Australia made 4,213 censorship requests during pandemic, data show

Australia’s Department of Home Affairs made 4,213 requests of social media platforms to censor posts containing COVID-19 “misinformation”, data released last week revealed.

Home Affairs provided the data to Liberal Senator Alex Antic in response to his Freedom of Information request from November. Between January 2017 and December 2022, the department “had made 13,636 referrals to digital platforms to review content against their own terms of service”. Of these, 4,213 were “COVID-19-related referrals”.

When he was hauled before a Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee last week, Home Affairs Secretary Michael Pezzullo explained the department’s process, which began with a third-party marketing firm called M&C Saatchi.

Prior to the pandemic, Saatchi was hired by the department to scour social media platforms for posts related to terrorism. In 2020, Australia’s Health Department asked Home Affairs to have Saatchi also include posts that questioned government science on COVID-19.

At Home Affairs’ behest, Saatchi staff began scanning social media for offending posts. But rather than search for just any dissenting content, they specifically looked for content which violated the social media corporations’ “COVID-19 misinformation” policies. Saatchi’s staff would send the posts to Home Affairs, where a team run by First Assistant Secretary Catherine Hawkins would review them and refer them to the social media companies for removal.

“If we came across material that in the Department of Health’s view offended or potentially offended the disinformation/misinformation standards that the technology companies themselves have in place around COVID, [then] as an assistant or adjunct to the Department of Health . . . we would take that on as . . . a utility player, able to assist the Department of Health,” Pezzullo told the committee.

Both Senator Antic and Senator Malcolm Roberts pressed the Home Affairs officials on how they determined what was COVID-19 misinformation, given that much of that “misinformation” has since been proven correct. But Hawkins responded that the department made no such judgment; her team only referred posts that violated tech platforms’ own misinformation policies.

“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.

Antic was also provided with a copy of the Department of Home Affairs Online Content Incident Arrangement Procedural Guideline, subtitled, “Australia’s domestic crisis response protocol for online terrorist and extreme violent content”. The document details the department’s procedures for social media content and runs for 28 pages. Every page other than the title page has been completely redacted.