Covid censorship tyranny: fear and control used to ‘keep us safe’

The unimpeded expansion of government power, unauthorised contraction of citizens’ rights and unannounced restriction of media freedom might have done more harm than the virus.

We still do not know the full details or extent of the government’s social media thought control. Illustration: Vector

What we saw with our own eyes during the pandemic pandemonium was bad enough – a pregnant woman arrested in her own home for daring to dissent online about lockdowns; police herding people off beaches and out of parks; rubber bullets fired at construction workers protesting against vaccine mandates – but the secret actions of government revealed this week are equally disturbing.

Under Coalition and Labor federal governments Australians have been subjected to covert, online censorship on Covid-19 related matters – and it is still happening.

Pregnant Zoe Lee Buhler, handcuffed in her Ballarat home.

That this has not escalated immediately into a national scandal tells us much about the way the political/bureaucratic/media class has colluded in a mutually beneficial orgy of fear and control since the early days of the pandemic. Sadly, it also reveals how complacent and compliant the public has become, enabling and encouraging the erosion of basic liberties.

We’ve simultaneously experienced the tyrannies of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. Police powers, blocked borders, lockdowns, rings of steel, school closures and curfews delivered an authoritarian, Orwellian subjugation, while it was Aldous Huxley who foresaw us buying into the fear porn and distractions, dobbing on our neighbours, meekly accepting the rules, propaganda and censorship.

It is only because dissident Liberal senator Alex Antic pursued Covid-19 censorship through a Freedom of Information application that we know the basics of what transpired in online information surveillance. But we still do not know the full details or extent of the government’s social media thought control.

To December last year the Department of Home Affairs had intervened 4213 times with digital platforms to have pandemic posts removed. We know that not all bids were successful; we know very little about what was deleted; but, worryingly, we know it is still occurring and will continue until funding expires at the end of next month.

Thanks to Elon Musk’s exposure of the Twitter files, Barcelona-based journalist Andrew Lowenthal has been able to reveal a small sample of the federal government’s interventions on that platform. One tweet showed Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews sporting a medical mask emblazoned with the words “This mask is as useless as me.” Our government’s submission to Twitter argued this amounted to “potentially harmful information” that contradicted “official information on face mask efficacy”.

The scientific basis of this call is highly debatable, and censoring such a view was an attempt to silence a medically important and contentious debate that never should have been banned during the pandemic.

We cannot ignore the political context either and the possible aim of shielding the premier from ridicule. Canberra clearly was also keen to ensure public debate allowed no room for dissent, and delivered only meek compliance with its extraordinary interventions.

It is outrageous that such a harmlessly contrarian post could be censored secretly by government. There has been no transparency or accountability on these matters.

Other tweets the government asked Twitter to delete include an observation that then health minister Greg Hunt had used “emotionally manipulative language” and one ridiculed people over queueing for seven hours to take a Covid-19 test. Our government even asked Twitter to take down an overseas tweet retweeted into “Australia’s digital information environment”.

The arrogance and unaccountable overreach of government here is breathtaking. Not only were they on a mission to “keep us safe” but also to protect us from any debates about their methods for doing so – presumably the politicians and bureaucrats believed open debate of contentious medical and public health decisions might have turned a locked-down and acquiescent population into an unruly mob in festering dystopia.

Emergency Management Minister Murray Watt described digital censorship as a ‘really good thing’. Picture: Glenn Campbell

Asked about the revelations in Senate estimates this week, Emergency Management Minister Murray Watt said he was “comfortable” with this digital censorship, which was a “really good thing”. Watt said it was about “governments providing and ensuring the Australian public receives information based on science rather than … on the fringes of the Twittersphere.”

Yet this is not about disseminating government information; this is actually about meddling online to ensure nobody can question or disagree with the government’s proclamations. We are talking about crucial issues such as vaccine efficacy, risks and mandates, as well as masks, lockdowns, border closures and other measures that were highly contentious in scientific debates at the time and on which in some cases the official lines subsequently have been proven incorrect.

We were constantly told, for instance, that there was a community benefit in vaccination for those who were not vulnerable because it would prevent infection and transmission – we were constantly told about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. But from early on it seemed this was not true and so it has been proven.

Yet it seems this vital debate, too, must have been covertly curtailed through this secret government censorship. With political consensus from the major parties, media buy-in and public debate corralled, where was the opportunity for proper consideration of pandemic response alternatives?

