The COVID Censorship Chain of Command

During the May/June Senate Estimates hearings, I asked the Department of Health and Aged Care to clarify their role with the Department of Home Affairs in censoring social media posts. Home Affairs had indicated that it relied upon the Department of Health to identify social media posts that ’contravened Facebook/Meta’s guidelines’. This of course is just more dodging of responsibility as the agency trampling the fundamental rights of speech. Although it’s government doing the censoring, they give the social media corporations the button to push. It turns out that when Home Affairs wanted to censor or provide information to social media platforms where posts breached the platform’s own guidelines during the COVID response, they relied upon the Department of Health to identify whether or not there was a breach. The Department of Health rarely identified posts and merely provided the information that the government decreed to be ’correct’.