Not long ago, coordinated disinformation and its trail of social and political chaos was something that happened to other countries. No longer. Authoritarian states have expanded their information operations in Australia, and local actors are learning and imitating. Government efforts to deal with the problem haven’t yet responded to its sheer scale.

Australia urgently needs to put into place well-funded public disinformation literacy campaigns, augmented by digital media literacy education in schools, a report published by the Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy & Defence Dialogue (AP4D) argues. The government also needs to grow and support fact-checking bodies in media organisations, universities and the non-government sector.

As the problem of disinformation grows, it’s clear that the softer options of industry self-regulation and voluntary codes of conduct aren’t enough. The news-media bargaining agreement with Meta, for example, is unravelling. It was supposed to put more money into news journalism to balance the mass of disinformation online, but Meta has moderation fatigue and is moving away from news altogether.

The government is still working through draft disinformation legislation that would give more regulatory bite, compelling social media companies to take more responsibility for the disinformation that their platforms so effectively enable.

Some of Australia’s foremost media and information experts, consulted in the AP4D report, say a huge piece of the policy puzzle is missing: people need help to protect themselves from online harms, including disinformation and other forms of manipulation, so they can really understand the powerful cognitive effects of disinformation coupled with the powerful delivery systems of social media.

So far, efforts to counter malicious information operations, disinformation and other threats in the information domain have been piecemeal and reactive, rather than comprehensive and strategic.

With almost half of the adult population not confident in their ability to identify misinformation online, combatting disinformation should be a national priority. Truth-based information is a fundamental national and global public good, needed for basic governance in any political system. In liberal democracies, truth-based information is needed to secure rights of citizens, conduct fair elections, administer the rule of law and make market economics work. It is also essential as a deterrent to corruption and the foreign interference that corrupt political and economic systems attract.

A low level of public literacy on disinformation and related threats is a key vulnerability for Australia.

A well-funded and ongoing public literacy campaign to reach Australia’s diverse national audiences is now a national necessity if we are to help citizens to reject disinformation and avoid such harms as fraud and identity theft, intrusive surveillance, harassment and data exploitation.

The efforts of non-government groups such as the Australian Media Literacy Alliance, a consortium of key public institutions and networked organisations, focus on supporting lifelong learning, especially for those who may be vulnerable to disinformation or digital exclusion. Through consultation, research and advocacy, the consortium’s primary goal is to develop and promote a government-endorsed national media literacy strategy for Australia. Its model should be supported.

In addition to broad-based public awareness campaigns, digital media literary needs to be included in education curriculums from early childhood onwards, to help children and young adults build resilience.

This includes, for example, teaching students to not just engage with information by scrolling down the page or by considering its superficial validity but also by learning about its source—by leaving the webpage, opening another tab and searching elsewhere. The concept is called ‘lateral reading’.

Radicalisation prevention and support strategies should be built into that framework. A successful education campaign would include teaching how to recognise disinformation and propaganda aimed at radicalisation and attempts at exploiting individual vulnerabilities for recruitment. Children and young adults need to be aware of the harmful and violent nature of radical groups and their financial and political aims. They also would benefit from presentation of the real world consequences of online violence. People who have already been radicalised need easily accessible off-ramps when they want to escape.

While cultivating more critical thinking, we also need immediate pushback against disinformation as it arises. This is where factchecking organisations operating at arm’s length from government become important. Their work would reinforce transparency and accuracy in the public sphere.

Key to implementation is raising the level of government communication with citizens. This can be challenging, especially in a risk-adverse public service, but where the government does not speak there is a vacuum that can be filled with disinformation.

With two thirds of Australians polled in a 2021 survey considering the ability to recognise and prevent the flow of misinformation as either extremely important or very important, there is an unarguable mandate for action.

Hardly a day had passed after the government unveiled its initial draft of the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill 2023 when critics descended upon it.

‘Hey Peasants, Your Opinions Hell, your facts Are Fake News’, posted Canadian right-wing professor Jordan Peterson on X (then Twitter) in response to the announcement.

Since then, commentary on the bill has grown more intense and fervent. The bill sets up Canberra to be a ‘back-up censor’ ready to urge the big tech companies to ‘engage in the cancellation of wrong-speak’, wrote Peta Credlin in The Australian under the headline ‘“Ministry of Truth” clamps down on free expression’. For Tim Cudmore writing in The Spectator, the bill represents nothing less than ‘the most absurdly petty, juvenile, and downright moronic piece of nanny-state governmental garbage ever put to paper’.

In reality, the intentions of the bill are far more modest than the establishment of a so-called Ministry of Truth. Indeed, they’re so modest that it may come as a surprise to many that the powers don’t already exist.

Put simply, the bill is designed to ensure that all digital platforms in the industry have systems in place to deal with mis- and disinformation and that those systems are transparent. It doesn’t give the Australian Communications and Media Authority any special ability to request that specific content or posts be removed from online platforms.

