of old.”

As with many dangerous progressive ambitions, this one began with the noblest of intentions. The crazed massacre of 51 people in two Christchurch mosques streamed live on the internet by the gunman on March 15, 2019 prompted Ardern to find ways to stop terrorists exploiting the internet. The result was the Christchurch Declaration, which has been adopted by nine countries, the EU, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, YouTube and other major tech companies.

In the days before Covid, limited censorship of the internet might have seemed a reasonable idea to those opposed to terrorism. The concerns about mission creep voiced by some at the time, however, now seem prescient.

Under the guise of fighting the pandemic, the tech giants have launched a dangerous war on heterodoxy that preferences the views of the progressive elite. Seriously credentialled medical academics from leading universities were shut out of the debate over the wisdom of lockdowns and the safety of vaccines by algorithms that bar them from contributing to online discussion or buried their opinions so far down the search engine you’d have to scroll for 50 years to find them.

This attack on free scientific debate trespassed upon the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. In Victoria, patient records were seized from surgeries without a warrant. Kangaroo courts banned experienced doctors from practising for diverging from the official Covid line.

Every small, illiberal step established a staging post for new assaults on freedoms we’d foolishly imagined were sacrosanct in a liberal democracy such as ours.

New laws being debated in state parliaments will give medical authorities the power to end the careers of doctors who diverge from the so-called consensus view on anything. A patient seeking a second opinion will be wasting their time since it is bound to be no different from the first.

Even Ardern sounds nervous about where this global war on online misinformation might head. “We are rightly concerned that even those most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech we value so highly,” she says. But to allow the internet content to rip, she claimed, “poses an equal threat to the norms we all value”.

“How do you successfully end a war if people are led to believe the reason for its existence is not only legal but noble?” she asked. “How do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists?” Seen through the narrow prism of ideological catastrophism, Ardern’s crackdown on scientific dissent presumably seems reasonable. Speaking in Sydney in July she declared that concerns about the militarisation of our region by communist China “must surely be matched by a concern for those who experience the violence of climate change”.

Claims as far-reaching as these demand debate. Ardern, however, hubristically insists there should be none. Perhaps this is because she is convinced her conclusions on climate change are beyond doubt. More likely, she fears their inability to stand up to scrutiny. Why else would she fear debate?

Conservatives frequently describe the progressive left’s march through the institutions as if we were facing a blitzkrieg, like Poland in 1939. In fact, the progressive cause shuffles, a centimetre at a time, until it gathers unstoppable momentum.

We should not be surprised, then, that Silicon Valley’s 10-tonne blue pencil is now boldly taking sides in democratic political debates. The censorship for two weeks of The New York Post’s exposure of the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop, which allegedly compromised his father, successfully prevented this explosive story from contaminating Joe Biden’s election campaign.

It was probably inevitable that Big Tech would take sides in the debate over the voice. It was equally predictable which arguments it would consider racist and which it would nominate as a cause so virtuous that no contrary arguments need be heard.

Last week, the Institute of Public Affairs posted a video on Facebook in which senators Jacinta Price and James McGrath and respected academic Anthony Dillon explained their decisions to vote no in the proposed constitutional referendum. Facebook promptly took the post down.

The IPA was notified that the video was rejected because it didn’t comply with Facebook’s policy on social issues, elections or politics. In the cause of enshrining an Aboriginal voice in the Constitution, an Aboriginal woman with a democratic mandate is being denied a voice on Facebook. The voices of a fellow senator and a distinguished Aboriginal academic have also been cancelled.

Don’t worry, Prime Minister Ardern. We are already living in the dystopia you seek.