That politicians who would claim to be liberal-minded or conservative would defend this overreach is extraordinary. Yet, with very few exceptions, politicians of all stripes defend these secretive and unaccountable intrusions on free speech or turn a blind eye (either that or all their strident protests are being censored from their Twitter accounts).

The mechanics for this insidious intrusion on our free speech belong to counter-terrorism measures. Civil libertarians have long argued that laws introduced to combat terrorism could curtail freedoms more broadly – in this case they have been proven right.

The Home Affairs Department runs an online surveillance function to spot terrorism and violent extremism material so it can work with the digital giants to have it taken down. In the early days of the pandemic, the Health Department – presumably at the behest of the cabinet – tasked Home Affairs to watch out for Covid-19 misinformation too. How very convenient.

Across six years there have been more than 13,000 requests to delete material, with more than 9000 of them related to terrorism and extremism. But in just under three years there have been more than 4000 related to the pandemic.

Lowenthal has accessed 18 emails to Twitter focusing on 222 tweets, which must be the tip of the iceberg because the department says most of the requests went to Facebook. He notes the public servants doing this undercover fact-checking repeatedly misspelled the word extremism in their job title, which is less than reassuring.

The unit conducting this work could have been named by George Orwell himself – the Social Cohesion Division. Alarmingly, the email correspondence refers to the government and the social media platform as partners and deliber­ately invokes the Five Eyes terminology of our intelligence sharing with the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.

The world’s most prominent Twitter files reporter, Matt Taibbi, has written about the revelations under the headline “Australia’s Creepy Covid Cops”. And the leading lockdown and vaccine mandate critic, Stanford University epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, welcomed the reports as some “sunshine” in Australia after “three long years”.

Censorship was rife at the pandemic’s height – and it’s still happening. Picture: Glenn Campbell

Taibbi wrote that the Department of Home Affairs emails “show a stricter, more nakedly dystopian approach to speech control” than was seen in American intelligence communications. “Australian authorities in these emails are seen trying to cast a wider net over potential speech violations than we’re used to seeing, targeting hyperbolic language (eg a claim that PCR tests are ‘shoved up into your brain’), jokes, tweets from people with literal handfuls of followers, and medical recommendations that were either merely controversial or later proved correct,” Taibbi wrote.

Yet in Australia, who cares? My report on Monday hardly set the world on fire. Ben Fordham followed up on 2GB the following day, and Antic joined me on Sky News but he has not been inundated with interview requests.

Antic got more media attention back when he tried to turn up to parliament without proof of vaccination. One of the few politicians to highlight his revelations is One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, who continues to call for a Covid response royal commission.

This was not the only censorship that occurred during the pandemic. Social media activists and anti-News Corp campaigners weaponised the digital giants’ pandemic rules and the edicts of the World Health Organisation to challenge what Sky News put to air.

At Sky my colleagues and I had to waste huge amounts of time and energy haggling with lawyers about what facts, opinions and dissent we could share while ensuring compliance with the broadcasting codes of practice or without having our videos banned from digital platforms (some clips were taken down and many others not posted to comply with the platform policies). The public debate suffered and crucial information was either suppressed or downplayed.

We are talking about scientific experts questioning vaccine efficacy, disagreeing with mandates, suggesting more liberal lockdown and social distancing strategies, and discussing the potential of alternative treatments. These were vital debates, with some of the dissenting views proven correct over time – yet they were constantly thwarted.

Not only was this an affront to freedom of expression, it probably prolonged the unnecessary suffering of many citizens. It might have cost lives, too, with too many healthy young people convinced to get the jab on the basis it would deliver a community benefit.

We had governments drastically overreact to the pandemic with illiberal bans on travel, lockdowns, school closures and the like. And all the while they overtly and covertly suppressed dissent.

This is another reason we simply must have a full national royal commission into our pandemic response. Anthony Albanese promised an inquiry from opposition and confirmed this intent in government but has done nothing about it. Neither the major parties nor most media are agitating for this. Perhaps they would rather not examine their three years of co-operation in fear and control.

We must fight back against this insidious trend of censorship in public debate. It is already being leveraged to stifle discussion of global warming and climate change policy, as well as debate on the Indigenous voice.

The unimpeded and unendorsed expansion of government power, unauthorised contraction of citizens’ rights and unannounced restriction of media freedom might have done more harm to our society than the virus. It is a dramatic demonstration of the fragility of our hard-won democratic ideals and a reminder that freedom can be wasted on the free.