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Australians were censored by their own government for telling the truth about Covid-19. And they paid over $1 million for it, according to a recent FOI revelation.

Australian taxpayers paid $1 million to a foreign-owned entity that helped the Commonwealth censor factually correct posts about Covid-19, new documents have revealed.

The bombshell revelation, published and editorialised by The Australian in recent days, came thanks to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests submitted by Senator Alex Antic from South Australia.

Australia’s Own Twitter Files Scandal

In total, the Australian Government flagged 4,213 Covid-themed posts for suppression.

While some posts contained irrational or unverified statements, the Commonwealth also blacklisted many legitimate claims made by Australian citizens.

Among them were posts correctly stating that Covid-19 injections did not stop infection or transmission of the virus, that masks and lockdowns were ineffective, and that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Content posted by Australian medical professionals was also censored, along with calls for peaceful protest against heavy-handed pandemic measures, and perhaps most cynically of all, testimonies of the vaccine-injured.

Even memes that poked fun at politicians were taken down, in what Senator Antic has dubbed the #AustralianTwitterFiles scandal.

The original #TwitterFiles hashtag refers to a recently-exposed plot by the United States government to have Big Tech shut down truthful reporting on Biden family corruption and other politically sensitive material, including Covid-19.

Senator Antic’s Investigation

Senator Antic submitted his initial FOI request last December and received the first documents in May of this year. They reveal that between 2020 and 2022, the Department of Home Affairs paid a London-based firm in excess of $1 million to monitor Covid-19 posts by Australians.

The department subsequently flagged undesirable posts with Twitter, Facebook and other digital platforms for restriction or removal.

The censorship took place mostly under the Morrison Government.

“It is entirely unclear to me why the Department of Home Affairs, a department which is primarily charged with the duty of overseeing matters like border control, has been using a backdoor arrangement with social media companies to influence the media in relation into matters such as public health,” Senator Antic said at the time.

The key document provided to Senator Antic justifying the department’s autocratic behaviour had all 28 pages blacked out. Only the title page was legible, indicating that the ‘Online Content Incident Arrangement (OCIA) Procedural Guideline’ was ostensibly put in place to address “online terrorist and extreme violent content”.

Censorship Details Come to Light

What kind of content was censored and why remained a mystery until last week, when questions on notice from Senator Antic yeilded further details of the government’s censorship industrial complex.

According to The Australian:

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.

The report, by National Affairs Associate Editor Chris Kenny, also revealed commonplace mockery like “a vaccine so safe you have to be threatened to take it… for an illness so bad you have to be tested to know you have it” was blacklisted as “potentially harmful information” that would “contribute to vaccine rejection”.

Critiques of mask, social distancing and stay-at-home mandates were likewise banned for contradicting “official information on the proven efficacy of the imposed public health order”.

For three years running, the Australian government made an average of four requests per day to Big Tech companies to gag Australian citizens speaking up about Covid-19 online.

“This was censorship on an industrial scale,” Kenny summarised, “with the private contractor tasked to trawl through social media posts 24/7”.

The Government’s Proposed ‘Misinformation Bill’

Smoking gun evidence that the Commonwealth banned the truth comes at an inconvenient time for an Albanese Government seeking to pass its ominous ‘Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill’.

The Orwellian legislation would give the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) the power to define truth and fine social media companies millions of dollars in fines for failing to shut down the free speech of Australian citizens.

In its Monday editorial, The Australian also drew a direct link between the government’s documented censorship and its looming ‘Misinformation Bill’:

The real-world efforts by the Australian government to suppress factual information as part of its overly restrictive response to the Covid-19 pandemic are all that is required to demolish any credibility in current efforts to police the internet for misinformation. The Morrison Coalition paid an Australian arm of the global M&C Saatchi communications empire more than $1m to monitor digital communications and alert the Department of Home Affairs to posts the government might want taken down…

This contemporary example of official overreach confirms the age-old problem identified by Henry Ergas on these pages; that few temptations come more readily to governments than that of suppressing views they regard as irksome, dangerous or simply incorrect. This is why the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 poses so serious a threat to our democracy.

Australians still have until 20 August to make a submission opposing the Labor Government’s proposed censorship powers. Make your submission HERE.

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