Tag: censorship

The Face Behind Australia’s Censorship Push

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has made international headlines over alleged censorship creep in an escalating standoff with social media platform X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk.

Inman Grant’s current crusade is not an isolated affair. She is a key player in a growing network of international initiatives seeking to impose bureaucratic controls over citizens’ speech, including coordinating with high-level EU officials, the World Economic Forum, and government-backed “anti-disinformation” projects such as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. 

The fracas with Musk involves Inman Grant obtaining an interim injunction to force X to hide footage of the non-fatal stabbing of a Bishop, which was live-streamed during a Western Sydney church service on Monday evening 15 April. 

​​X Global Affairs says the platform complied with a removal notice from the Commissioner to restrict content visibility to Australian audiences, but has challenged a further “unlawful” demand that X “globally withhold these posts or face a daily fine of $785,000 AUD.”

“Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian “eSafety Commissar” is demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?” Musk posted to X.

eSafety would not confirm if the removal notice ordered that X withhold the footage globally or just within Australia, but in a statement released on 23 April, the Commissioner confirmed that eSafety will seek a permanent injunction and civil penalties against X Corp over the matter. 

Politicians on both sides of the aisle have come out swinging in support of Inman Grant, calling for more online censorship as they seek to exploit two recent knife attacks, one of which claimed six lives to relaunch a shelved misinformation bill, with the center-right opposition flipping its position to now support the legislation.

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New ABC Fact-Checkers, Same Problems?

Australia’s public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), proudly announced in 2022 that it had partnered with the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), an international alliance of major news corporations and Big Tech firms, to counter the growing threat of “fake news.”

It was part of sweeping reforms in the media to deliver ‘trusted’ news to global audiences and protect the public from the harms of misinformation and disinformation online.

Spearheaded by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), partners include Reuters, the Associated Press, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, and ABC Australia, along with social media and tech giants – Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Microsoft (LinkedIn), and Google (YouTube) to name a few.

When ABC announced its new alliance with TNI, Justin Stevens, ABC News Director said, “We’re pleased to join the Trusted News Initiative and, in the process, provide Australian audiences with a deeper and better-informed view of our region and the world.”

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Australia’s eSafety commissioner and the Global Internet Censorship Network

Twitter owner Elon Musk should be thrown in prison, said a senator in Australia yesterday, because he refuses to delete a video of a recent stabbing from Twitter globally. “Whatever Elon Musk is on,” said Senator Jacqui Lambie, “it’s disgusting behaviour. Quite frankly, the bloke should be jailed.”

But what’s truly disgusting behaviour is calling for the incarceration of someone for refusing to censor the entire global Internet on behalf of a single nation. It is not the right of any nation to decide what should be on the Internet around the world. “No president, prime minister, or judge,” responded Musk on Twitter, “has authority over all of Earth!” He’s right.

It’s true that violent content online can be disturbing. I think platforms should put warning labels on them and find some way to prevent minors from seeing it. I also think there are real privacy concerns that should be addressed.

But violence is not the only thing the Australian government has told Twitter to remove. It has also targeted political speech. And nothing can justify the Australian government censoring the entire global Internet of content it does not like.

Many of us, myself included, have long suspected that government censors in Ireland, Scotland and the European Union would attempt to censor the whole of the internet, not just in their own countries. With Brazil and now Australia demanding the power to censor the whole internet, it’s clear that our fears were more than justified.

And now, Public has learned that there is a formal government censorship network called the ‘Global Online Safety Regulators Network’, which Australia’s top internet censor, Julie Inman Grant, who is an American, described at the World Economic Forum. The group includes censors from Australia, France, Ireland, South Africa, Korea, the UK and Fiji.

[Note: The UK’s Office of Communications (“Ofcom”) is one of the seven members of the Global Online Safety Regulators Network.]

But before getting to that, it’s first important to understand just how powerful she is. Here is Julie Inman Grant, boasting of her extraordinary censorship powers. “Yes, we do regulate the platforms. We have a big stick that we can use when we want to … They’re going to be regulated in ways that they don’t want to be regulated.”

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I was banned from Elon’s ‘free speech’ X app for offending power

Following years of pressure from Israel lobbyists and British spooks, I was finally banned by Twitter/X. What does my removal say about Elon Musk, who flaunts his opposition to censorship, while promising to build an “everything app” where you could lose access to banking and messaging for violating dubious speech codes? 

