Sky News Australia has published an in-depth report about a full throttle attempt to influence the outcome of a democratic referendum in the country. Facebook (now known as Meta) and a legion of supposedly third-party “fact checkers” are shutting down journalists and activists who oppose the referendum in an effort to silence dissent.
The referendum concerns a hot-button issue for the Australian left, the proposed creation of The Voice, a representative body based on ethnic lines, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders, that would act as an advisory body to the Australian parliament.
Mark Zuckerberg martial arts tourney (Facebook)
According to Sky News, Facebook, along with a coalition of international “fact checkers,” is working to skew debate on social media in favor of creating the proposed representative body, which will be put to a vote of the Australian people later this year.
Via Sky News Australia:
Two of Australia’s most powerful universities and a multi-billion dollar tech giant are fronting campaigns to silence news coverage of the Voice to influence the referendum.
A Sky News Australia investigation has uncovered a disturbing foreign-financed attempt to block political debate and news coverage around the Voice, which exposes the global fact checking system used by tech giant Meta as non-compliant with its own rules of impartiality and transparency.
In one case, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology has been allowed by Facebook parent company Meta to block and deplatform Australian journalism, despite the platform knowing it was a breach of the rules Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg established to distance himself from fact checking responsibilities.
According to Sky News, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), a Facebook-approved fact checker, breached their own rules to throttle Sky’s distribution on the platform.
“Fact checkers employed by RMIT have led to numerous code breaches, including one fact checker using her social media account to label Opposition Leader Peter Dutton a fear-mongering racist for his views on the [referendum],” reported Sky.
Sky’s report also highlighted how the RMIT Fact Lab, “which has a commercial contract with Meta to police content,” is led by a partisan left-wing journalist who is campaigning in the referendum on the “yes” side.
“News organisations should not be policed by activists who have wormed their way into powerful institutions to act as censorious arbiters of truth,” wrote Sky News Australia’s Jack Houghton, analyzing the report.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.