Here’s one I didn’t have on my 2026 Bingo card: the Australian government literally legislating itself the right to use unlimited AI-driven sock-puppet accounts to push propaganda.
For the uninitiated, ‘sock-puppet’ is internet slang for a false online identity used for deceptive purposes. Typically, sock-puppets are used to manipulate public opinion, or worse. In 2010, a US lawyer was convicted on charges including criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment, for using sock-puppet accounts. In 2014, a Florida court found that “the act of falsifying multiple identities” should be prohibited, regardless of whether the statements they make are false or true, but because the conduct is ipso facto deceptive.
But deception is what governments do. Few more assiduously than the Albanese government and its pet censor, “eKaren” Julie Inman-Grant. Inman-Grant has been rapped over the knuckles multiple times for illegally threatening platforms to try and force them to take down perfectly legal material. Her defence, bizarrely, is that, because she exceeded the limits of the law, the law therefore didn’t apply to her and she couldn’t be punished.
This is the person the Albanese government wants to hand the power to create literally unlimited sock puppet accounts, including using AI. This is the same Albanese government, remember, which is banging on about the ‘dangers’ of AI.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
A plan to allow Australia’s online censorship chief to operate fake social media accounts as part of Australia’s controversial Digital Duty of Care regime has sparked global outrage.
The provision would give eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant the power to create “sock puppet identities” – defined in the legislation as a “false or fictitious identities” – and use them to generate material online, including by means of AI, “without limitation”.
During the Covid era, it was common knowledge that Anthony Albanese’s close friend ‘Dictator Dan’ Andrews’s government was using an army of sock-puppets to shut down any criticisms of that state’s disastrous Covid policies. Anyone on social media, and even journalists writing in the legacy media, who dared criticise Andrews was instantly flooded with a barrage of harassment and near-identical defences of the Glorious Leader.
It’s one thing, though, to suspect that the government is up to something deceitful, quite another for them to literally come out and legislate themselves the right to deceive citizens.
That this is an inherently bad idea can be judged by the people most enthusiastically promoting it.
[Free speech advocate Michael Shellenberger] then drew attention to the fact that Ms Inman Grant, an unelected leftist bureaucrat who is paid $536,000/year, has admitted being offered a job at the CIA, and has tried to censor the global internet.
He also referred to a Greens senator’s recent comments that the Digital Duty of Care was needed to stop right-wing political messaging being “amplified”, and wrote: “They’re not even trying to hide that they’re doing this to censor their political enemies.”
The Greens senator in question is grotesque antisemite David Shoebridge, who openly touts the sock-puppet legislation as a means of silencing perfectly lawful comments by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, or the Liberals. Among the things Shoebridge wants censored is completely factual rebuttals of the ‘genocide in Gaza’ lie that he promotes.
Tracing back the family tree of this astonishing deceit brings us to the doorstep of the defunct, thoroughly discredited, USAID far-left propaganda machine. The husband of the last USAID administrator, Cass Sunstein, has openly advocated using sock-puppets to manipulate public opinion – or, ‘conspiracy theories’ as he prefers to sneer.
Many millions of people hold conspiracy theories; they believe that powerful people have worked together in order to withhold the truth about some important practice or some terrible event.
You mean, such as when the AFP Commissioner and ABC journalists lied that there was “no religious motivation” to the Bondi Islamic terror attack? Maybe, WMDs in Iraq? The Gulf of Tonkin incident? COINTELPRO?
Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action.
But, as always, it’s different when anyone else does it.
Political leaders across the West have said for a decade that governments must end online anonymity to shut down fake accounts known as bots, particularly those from Russia. “I want to see real names on the internet,” said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in February. “In a democracy, citizens have the right to privacy,” said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at Davos in January 2025, and “not to anonymity or impunity,” proposing to tie every social media account to a European digital identity wallet. Greece’s digital governance minister proposed in April 2026 to link every profile to a verified identity because “The major problem behind anonymity is toxicity.” French President Emmanuel Macron declared that his priority was “to demand the disappearance of fake accounts” and “these famous bots, these troll farms.”
When the government wants to forbid you from doing what they are openly admitting they are up to, you can be very sure that they are up to no good.