On February 17, I was suspended from Twitter/X without warning. The cause was mass-reporting by Zionist activists I’d offended. My removal was justified on the basis that I violated X’s “rules against violent speech.” Having endlessly condemned violence on the platform – in particular, the Gaza genocide – I’m flummoxed. Not least because a post from one of my Zionist detractors, which openly calls for me to be “battered on a weekly basis” over my political views, remains extant today.

Despite repeated requests for clarity from X, I have no idea whether I will ever be reinstated. In February, I received from “support” stating the suspension will only be reversed after three months. But just a few sentences later, the email contradicted itself, stating in closing that the ban would last just a month. Meanwhile, whenever I log into X, my profile appears to have zero followers or follows, I cannot view or search anyone’s tweets (including my own), and my DMs are inaccessible. Have they been erased? A landing page message reads:

“Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t post, repost, or like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts.”

In January 2024, X purged a number of prominent, predominantly left-wing users without warning or explanation. Their suspensions were lifted only after a deluge of complaints poured in to the personal account of Elon Musk, the libertarian tech maven and self-proclaimed free speech warrior who purchased Twitter with his personal fortune.

I am grateful that scores of X users have done the same following my own suspension. However, Musk has kept mum about my case. While I may not have as many followers as those abruptly defenestrated in January, my work has been widely shared on X, with some posts gaining millions of impressions. Most-viewed was my December 2023 revelation that an unadvertised and unnoticed Russian government plane was parked in Washington DC’s Dulles airport, a visit which likely represented the beginning of the Ukraine proxy war’s end.

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Australian PM Calls For Crackdown on Memes About Himself

Australia’s Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese has endorsed social media censorship of satirical memes about him.

Albanese insinuated that social media platforms are duty-bound to suppress the so-called “misinformation” present on their sites.

Albanese noted, “I noticed today, for example, on the way up here that they removed various sites that were up containing fake images of myself superimposed on other people. That’s just the sort of thing that’s going on on social media. Social media has a responsibility to do the right thing here.”

X has initiated a legal challenge against the Australian government following an unprecedented court order mandating global content censorship. This move comes after the Australian Federal Court ordered X to block worldwide access to posts showing a violent stabbing in a Sydney church, despite X already geo-blocking the content within Australia​.

Musk has openly criticized the Australian government, accusing it of attempting to impose censorship on a global scale. He argues that such court orders set a dangerous precedent, allowing any country to exert control over the entire internet. This approach threatens the foundational principles of free speech and the open internet, undermining users’ rights to access information from around the world.

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TikTok Announces Crack Down on “Conspiracy Theories”

As of May 17, TikTok will start implementing new rules affecting content appearing on the app’s For You feed (FYF), and the changes are prompted by concerns about so-called “harmful speech” and “misinformation.”

FYF is vital for the visibility of content, since it opens and plays videos automatically when the app is launched, something TikTok refers to as its “personalized recommendation system.”

A post on the company’s site titled, “For You feed Eligibility Standards,” reveals that content that is deemed as health or news “misinformation” will be censored from this tab more stringently going forward.

On the health side, TikTok looks to clamp down on anything from videos promoting “unproven treatments,” dieting and weight loss, plastic surgery (unless related risks are included as well), videos allegedly misrepresenting scientific findings, to the very broadly defined content that is considered misleading, and “could potentially” cause harm to public health.

Clarity is not the announcement’s strong suit, and so the new rules will tackle even such things as “overgeneralized mental health information.” Also in the FYF “doghouse” will be content that’s found to be too focused on “sadness” (including “sharing sad quotes”).

Then there’s the blog post’s “explanation” that some types of content “may be fine if seen occasionally, but problematic if viewed in clusters.”

What this actually means is control of users’ exposure to content at its finest: “We will interrupt repetitive content patterns to ensure it is not viewed too often,” TikTok said.

When it comes to hate speech, “outlawed” is now even “some content” that is deemed to be making insinuations or indirect statements about protected groups – such that “may implicitly demean” them.

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Facebook designates Grayzone journalist Kit Klarenberg a ‘dangerous individual’

The notoriously intelligence-friendly social media network appears to have imposed a ban on posting a recent report by Kit Klarenberg, and is automatically restricting users who re-publish his work.

Multiple Facebook users have reported being banned, or having their posts censored, after sharing an investigation by The Grayzone’s Kit Klarenberg into CIA and MI6 involvement in the creation of ISIS. Readers who post links to the piece on the social network find themselves frozen out of their accounts, on the apparent grounds that Facebook has classified Klarenberg as a “dangerous individual.”

