On Monday, thanks to Liberal Senator for South Australia Alex Antic, we discovered that the Australian government is a member of a global censorship industrial complex.

When Elon Musk opened up Twitter’s internal communications to investigative journalists starting late last year, they discovered that the US government was using current and former officials from the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security who were working with NGOs and university think tanks to censor Americans on social media. This is a direct violation of the First Amendment which protects free speech from government censorship.

When I wrote about this in The Spectator Australia on 8 April, I had no idea that a similar process of government censorship was going on in Australia. However, following a request last December from Senator Antic under Freedom of Information laws, the secretary of the Department of Home Affairs Michael Pezzullo revealed on Monday that between January 2017 and December 2022, his department had referred 13,636 posts to digital platforms such as Facebook, Meta, Twitter, Instagram and Google to review against their terms of service. Of these, 4,213 were related to Covid.

The Covid requests were put to social media platforms under a protocol developed to deal with ‘online terrorist and extreme violent content’. It was created in response to the Christchurch massacre perpetrated by an Australian who used a helmet-mounted camera to broadcast live on Facebook as he murdered worshippers in mosques. A law passed shortly afterward can impose sentences and large fines on social media executives who fail to speedily remove violent live-streaming content from their platforms. At the time critics said, presciently, that the law could lead to media censorship.

This week, the department refused to provide any information about the posts it censored. But thanks to a whistleblower, The Spectator Australia has seen a spreadsheet that includes the date on which posts were flagged for censorship, the title of the posts, and the reason for the referral. Here are some examples.

On 21 January 2021, a post titled ‘Coercion is not consent’ was referred to Facebook because, ‘Video content is assessed to breach Facebook’s Community Standards (violation of misinformation threshold) as the content contains the statement “This v@ccine will take lives.”’ The reason given for censoring the post was ‘Content appears designed to undermine public confidence in Covid-19 vaccination program.’

The trouble with censoring this post is that it was correct. Just in Australia, the Therapeutic Goods Administration has admitted that 14 people were killed by the Covid vaccines and the deaths of another 972 people have been reported to the TGA because it is suspected that their deaths were caused by the vaccines.

Another post titled, ‘The Stand – The Truth About the Covid-19 Vaccine’ was flagged for censorship on 21 January 2021 because it was ‘assessed to have breached Facebook’s Community Standards (violation of misinformation threshold) as linked content includes misleading claims including that the “so-called vaccine experimental biological agent” actually doesn’t stop transmission’.

It is a fact that the Covid vaccines don’t stop transmission. Experts such as emeritus Professor Robert Clancy, one of Australia’s leading immunologists, pointed out that the vaccines never could have stopped transmission because they couldn’t trigger the development of antibodies in the nose and throat.

A post from 20 January 2021 was flagged because it urged people to ‘fight the “malicious mask mandate” and say no to masks and lockdown, directly contradicting official government advice on the efficacy and necessity of those public orders’.

Yet it was widely accepted before Covid that masks cannot stop the transmission of respiratory viruses and that lockdowns do great harm to society and can only protect a privileged ‘laptop class’.

In the ultimate touch of black humour, one of the reasons given for flagging a post for censorship was ‘misrepresenting a George Orwell quote’.

It is obvious that these posts are not examples of ‘online terrorist and extreme violent content’ and thus it would seem that they should never have been censored under the relevant legislation. Worse, in each of these cases, it is the government that was the purveyor of misinformation, not the post being censored.

This would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous and so tragic. In 2022 more than 25,000 Australians died unexpectedly. The government refuses to investigate what has caused the biggest increase in excess mortality in Australia since the second world war as the prime suspect is the mass Covid vaccination campaign that it conducted.

The censorship industrial complex is a big story in the US. Republican senators have introduced a ‘Disclose Government Censorship Act’ which would require transparency about any coordination between the government and social media companies.

The most depressing aspect of the revelation of government collusion with Big Tech to censor social media in Australia is how little coverage it got in mainstream media. Chris Kenny wrote about it in the Australian but his article was down the side of page five. Blink and you missed it. That was better than the ABC which didn’t cover the story at all. At the Guardian, Tory Shepherd didn’t see anything wrong with the government calling for the removal of whatever it deemed to be misinformation. Rather she accused Antic and One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts of ‘crying censorship because they themselves have had posts taken down’. Removing the social media posts of senators sounds a lot like political censorship but the left has become so authoritarian these days that it no longer blushes at silencing its opponents.

That almost identical pandemic censorship should occur in the US and Australia is not an accident. Early in the pandemic, the World Health Organisation called for Big Tech to remove any posts about the pandemic that countered its official narrative. Far from lamenting the mistakes that it made, the WHO is calling for even more power and resources via a pandemic treaty which it will use to censor misinformation during the next pandemic. Frighteningly, the Australian government and the mainstream media seem only too happy to give the WHO a blank cheque.