How Big Tech tried to silence my voice

Peta Credlin is opposed to "Voice", a forthcoming Left-led referendum in Australia designed to privilege blacks



On August 3, Sky News posted my night’s editorial on Facebook, substantiating the argument that the Uluru Statement is a lot more than just the PM’s one-page poster. A week later, the Big Tech censors blanked it out, plastering this statement where the video used to be – “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers” – and a link to a document from a hardly unbiased partnership between the RMIT and the ABC.

In the document, the RMIT-ABC “fact-checkers” simply asserted that the Prime Minister, the Uluru Statement’s authors and the NIAA had denied my claim. They were completely oblivious to six years of previous statements by the authors who said otherwise, and disregarded the NIAA’s earlier written confirmation, from its FOI legal team, that Document 14 was indeed the full Uluru Statement.

A clear case of fact-checkers ignoring inconvenient but relevant facts, and Big Tech then blocking anything that’s doesn’t pass the RMIT-ABC test of political correctness.

This is not the first time Big Tech has censored arguments against the voice. Facebook has previously blocked an Institute of Public Affairs discussion featuring senators Jacinta Price and James McGrath. It’s also blocked a post from Advance Australia stating that the voice conferred “special rights” on Indigenous people, again citing RMIT-ABC fact-checkers, despite former judges making the very same point.

It’s wrong for Facebook to cancel views it doesn’t like, rather than be the platform for free speech that it used to claim to be, and letting people judge for themselves.

But think just how much worse this will get if the Albanese government’s proposed bill against mis­information and disinformation passes. Politically correct censorship will become routine if Big Tech faces multimillion-dollar fines for posting material that faceless government officials think is misleading or false. Especially with formerly free speech that the PM himself claims is “misinformation” because it doesn’t fit the political case he’s trying to make.

So far, there’s no suggestion that Big Tech has blocked any pro-voice advocacy, notwithstanding any number of social media posts that it’s racist to vote No or false claims that the official No campaign was using AI to fake Indigenous opposition to the voice.

This voice debate has become quite a dangerous moment for our country. There’s the PM committed to implementing “in full” a statement that he hasn’t fully read, in a bad case of endorsing the cover but not the contents.

There’s the risk Australians may be pressured by moral intimidation and weight of advertising into abandoning our historic commitment to being, in Bob Hawke’s words, a country with “no hierarchy of descent” and “no privilege of origin”. And then there’s the threat to free speech, justified on the grounds that any dissent from the Big Government, Big Business, Big Sport and Big Tech line is somehow “misinformation”.

As a newspaper columnist with my own TV show, I’m not after sympathy. And it’s hard to defend the more extreme statements that difficult subjects always elicit. Yet if free speech is not for everyone, ultimately, it is for no one.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/big-tech-yes-camp-censors-will-only-reinforce-no-vote/news-story/b4d58fd295a9cc8ad3f87dcaad49ea5a

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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