“I just shared this article from @Kit Klarenberg on Facebook and the post was immediately deleted,” wrote Ricky Hale, the founder of popular independent left-wing outlet Council Estate Media.

In a Substack article published April 5, Hale wrote that “the page was hit with restrictions and I was told I had shared a post from a dangerous individual or organisation.”

Hale was only able to regain control of his Facebook page, which boasts over 44,000 fans, by removing administrative privileges from the user who shared it — which happens to be himself.

Other restrictions imposed due to sharing Klarenberg’s work have not been lifted, and may well never be. Hale says he has been blocked from changing the page’s name, inviting people to join the page, or creating new Facebook groups. “Given Facebook had already reduced my page’s visibility for another absurd violation, I’m assuming my posts are going to be invisible,” Hale lamented. “This means a Facebook page with 44,000 users has been rendered useless because of state censorship that’s been outsourced to big tech. This is not how a free society operates.”

It was not the first time that Facebook censored one of its users for posting Klarenberg’s article. Hours beforehand, another social media user revealed the piece had been removed from her Facebook timeline mere “seconds” after it was posted.

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Social Media Fact Checkers Claim Their Work Isn’t Censorship. Here’s Why It Is.

There’s good news, and bad: first, the fact that “fact-checkers” masquerading as unbiased and accurate moderators of content – while actually unreliable and bias-prone tools of censorship – are now recognized widely enough as just that, to trigger a reaction from some prominent actors.

But then – these “fact-checkers” are reacting in order to double down on their role as something positive, and justified.

Because there are no facts to support this attitude, one of the key “fact-checkers” is hiding behind an opinion piece. But the claim is there: “Fact-checking is not censorship,” a post on Poynter wants you to believe.

This, despite the organization, which acts to “certify fact-checkers” via the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), having a project that has resulted in mass suppression of posts on Facebook.

According to Facebook (Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, posts that get fact-checked experience a 95% drop in clicks. In other words, even if this content is not outright removed, it is made virtually invisible. That’s censorship by any other name.

So how in the world can Poynter claim that activities of those it certifies actually result in “adding to the public debate” rather than suppressing it?

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Brazilian Censorship Scandal: Twitter Files Shows How Government and Big Tech Silence Dissent

The latest development in the Twitter Files suggests that a concerted initiative backed by the Brazilian government is threatening freedom of speech across the globe in coordination with various high-profile tech companies. According to the allegations brought forth by investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters are specifically in the crosshairs of this extensive campaign.

At the helm of this scheme, as Shellenberger suggests, is Alexandre de Moraes, the superior electoral court’s chief and a participant in Supreme court proceedings and someone whose push for censorship has been documented heavily.

He is purportedly leading a combined legislative and judicial endeavor to stifle political dissent. Shellenberger unveils some quite disturbing actions allegedly enforced by de Moraes, including imprisoning individuals sans trial for content shared on the web, the requirement of user-removal from social media sites and specific content censorship without the ability to appeal or access evidence produced against them.

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German Intel Chief Defends His Efforts To Police The “Thought And Speech Patterns” Of Citizens

The German Interior Ministry continues to defend its controversial and widely criticised plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), our domestic intelligence service and political police, have sacrificed substantial popular regard in the face of this campaign. According to a poll published last month, a plurality of Germans believe that the BfV is being misused for political purposes. The sentiment is prominent across all parties, except of course for the Greens, who believe that all is well with the Federal Republic.

The creepy, dissolute and rodent-looking BfV chief, Thomas Haldenwang, has taken to the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine to defend the conduct of his office and his plans to shape the “thought and speech patterns” of ordinary people through official repression.

The thing about “freedom of expression,” Haldenwang explains, is that it “is not carte blanche for enemies of the constitution”.

Recently, public discourse has repeatedly featured headlines and articles calling the work of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) into question. There is talk of an “opinion police,” a “language police” and even a “Government security service”. They say the BfV discredits political opinions “on command” as extremist as soon as they depart from the social and political mainstream, or when they embark upon criticism of Government action or the work of the democratic parties.

One thing should be unmistakably clear: freedom of opinion prevails in Germany – and that is a good thing! Freedom of opinion is a fundamental element of our constitution and one of the greatest assets of our liberal democratic order. As such, it is also protected by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

“Freedom of opinion,” Haldenwang explains, is what “distinguishes a democracy from an autocracy or a dictatorship.” In the Federal Republic even “offensive, absurd and radical opinions” are protected.

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