Every family has at least one WhatsApp group that is a strange cocktail of grocery lists, birthday plans, unsolicited weather warnings and the occasional article that someone’s aunt has forwarded without reading. Mine is no exception. My uncle believes in miracle cures; my cousin replies with eye-roll emojis; my grandmother forwards videos of baby animals and vaguely apocalyptic news stories in equal measure. We laugh, sigh, sometimes argue, and try to move on. But in recent years, politicians and commentators have looked at this messy, human, unsupervised conversation and concluded that it needs supervision. The headline of a recent Australian Financial Review opinion piece put it sharply: “Online truth, lies and misinformation shouldn’t be in eye of the minister.” That sentence is simple, but it contains an entire philosophy. It is a warning against a well-intentioned temptation: the temptation to believe that official accuracy can replace public trust, that a minister or a regulator can decide what is true and what is too false to be allowed. I understand that temptation. Falsehoods can hurt people. I have watched a rumor sweep through my own town as if it were wildfire. But the more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that the cure being offered is worse than the disease. The answer to bad speech is not state-owned truth. The answer is better speech, more questions, deeper trust, and a public space messy enough to find its own footing.
A few years ago, a text message began circulating in our area saying children had been approached outside a school by strangers in a white van. Every parent in our community felt their stomach drop. It turned out to be entirely false, a garbled story copied from somewhere else and stuck with our school’s name. If I had not witnessed that panic, I might not have understood why governments propose misinformation laws. The problem is real. But what actually stopped the rumor? Not a minister. A group of parents called the school, the principal sent out an official message, a local journalist checked with police, and a neighbor who knew one of the supposed witnesses explained the misunderstanding. The correction came from people who knew who to ask, not from an official eye that had already decided. That is what the headline is really asking us to remember: when we outsource truth to the government, we lose the very habits of checking, questioning and correcting that keep a community healthy. The minister’s eye may be well-intentioned, but it is still a single eye, and truth requires many.
The phrase “eye of the minister” is deliberately unsettling because it suggests something that should never belong to one person. Truth is not a possession; it is a relationship with evidence, context, and other people. It is tested by skepticism, changed by new information, and sometimes awkward and partial. When we say that misinformation should not be in the eye of the minister, we mean that online content should not be treated as if truth were a subjective preference that can be settled by someone in power. The minister is a political person. That is not an insult; it is a structural fact. She answers to a party, a cabinet, a media cycle, an election calendar. Her eye is naturally drawn to what is politically convenient, what is publicly embarrassing, what can be used by rivals, what polls well. The same sentence about the same topic could be described as dangerous misinformation under one leadership and vigorous public debate under another. This does not have to lead to a dictatorship to end badly. It only has to be human. The slippery slope begins with a vague definition of harm. We can all agree that lies which lead people into danger are terrible. But from there, the category stretches. It catches viral nonsense, then satirical posts mistaken for fact, then someone using the wrong adjective, then a teenager mocking a politician, then a scientist whose findings upset a government department. Every new crisis becomes a reason to widen the frame. Everyone with power becomes a potential target of the new rule. Before long, ordinary citizens stop speaking freely because they cannot calculate whether something they say might be judged misinformation by an official they have never met. That is not a safe society. That is a chilled one.
None of this should be read as a shrug in the face of misinformation. It is not a phantom or a moral panic invented by politicians to win votes. It is a real and persistent feature of modern life, and it has a body count. I know a woman whose elderly mother stopped taking blood-pressure medication after watching a video of a man in a white coat claiming that a particular drug was poison. The woman almost had a stroke. A cousin of mine once shared a conspiracy theory about the water supply of a capital city; it was not true, but for two weeks it terrified people and led to a run on bottled water. In Australia and around the world, foreign actors and local opportunists have spread lies about vaccination, weather disasters and elections. We should not pretend those things are harmless. They are not. The argument against the minister’s eye is not an argument for ignoring viral falsehoods. It is an argument about who should carry the burden of separating truth from lies. We are capable of building institutions, platforms and habits that catch dangerous nonsense without handing the whole concept of truth to the state. Consider the harm of a false statement. Harm to whom, exactly? To public health? To social cohesion? To a politician’s reputation? To the economic wellbeing of a town? The moment a law starts counting all those harms in one basket, the scale of punishment depends less on the damage done and more on who is complaining. A post that hurts a minister’s feelings could be described as serious social harm if the definition is broad enough. A post that genuinely misleads people but does not annoy anyone in power could slip through. We cannot design a content-accuracy police that will only go after the bad guys, because in a democracy the bad guys are always the ones who disagree with us.
