Government sought removal of tweet making fun of Daniel Andrews

The SOS to Twitter HQ is one of at least 18 emails, with 222 tweets deemed too hot for public consumption by the federal government.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Nicki Connolly

The federal government sought the removal of a tweet that accused Daniel Andrews of being a “d**k” and included a picture of the Victorian Premier wearing a mask inscribed with the words “This Mask is as Useless as Me”, on the grounds it was “potentially harmful”, according to new information from the Twitter Files.

The public health SOS from Canberra to Twitter HQ in San Francisco, which occurred sometime after the tweet emerged in February 2021, was one of at least 18 emails to the US social media giant from the Department of Home Affairs, which collectively requested at least 222 tweets be taken down.

Other tweets the government deemed too hot for public consumption included one accusing then health minister Greg Hunt of “emotionally manipulative language”, and another from ‘Tony’ which called Australians “not only clowns, but the entire circus” for waiting “seven hours in a line” for a PCR test.

“By claiming that Covid-19 vaccines are ‘experimental and untested’ while photoshopping … the faces of Gladys Berejiklian, Daniel Andrews and Annastacia Palaszczuk onto the heads of Islamic State terrorists… the post undermines confidence in the Covid-19 vaccination program,” the government told Twitter in reference to one tweet.

In total the federal government asked social media companies to censor at least 4,213 posts during the Covid-19 pandemic, a fact that emerged from a freedom of information request instigated by Liberal Senator Alex Antic, and reported by The Australian earlier this week.

But the heavily redacted document provided little information about the nature of the particular requests to social media companies, which it turns out, thanks to new information from the Twitter Files, emanated from public servants in the “Extremsim [sic] Insights and Communication” branch of the Social Cohesion Unit of the Department of Home Affairs.

“A group that can’t spellcheck seemed to become the “fact-checking” authority for an entire nation,” Andrew Lowenthal, an Australian, Barcelona-based journalist, and one of small group working on the Twitter Files, told The Australian.

The email signature of the analysts from the Canberra department, which is responsible for border and national security, including ASIO, often spelt the word extremism incorrectly.

Mr Lowenthal, prompted to trawl the Twitter Files by The Australian’s reporting this week, has been working with high-profile US journalist Matt Taibbi, who was among the first with access to the Files, a vast trove of internal Twitter documents the company’s owner Elon Musk made available after he bought Twitter late last year.

Successive analyses of these documents have revealed a high degree of communication and co-ordination between US government agencies, including the FBI, and Twitter over decisions to ban news stories, social media posts and individuals who disagreed with the US government’s public health claim and mandates.

“It seems government efforts to work with Twitter to censor things they didn’t like extended far beyond the US and to Australia too,” Mr Lowenthal said, pointing out the social media giant referred to the Australian government as a “partner” in internal correspondence.

“Jokes and information that later turned out to be true were frequently included in the Australian governments censorship requests”.

Twitter staff referred internally to “hefty lists” of requests from Canberra to Twitter, which sometimes targeted doctors, individuals with as few as 20 followers, and foreigners who had “retweeted misinformation” in “Australia‘s digital information environment”.

“The DHA rarely provided evidence for their counterclaims and where they did, relied on “fact-checking” organisations like Yahoo! Or USA Today, rather than on Australia’s own scientists,” Mr Lowenthal said.

Mask mandates had no statistically significant effect on the spread of Covid19 according to a 305-page UK Cochrane analysis published globally on January 30th.

In March The Australian reported how the post-Covid vaccination death of Amy Sedgwick would have been removed from the internet by Twitter it it had emerged in 2021, under pressure from US-government funded ‘information experts’ working in partnership with Silicon Valley social media giants.

A ‘censorship-industrial complex’ of US taxpayer-backed NGOs, Stanford University academics worked in partnership with Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Google (YouTube), and Pinterest to take down or flag as misinformation “stories of true vaccine side effects”, discussion of “natural immunity” and the possibility Sars-Cov2 leaked from a lab.

“With the wind-down of the War on Terror, the intelligence community appears to have switched its attention to Countering Violent Extremism, which provides broader cover for the censorship of disfavoured internal groups, such as vaccination sceptics or even just anti-lockdown activists”.