If the bill were to pass, it would mean that digital platforms like WeChat will finally have to come clean with their censorship practices and how they’re applying them, or not, to content aimed at Australian users. It will also mean that digital platforms like X that once devoted resources to ensuring trust and safety on their platforms, but are now walking away from those efforts, are made accountable for those decisions.

If there’s one thing that Elon Musk’s stewardship of X has shown, it’s that even with an absolutist approach to free speech, content-moderation decisions still need to be made. Inevitably, any embrace of absolute free-speech principles soon gives way to the complexities of addressing issues like child exploitation, hate speech, copyright infringement and other forms of legal compliance. Every free-speech Twitter clone has had to come to this realisation, including Parler, Gettr and even Donald Trump’s Truth Social.

So, if all digital platforms inevitably engage in some sort of content moderation, why not have some democratic oversight over that process? The alternative is to stick with a system where interventions against mis- and disinformation take place every day, but they’re done according to the internal policies of each different platform and the decisions are often hidden from their users. What the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill does is make sure that those decisions aren’t made behind closed doors.

Under the current system, when platforms overreach in their efforts to moderate content, it’s only the highest-profile cases that get the attention. To take one recent example, a report by Credlin was labelled ‘false information’ on Facebook based on a fact-check by RMIT FactLab. The shadow minister for home affairs and cyber security wrote to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to complain, and the ABC’s Media Watch sided with Credlin.

Would it not be better if this ad hoc approach were replaced with something more systematic that applied to regular members of the public and not just high-profile commentators? Under the proposed bill, all the platforms will have to have systems in place to deal with mis-and disinformation while also balancing the need for free expression. The risk of the status quo is not just that the platforms will not moderate content enough, but that they will overdo it at times.

When digital platforms refrain from moderating content, harmful content proliferates. But as platforms become more active in filtering content without publicly disclosing their decision-making, there’s an increased risk that legitimate expression will be stifled. Meta executives admitted at a recent Senate committee hearing that it had gone too far when moderating content on the origin of Covid-19, for example.

In contrast to the Australian government’s modest approach is the EU’s Digital Services Act, which just came into effect last week. That act heaps multiple requirements on the platforms to stop them from spreading mis- and disinformation. Many of these requirements are worthwhile, and in a future article, I’ll make the case for what elements we might like to use to improve our legislation. Fundamentally, the act represents a positive step forward by mandating that major social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok enhance transparency over their content moderation processes and provide EU residents with a means to appeal content-moderation decisions.

But if critics wish to warn about Orwellian overreach, they’d do better scrutinising the EU’s Digital Services Act, not Australia’s proposed Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill. In particular, they should take a look at one element of the European legislation that enables the EU Commission to declare a ‘crisis’ and force platforms to moderate content according to the state’s orders. That sets up a worrying precedent that authoritarian rulers around the world are sure to point to when they shut down internet services in their own countries.

After years of relative laissez-faire policymaking, the world’s biggest tech companies are finally becoming subject to more stringent regulation. The risk of regulatory overreach is real and critics are right to be wary. But the Australian government’s proposed solution, with its focus on scrutinising the processes the platforms have in place to deal with mis- and disinformation, is a flexible approach for dealing with a problem that will inevitably continue to grow. And unlike the European strategy, it avoids overreach by both the platforms and the government.

An urgent problem for governments around the world in the digital age is how to tackle the harms caused by mis- and disinformation, and Australia is no exception.

Together, mis- and disinformation fall under the umbrella term of ‘fake news’. While this phenomenon isn’t new, the internet makes its rapid, vast spread unprecedented.

It’s a tricky problem and hard to police because of the sheer amount of misinformation online. But, left unchecked, public health and safety, electoral integrity, social cohesion and ultimately democracy are at risk. The Covid-19 pandemic taught us not to be complacent, as fake news about Covid treatments led to deadly consequences.

But what’s the best way to manage the spread of fake news? How can it be done without government overreach, which risks the freedom and diversity of expression necessary for deliberation in healthy democracies?

Last month, Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland released a draft exposure bill to step up Australia’s fight against harmful online mis- and disinformation.

It offers more stick (hefty penalties) and less carrot (voluntary participation) than the current approach to managing online content.

If passed, the bill will bring us closer to the European Union-style model of mandatory co-regulation.

According to the draft, disinformation is spread intentionally, while misinformation is not.

But both can cause serious harms including hate speech, financial harm and disruption of public order, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).

Research has shown that countries tend to approach this problem in three distinct ways:

• non-regulatory ‘supporting activities’ such as digital literacy campaigns and fact-checking units to debunk falsehoods
• voluntary or mandatory co-regulatory measures involving digital platforms and media authorities
• anti-fake-news laws.

