As I reported recently, the Australian government was censoring social media posts at a rate of knots during Covid. In less than three years, the government censored over 4000 posts, for supposedly “harmful misinformation”.
I’m sure you won’t be at all surprised to find that that was a blatant lie.
Many of 4000 social media posts secretly censored by government during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic contained factual information and reasonable arguments rather than misinformation, new documents reveal.
Remember when you were told that, if you didn’t hear it from the government or its lackeys, it wasn’t true? That was a deliberate and knowing lie.
Censored social media posts, on the other hand, were too often the plain truth the government didn’t want you to hear.
For instance, the then Coalition government sought the removal of an Instagram post in April 2021 that claimed “Covid-19 vaccine does not prevent Covid-19 infection or Covid-19 transmission”.
That statement clearly was accurate yet the official intervention via the Home Affairs Department claimed it breached Instagram’s community guidelines because it was “potentially harmful information” that was “explicitly prohibited” by the platform.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that every censored post was true. But it does mean that, once the government gets into the censorship business, truth is too often the victim of the inquisitor.
Even if some of the information was false, the hypocrisy is that it was the censors themselves who were most often, and most harmfully, lying through their teeth.
What harm, after all, is there from someone declining to be Covid vaccinated, except maybe to them? On the other hand, the harm from the lies behind lockdowns and mask mandates are demonstrable, society-wide, and with a decades-long tail.
We know where the real harmful misinformation is coming from — and it’s not your nutty mate gibbering about 5G towers.
Many other social media posts were censored for opposing mask mandates and questioning the effectiveness of lockdowns and vaccines.
Objections and questions which we know — and knew, even then — were absolutely, scientifically demonstrably true.
An April 2021 tweet was challenged because it claimed “Covid-19 was released or escaped from Wuhan laboratory in China and that it was funded by the US government”.
The Home Affairs Department claimed this was “explicitly prohibited” under Twitter’s rules because it might “invoke a deliberate conspiracy by malicious and/or powerful forces”, yet American intelligence agencies have found the most likely source of the virus was the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and it has been revealed that some work at the laboratory was funded by the US […]
One Facebook video post in January 2021 was targeted for removal because it encouraged “civil disobedience”.
Ordnung muss sein!, indeed. (“There must be order!”) How dare the proles be disobedient?
Even worse than the sort of industrial-scale censorship that would make the Stasi blush, is the fact that the government hired private enforcers to do its dirty work.
Over three years up until last month, the federal government paid World Services Australia, an arm of London-based global communications firm M&C Saatchi, more than $1m to monitor Covid-19 posts online and alert it to controversial material.
The Australian
As Senator Alex Antic, whose FOI requests unmasked the censorship regime says, this amounts to a “censorship industrial complex”.
All coming, too, from the same government which is trying to force through a “Misinformation Bill” which would punish social media platforms for declining to censor anything the government objected to.
They lied, they knew they were lying, and they punished anyone who told the truth.