Even when we set aside the philosophical dangers, the practical problems are enormous. The internet is not a public square with one microphone. It is millions of conversations happening in every language, in every corner of the world, at every moment. A government agency trying to adjudicate truth in that space would be overwhelmed, not by malice, but by scale. It would need terrible triage. It would rely on complaints. It would create a deluge of reports from people who want to silence opponents. And because the agency cannot cope, it would pressure platforms to do the work for it. Platforms are very good at removing content at scale. They are not good at nuance. They are terrified of regulators. The safest thing for a platform is to over-delete: to take down not just the problematic post, but everything that looks vaguely like it, including legitimate criticism, satire, health debates, and clumsy questions that were poorly phrased but not malicious. The result would be a speech environment that is worse for everyone. A minister is not a judge. A judge has rules, precedents, evidence, and an independent appointment. A regulator is closer, but it is still born out of the political process. Its chair is appointed by a government. Its budget comes from the taxpayer. Its priorities are set in legislation written by a minister’s office. And its decisions inevitably become a subject of political complaint. If you give the government the power to define misinformation, you are not creating an impartial referee. You are creating an umpire who is expected to play for the home team.
So where does that leave us? Are we supposed to let conspiracy theories win? No. But instead of handing the truth to a minister, we can build a stronger public culture. First, we can demand that online platforms be transparent about the way their algorithms spread content. We do not need the government to tell us which posts are true; we need to know why a false post has been shown to a million people and how it can be slowed down. That is a design question, not a censorship question. We can also support media-literacy programs in every school. Children should learn to ask who made a claim, why they made it, where the evidence comes from, and how to recognize emotional manipulation. That is hard work, but it is the only work that sticks. We can invest in local journalism, which has been shredded over the past twenty years and is our best antidote to rumor. When a story breaks, it is the professional who calls the police chief, checks the council record, and prints a correction. A reporter is much more effective than an official definition. I have watched this work in my own life. During a recent flood warning, a stranger in a community forum posted that the levee had broken and everyone in the low-lying area should evacuate immediately. It was false. For ten minutes, the forum was in a state of panic. Then a local journalist posted the actual levee level, a retired engineer explained what the numbers meant, and the person who started the rumor came back and said he had misread an article from another town. No one was arrested. No one was removed. The system worked because enough reliable information outvoted the lie.
At the end of the day, truth is like a campfire. It is warm, bright, and essential. But it is also alive. It flickers, it spits, it changes shape as the wind moves. If one person is allowed to own the fire—if the minister controls the match, the wood, the smoke, the heat—then the fire stops being a campfire and becomes a weapon. It can warm only those who sit close enough, and it can burn everyone else. The better way is to learn how to guard, feed and carry the fire together. That means treating truth as a common possession, not a government service. It means accepting that we will sometimes be fooled, and that being fooled is the beginning of the ability to stop being fooled. It means sitting next to the relative who believes a strange thing and saying, “I love you, but I want to check that with a source.” It means supporting institutions that are stubbornly independent—the journalist, the librarian, the teacher, the editor—rather than institutions that are conveniently controlled. And it means repeating the sentence from that Australian Financial Review headline whenever someone offers to put the national truth in the hands of a minister. If we manage to do all this, the internet will still be messy. It will be full of arguments, half-understood studies, jokes that fall flat, and posts that will embarrass us in ten years. That is not a sign of failure. That is what a free conversation looks like. The alternative—a conversation in which a minister has already decided the ending—is not truth. It is just obedience. Truth cannot be commanded; it must be found. And the only place it can ever be found is in the wild, open, argumentative and gloriously human space between us.