Initial opinions about the bill are divided. Some commentators have called the proposed changes ‘censorship’, arguing it will have a chilling effect on free speech.

These comments are often unhelpful because they conflate co-regulation with more draconian measures such anti-fake-news laws adopted in illiberal states like Russia, whereby governments arbitrarily rule what information is ‘fake’.

For example, Russia amended its Criminal Code in 2022 to make the spread of ‘fake’ information an offence punishable with jail terms of up to 15 years, to suppress the media and political dissent about its war in Ukraine.

To be clear, under the proposed Australian bill, platforms continue to be responsible for the content on their services—not governments.

The new powers allow ACMA to look under a platform’s hood to see how it deals with online mis- and disinformation that can cause serious harm, and to request changes to processes (not content). ACMA can set industry standards as a last resort.

The proposed changes don’t give ACMA arbitrary powers to determine what content is true or false, nor can it direct specific posts to be removed. The content of private messages, authorised electoral communications, parody and satire, and news media all remains outside the scope of the proposed changes.

None of this is new. Since 2021, Australia has had a voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation, developed for digital platforms by their industry association, the Digital Industry Group (known as DIGI).

This followed government recommendations arising out of a lengthy Australian Competition and Consumer Commission inquiry into digital platforms. This first effort at online regulation was a good start to stem harmful content using an opt-in model.

But voluntary codes have shortfalls. The most obvious is that not all platforms decide to participate, and some cherrypick the areas of the code they will respond to.

The Australian government is now seeking to deliver on a bipartisan promise to strengthen the regulators’ powers to tackle online mis- and disinformation by shifting to a mandatory co-regulatory model.

Under the proposed changes, ACMA will be given new information-gathering powers and capacity to formally request that an industry association (such as DIGI) vary or replace codes that aren’t up to scratch.

Platform participation with registered codes will be compulsory and attract warnings, fines and, if unresolved, hefty court-approved penalties for noncompliance.

These penalties are steep—as much as 5% of a platform’s annual global turnover if it is repeatedly in breach of industry standards.

The move from voluntary to mandatory regulation in Australia is logical. The EU has set the foundation for other countries to hold digital technology companies responsible for curbing mis- and disinformation on their platforms.

But the draft bill raises important questions that need to be addressed before it is legislated as planned for later this year. Among them are:

• how to best define mis- and disinformation (the definitions in the draft are different from DIGI’s)
• how to deal with the interrelationship between mis- and disinformation, especially regarding election content. There’s a potential issue because research shows that the same content labelled ‘disinformation’ can also be labelled ‘misinformation’ depending on the online user’s motive, which can be hard to divine
• and why exclude online news media content? Research has shown that news media can also be a source of harmful misinformation (such as 2019 election stories about the ‘death tax’).

While aiming to mitigate harmful mis- and disinformation is noble, how it will work in practice remains to be seen.

An important guard against unintended consequences is to ensure that ACMA’s powers are carefully defined along with terms and likely circumstances requiring action, with mechanisms for appeal.

The closing date for public submissions is 6 August.

There can be little doubt Australia’s strategic environment has evolved significantly in recent years. Across the Indo-Pacific, we now face a region characterised by a broad spectrum of geopolitical influences, from conflict and contest at one end to cooperation and collaboration at the other.

Through this spectrum, we’re seeing a diversification of the circumstances where all our elements of national power will need to contribute to our national security and prosperity goals.

We’re also seeing significant changes in the way some states wield power and influence in the region. Of course, Australia continues to support an Indo-Pacific characterised by rules-based cooperation and stability. But we must also be prudent in recognising the prevalence of new forms of rivalry and competition that fall outside our preferred models.

Australia, like its friends and partners in the Pacific, needs options to challenge the threat posed by coercive statecraft. Adversarial actors including China and Russia are using agile and malign methods to secure strategically significant outcomes, often to our disadvantage.

And to date, these methods have proven both effective and relatively low cost. So, for Australia to more effectively counter this coercive statecraft it will be important to raise the costs—both economically and politically—for the antagonists.

In Chinese strategic literature, there is a strong emphasis on adopting comprehensive approaches to wielding national influence. One of the more important works on this in recent years, Unrestricted warfare, espouses a persistent campaign for advantage that:

Breaks down the dividing lines between civilian and military affairs and between peace and war… non-military tools are equally prominent and useful for the achievement of previously military objectives. Cyberattacks, financial weapons, informational attacks—all of these taken together constitute the future of warfare. In this model, the essence of unrestricted warfare is that the ‘battlefield is everywhere’.

Beijing’s purpose in applying these methods is to achieve its strategic goals below our thresholds of military response. And although China incorporates the threat of military force among the suite of its coercive measures, it nevertheless seeks to render Western military capabilities irrelevant by achieving its goals without triggering conflict.

