If there’s one thing that tyrants have always dreaded, it’s mockery. “Every joke is a tiny revolution,” as Orwell said. The Nazis launched a full-scale diplomatic offensive against a Finn whose dog mimicked the Heil Hitler salute. Sergei Popovich spent ten years in the Gulag for telling six anti-Soviet jokes. Jan Kalina was sentenced to two years by Czech secret police for his “anti-totalitarian jokes”.
Covid tyrants don’t like being mocked, either.
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.
“Harmful” to what? Dictator Dan’s self-esteem?
As recently reported by The BFD, the Australian government spent an extraordinary amount of time and energy snitching to Big Tech and having social media posts removed. Roughly four posts a day were memory-holed at the government’s request.
What other heinous humour did the grim-faced inquisitors of the Committee for Public Safety take the razor to?
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.
Confidence which, as we now know, was entirely misplaced.
No wonder these clowns tried to redact everything when Liberal Senator Alex Antic lodged his FOI request. When Antic received the material he requested, one document had all 28 pages redacted: everything except the title.
We had to turn to the Twitter files to find anything resembling the truth that our government tried to hide.
“Jokes and information that later turned out to be true were frequently included in the Australian governments censorship requests”.
It may be that they redacted much of the material out of sheer embarrassment.
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.
It wasn’t just a case of a single typo, either.
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.
But the lexically-challenged numbnuts in Canberra were just one cubicle in a vast, global Covid Minitrue.
In March The Australian reported how the post-Covid vaccination death of Amy Sedgwick would have been removed from the internet by Twitter if 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.
Other “experts” relied on by the censors were decidedly less so.
“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.
The Australian
Why would they bother with science, though, when they’ve got The Science™?
