Australia’s top bureaucrats want protection from ‘harmful’ social media videos

Many of the free speech fights today rest on the question: How do we protect kids online? But some of the battles over what can be said or shared on the internet are about protecting a remarkably less vulnerable — and significantly more powerful — group from so-called harm: public officials. One such case is in Australia, where top bureaucrat body the Secretaries Board is asking Parliament to cap politicians’ and parties’ ability to share and criticize clips of testimony from the very officials the board represents.

‘Ridicule’ directed at public officials

In a recent submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Parliamentary Standards’ inquiry into workplace behavior codes, the Secretaries Board raised concerns about challenges facing public servants and officials, including members of the military and heads of government agencies, when acting as witnesses before Parliament. 

One of the Board’s “emerging concerns” is that politicians, political parties, and “third parties” can excerpt “short segments of committee broadcasts and distribute them to large audiences via social media.” In doing so, the Board notes, they can present “incomplete” clips of exchanges, remove segments from their “broader context,” add “captions with highlights or additional commentary,” and “invite ridicule, hostility or abuse directed at individual officials.” 

The Board shared a long list of some “highly offensive” comments posted beneath videos of officials’ testimony, including “despicable,” “political puppet,” “bigot,” “pig,” “KKK member,” “clown,” “fraud,” “demonic,” “shill,” “criminal,” and “scumbag.”

The Board acknowledges that committee proceedings are public, but it argues that witnesses did not consent to having their testimony shared on social media, where clips can cause “reputational harm and personal abuse” to officials as well as “risk undermining political debate more generally.” 

“When officials are publicly criticised, mocked, berated, or portrayed as personally responsible for policy decisions, the resulting effect can be significantly broader than the experience of the witness alone,” the Board writes. “Such conduct may contribute to a perception that appearing before parliamentary committees carries an unreasonable personal or reputational risk, potentially discouraging capable public servants undertaking public-facing responsibilities.”

Board seeks limits on ‘harmful’ social media clips

The Board is calling on Parliament to provide “guidance,” or more accurately, censorship. In short, it’s clear they want Parliament to consider banning politicians’ use of “harmful”  clips from parliamentary hearings on social media — and, in their view, mockery and ridicule are a form of harm. 

But, if “Parliament were not inclined to prevent the use of this evidence on social media,” then the Board would like it to consider guidance pressing members of Parliament to share video in full rather than in excerpts, as well as “refrain from content and commentary that targets individual officials for ridicule or harassment,” and disable comments so the general public cannot reply.

Bureaucrats shouldn’t set the limits on criticism of bureaucrats

The Secretaries Board does express concerns about threats to public officials after they testified. 

But it’s striking how much of the Board’s focus is on ordinary insults, criticism, and mockery by politicians and members of the public responding to videos of hearings. And because the Board is proposing disabling comments, its intent is to limit not just what politicians say about testimony but how ordinary Australians can respond to it.

Ridiculing bureaucrats who make and enforce public policy, and are often well-paid in the process, is not a subversion of the democratic process. 

Sure, ridicule is not a pleasant experience, and it can be miserable and hurtful. There’s no denying that. But satire, parody, mockery, and insult have also long been used by citizens to challenge state power. Treating those methods as harms in themselves in order to justify censorship is itself a threat to a free and open society. 

Politicians from a range of parties, including the Greens, Liberals, and One Nation, are objecting to the Board’s proposal. “Bureaucrats shouldn’t get to decide where to draw the line on parliamentary scrutiny, particularly when they’re the ones being scrutinised,” Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May told The Guardian. 

Ridiculing bureaucrats who make and enforce public policy, and are often well-paid in the process, is not a subversion of the democratic process. It is a component of it. If we allow public officials to limit permitted political speech to only what is perceived as “respectful” by those officials, we may find that the real limit is that nothing critical can be said at all.