Once we understand this, it becomes clearer why our own military capabilities, including those for power projection and networked warfighting, are necessary but not sufficient.

Whereas the West has tended to equate the possession of superior military force with deterrence, that plainly isn’t working against China’s comprehensive coercion.

And where Australia’s armed forces have focused on force projection as an essential capability, the time has come to weave these capabilities into broader options for influence projection.

Rather than narrowly focusing on dominating the battlespace with forward-deployed force elements, the military can broaden its value proposition by complementing whole-of-government efforts to out-position rival powers in economic, diplomatic and information-influence campaigns.

As China has amply demonstrated, coercion does not necessarily involve the application of physical violence. Influence comes in many forms and can apply to peacetime and wartime situations, as well as those in between.

As NATO has suggested, ‘even lethality, the ultimate penalty of physical force, is giving way to abstractions of perception management and behavioral control, a fact which suggests that strategic success, not tactical victory, is the more coveted end-state’.

Any Australian efforts to engage in constant competition and counter China’s aggressive political warfare methods will need to have both defensive and offensive elements.

In terms of deterrence, by shining a light on these actions and actively calling them out, we can begin to erase the ambiguity and uncertainty on which they rely. Since these methods depend on cultivating confusion and uncertainty, an important counter action is to establish robust, evidence-based narratives which demonstrate to the world what is going on.

But exposure alone will not always be enough. And that’s where we need to be able to move from a defensive to an offensive mindset. We will need to become tough-minded to more forcibly ensure that antagonists desist from actions that hurt us.

This will require the development of robust cost-imposing strategies to alter their calculus. Such strategies will need to convince threat actors that the price of achieving their aims through political warfare methods exceeds what they are willing or able to pay. And that means we need to signal clearly that we have both the capacity and the will to take actions that will impose these costs.

Cost-imposing approaches can be proportional or asymmetrical. Authoritarian regimes are deeply fearful of threats to their legitimacy, making them vulnerable to well-considered influence operations which might hold that legitimacy up to question.

Such influence actions might be used to inject information into a closed society that authoritarian regimes would not want disclosed. This could range from alternative perspectives on current events that differ from regime-imposed narratives to exposure of political and economic corruption. These kinds of disclosures could impose significant costs on a regime constantly worried about maintaining domestic control.

This points to a broader theme, sometimes called ideational power. Authoritarian regimes like the Chinese Communist Party depend on repression rather than democratic legitimacy to maintain control, as has been made painfully evident in Hong Kong.

Authoritarian regimes are deeply fearful of instability, rendering them brittle at home and severely limiting their appeal abroad. Australia should take a robust and comprehensive approach to emphasising and contrasting its own values and methods against authoritarian ones.

Throughout history, long-term campaigns for influence have had this ideological dimension to them—the contrast between light and dark, between inclusiveness and domination. So Australia should be emphasising, not minimising, the ideological contrast between its own values and those represented by authoritarianism.

It makes sense to develop and enhance asymmetric advantages. For example, China doesn’t have access to anything like the network of alliances and partnerships that Australia has. And although Australia’s economic size pales in comparison to China’s, our network of friendships can be a source of significant strength.

Put another way, this is about how we play our strengths against their weaknesses. Now is the time to be exploring how our creativity and adaptability can be used to identify, explore and exploit the critical vulnerabilities of authoritarian regimes, to be able to get at them in ways that hurt.

To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean the application of military force—sending people into harm’s way—although those skills will remain essential. Rather, it’s about using discrete, tailored options to go after background vulnerabilities.

The military notion of unconventionality is helpful here:

In unconventional warfare, the emphasis is on defeating the opponent without a direct military confrontation…typically, the unconventional forces act undercover, or discretely, their targets are not of an exclusively military nature, and the techniques employed are distinct from those specific to purely military operations.

This logic could be broadened to other dimensions of Australian statecraft. The actions needed to impose costs of sufficient magnitude to deter China’s coercive behaviour would likely need to hold at risk Beijing’s core interests—the things it fears and values—without necessarily engaging in physical attack.

This would likely need to involve a more holistic or unrestricted approach, much as China itself pursues. And while we need to stay within the bounds of the international rules and norms we espouse, there is nevertheless fertile ground for exploring unconventional and unorthodox means for generating costs.

And although prudent self-reliance dictates that Australia should not render itself overly dependent on external providers to guarantee our security, it will be vital to work multilaterally counter China’s malign influence. Benefits will arise from cooperation in non-traditional aspects of military operations, including in the information and economic domains.

By working with our partners in the Indo-Pacific, including the Quad, Indonesia and the Pacific island countries, to develop new and disruptive options, Australia can bolster its ability to not only expose China’s malign statecraft, but also to adopt cost-imposing strategies that will deter grey-zone political warfare.