The Australian Government colluded with big tech to suppress speech on Covid
The Censorship Industrial Complex Down Under
A Freedom of Information request by Senator Alex Antic has revealed that the Australian Department of Home Affairs made over 4,000 requests to digital platforms to take down content related to Covid.
The FOI documents1 show that from the start of the pandemic up to 15 Dec 2022, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) referred 4,213 social media posts that they believed to be in breach of big tech platforms’ community guidelines. This comes as a surprise, given that the Department’s purview includes border security, counter-terrorism and immigration, but not public health.
Covid social media posts were reported to platforms under the Online Content Incident Arrangement (OCIA). A copy of the OCIA was provided in the FOI response, however every page but the cover was redacted.
In Senate Hearings today, 22 May 2023, DHA representatives told Senator Antic that the OCIA was initially set up in the wake of the 2019 Christchurch shootings as a counter-terrorism effort to monitor and report Terrorism & Violent Extremist Content (TVEC). However, under the Scott Morrison Government, the Department was given the directive to, “lean in on Covid dis- and misinformation.”
Senator Antic responded,
“What you’re describing, effectively there is a censorship industrial complex that arises out of the Department of Health, presumably ATAGI and the Therapeutic Goods Association (sic) directing traffic through the Department of Home Affairs to enforce that?”2
Secretary of the Department, Michael Pezzullo AO, did not accept this characterisation, however he told Senator Antic that the DHA did receive funding to monitor social media posts related to Covid on behalf of the Department of Health (DOH). The funding is set to end on 30 June 2023.
Assistant Secretary Catherine Hawkins stressed that the DHA is, “not the arbiter of truth and we have no coercive powers,” when it comes to determining what constitutes Covid dis- and misinformation and enforcing content take-downs. DHA’s role is more like a social media hall monitor, reporting posts to social media platforms based on what violates their own community guidelines. Except that the DHA doesn’t actually do the hall monitoring themselves - they outsource the task to a service provider.
This is one of a series of troubling revelations that hint at the possibility of a Censorship Industrial Complex at work in Australia.
Earlier this year, another release of FOI documents3 revealed that the DOH had emailed Facebook to flag a group that was sharing, “vaccine reactions that are not substantiated.” Facebook responded that it had taken down the group.
The documents show that the DOH also emailed Twitter and Instagram to flag social media posts, including one that directly quoted the TGA’s Covid vaccine safety report. Twitter emailed back asking the DOH if there were any other Tweets that they would like the Twitter team to assess.
The DOH and Twitter also emailed about using Moments as a tool to push Covid vaccine information to users from “reputable sites” such as the DOH, the TGA, the Australian Academy of Science, the NCRIS, and the WHO. The DOH also asked for assistance in managing paid dark posts on Twitter. Dark posts are targeted ads that show only in the feeds of targeted users.
All in all, from March 2020 to September 2022, the DOH spent almost $10 million on social media related to Covid.
(Credit to Twitter user @real_GGoswami for bringing this FOI to light - you can find the full thread here.)
In March of this year, American journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibi testified in US Congress about their discovery of a Censorship Industrial Complex in their investigation of Twitter’s internal files.4 Shellenberger and Taibi described a web of cosy collusion of government agencies, private sector think tanks and academic institutions working together with big tech to spy on and censor ordinary citizens.
In their reporting, which has become known as the Twitter Files, Shellenberger and Taibi, along with other notable independent journalists, documented a list of activities that people in free and democratic nations would probably associate with authoritarian regimes in places such as China or Russia. Activities including:
Elaborate disinformation campaigns instigated by government agencies and think tanks in order to influence elections (eg: Hunter Biden laptop coverup, fake Russian bot disinfo used to tie Trump to Russia);
Censorship of true information that was inconvenient to government policy (called ‘malinformation’);
Twitter’s secret use of blacklists and visibility filters to suppress certain accounts, opinions and even entire topics, and so much more.
Find a complete list of the Twitter File instalments here.
