Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been fact-checked by Twitter after claiming the Coalition’s nuclear policy would put Australia’s cities and towns “under threat”.
Mr Albanese hit out at the Coalition on Wednesday, posting a series of idyllic photos of beaches, wineries and tropic islands from across Australia along with text asking which of the areas the Coalition would put “under threat”.
“What do these beautiful parts of Australia have in common?” Mr Albanese asked.
“They’re at risk of a nuclear reactor in their backyard under Peter Dutton.
“Australians have waited 673 days for details on Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan. He still won’t say what cities and towns he’ll put under threat.”
Twitter (now X) quickly attached a Community Note to the Prime Minister’s post outlining the safety of nuclear power.
“The evidence over six decades shows that nuclear power is a safe means of generating electricity,” the community note stated.
“The risk of accidents in nuclear power plants is low and declining. The consequences of an accident or terrorist attack are minimal compared with other commonly accepted risks.”
Shadow climate change and energy minister Ted O’Brien welcomed the fact check, accusing the Prime Minister of using Twitter to “incite a fact-free scare campaign”.
“Anthony Albanese is too weak to have a proper debate on Australia’s energy future, so he’s resorting to frightening the very people he was elected to service,” Mr O’Brien told SkyNews.com.au.
“The PM’s use of terms like ‘under threat’ and ‘risk’ to provoke fear in regional communities is as duplicitous as it is inaccurate.
“It is misinformation and X (Twitter) has overridden his message to give assurance to people who would otherwise be frightened.”
The Queensland MP called on the Prime Minister to engage in a “mature conversation about zero-emissions nuclear energy” rather than “reverting to childish NIMBY scare campaigns”.
Introduced after Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform, Community Notes are Twitter’s fact-checking system, which in contrast to the systems put in place Meta, relies on crowd-sourced information rather than the views of self-appointed experts.
According to Twitter, the system works by “empowering people on X to collaboratively add helpful notes to posts that might be misleading.”
To prevent one-sided ratings, the system identifies notes that are “helpful to a wide range of people” by requiring “agreement between contributors who have sometimes disagreed in their past ratings”.
Mr Dutton also hit back at the Prime Minister’s post, sharing a social media video stating Australians expected better than Mr Albanese’s “false” and “childish” claims.
“No one’s proposing that a zero emissions nuclear power plant would be built on anything other than an end of life coal fire power station site,” the Opposition Leader said.
“The job of the Prime Minister is not to carry on like a child. It’s to make the tough but necessary decisions in our country’s long-term best interests.”
Mr Dutton said there were “more than 30 countries” using nuclear power, with another 50 “looking at using it for the first time”.
“Do we really think that all of these countries have got it wrong and that Anthony Albanese has it right?” he asked.
The federal opposition has made nuclear power a signature feature of it’s energy policy, with Peter Dutton suggesting the first small modular reactors could be added to the grid by the mid-2030s.
However the Opposition Leader is yet to announce where the reactors would be located, saying only that they are looking at sites with coal fired power stations that are coming to the end of their life.
While the images used by the Prime Minister are of locations close to where aging coal fired power plants are situated, there are no power plants shown in any of the picturesque photos shared by Mr Albanese.
This is not the first time this week the government has come under fire for spreading misinformation, with embattled Immigration Minister Andrew Giles announcing drones were being used to track former immigration detainees before sensationally retracting the claims.
The Prime Minister’s misleading claims about nuclear power are also an embarrassing reminder that his government has proposed a radical misinformation bill that would give the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) new powers to dictate how social media companies combat misinformation and disinformation on their platforms.
Under the proposed laws, ACMA would have the power to force digital platforms to adhere to an industry-wide “standard” for the removal of harmful content, with failure to do so leading to fines of up to five per cent of a company’s global turnover.
In the case of Meta, that’s approximately $8 billion.
Communications Minister Amanda Rishworth has hit back at criticism of the draft bill she released mid last year, claiming the laws are “not about moderating content”.
“There’s no power to remove or request the removal of individual posts. There’s no role in the regulator in determining what’s true or false,” Ms Rishworth said in July.
“The platforms will continue to have that responsibility for the content that they host, and how they promote it to consumers.”
However the draft laws have been widely denounced as a threat to free speech, with politicians, legal experts and free speech activists lining up to denounce the legislation.
This has included everyone from the Institute of Public Affair’s John Story, who described the bill as “one of the greatest attacks on free speech Australia has ever seen”, to constitutional law expert Anne Twomey, who said bill would be “worse than the disease” it aims to address.
Even Meta has criticised the legislation, pointing out it could be used in a way that “inadvertently chills free and legitimate political expression online”.
For his part, Mr Dutton said the government’s draft misinformation proposal “goes well beyond any reasonable measure”.
“It is an attack on free speech and I think Australians are right to condemn it,” the Opposition Leader said.