Why this matters should be obvious, but in case it’s not, the collusion of government with big tech, industry (eg: pharma), academia and think tanks to steer public conversation and suppress inconvenient truths veers sharply away from the democratic ideals that our societies were founded on. In a world where the Experts were always right, this would only be a violation of our freedom of expression and thought. But as we know from the Covid era, the Experts get it wrong, a lot, which makes the Censorship Industrial Complex a violation of truth itself.
The extent of the Censorship Industrial Complex in Australia is as yet unknown, but there are enough breadcrumbs to cause alarm.
Senator Antic said today,
“What I’m troubled by is the interjection of unelected bureaucrats into the realm of freedom of speech and into the realm of publishing, and of government departments generally.”
Senator Antic is hardly alone on this, in Australia or around the world. Senator Antic has requested a full, unredacted copy of the Online Content Incident Arrangement and more detail about the 4,213 social media posts that the Australian Government sought to have taken down.
The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) is the expert body that advises the regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
At this point are there any public entities in this country, elected or unelected, local or federal, that are staffed by a majority of ethical people, and run for and on behalf of the Australian public? The answer is sadly “No”.
Put another way, what sane, critically-thinking, incorruptible, competent person would choose to work for one of them?The fact that Senator Antic is so well known as an outlier of the system, says it all.
Paraphrasing now, but it was recently said by someone that the system here and elsewhere is now purposefully so corrupt, so bloated, so broken, so lacking in checks and balances, so opaque, the rules and regulations so inscrutable, that essentially it now exists to hide differing degrees of graft and incompetence because practically everyone in it is either ignorant of, indifferent towards, cowed by, or is actively benefiting from, said crime or graft.
How the hell does one even begin to root out the bad actors when practically the entire edifice needed to do so is itself staffed with bad actors, and the judicial system to whom one would turn for redress is no longer interested in justice??
Speaking of censorship/fact checking, I was subject to this in one of my earlier interviews with Graham Hood and John Larter, see: https://www.facebook.com/grahamhoodformerpilot/posts/492738042279842/
This video now has the warning: “Partly false information. Independent fact-checkers say that this information has some factual inaccuracies. You can choose whether to see it.”
The AAP fact check article says: “An Australian vaccine sceptic claims “you can’t actually vaccinate” against respiratory diseases because the vaccines are “bypassing the oral-nasal” region.” https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/you-cant-vaccinate-against-respiratory-diseases-claim-is-baseless/
Yes, that’s what I said, quoting retired professor Ted Steele from a joint interview we did in August 2022 with Mike Ryan on TNT Radio, one of the few places people can speak freely on vaccination topics. Here’s a transcript of Ted Steele's comments that I referred to, which were in reference to a clip of conversation between Norman Swan, ABC, and Christopher Goodnow, Garvan Institute, starting at 33.34 in this link. https://tntradiolive.podbean.com/e/steve-crothers-elizabeth-hart-prof-ted-steele-on-the-mike-ryan-show-03-august-2022/
Ted Steele:
“…this is the most extraordinary revealing interview I've heard in my life, particularly through Covid, through two experts. There was one thing that stood out, that was so striking. As an immunologist, there's two immune systems. There's the immune mucosal oro-nasal immune system for the respiratory tract and the gastrointestinal tract. That's the primary one. And then there's the blood immune system, as I've repeatedly pointed out, and my colleagues and I've repeatedly pointed out, there's no way any type of jab in the arm, however dangerous they are, because they're dangerous, can possibly protect you against the infection in the respiratory tract and the lungs. For that, you need oro-nasal mucosal, secretory IgA immunity. That's why all these vaccines, as Elizabeth would put it, are 'leaky'. That is, they don't protect you. They haven't protected anyone at any time throughout the Covid pandemic for the past 12 to 18 months now, on our monitoring of what's going on. So the extraordinary ignorance on display, immunological ignorance on display, that's where the hubris is, incredible ignorance of immunology. Yet he's a professor of immunology at the Garvan Institute. I'm just staggered by it, quite honestly, I'm just staggered by it.”