Australian nationalist activist Blair Cottrell cannot search for his own name on Facebook without being warned and prompted to access a New South Wales state government program aimed at overcoming “violent extremism”.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday that Facebook and Instagram will stop using third-party fact-checking organisations to moderate content as they were too politically biased, and slammed “governments and legacy media” for pushing for ever-increasing levels of censorship.
But in Australia Facebook is still working with the NSW government’s Step Together program, which appears targeted at young White Australians with patriotic political views, to warns users that certain search terms are “associated with violent or hateful activity”.
Facebook users who search for Mr Cottrell, who has no history of political violence, are shown a screen saying “are you sure that you want to continue?” and if they do they get a second warning pop-up directing users to “learn more from Step Together”.
Mr Cottrell, who first noticed that his name was flagged last month, told Noticer News he was concerned that Facebook’s partnership with Step Together could push young men into extremism by associating national pride with terrorism or violence.
“Young men need to be able to be proud of their country and ethnic heritage without government agencies calling them terrorists,” he said.
“There’s currently no level of ethnic and cultural awareness for White people the government is willing to tolerate, and that is creating extremists.”
In a video on the topic Mr Cottrell made the same point, and stressed that he had never been involved in any violent extremism.
“It’s actually really dangerous,” he said. “Because if I was younger, or less developed, and I was being wrongly associated with violence, or violent extremism, publicly by the government, like if I was 18 years old and pissed off, I might end up just thinking ‘stuff this, I’m going to become the monster they say I am’.
“That’s how a lot of young guys think. So as usual, government hags are projecting their own self-loathing onto proud Australians, declaring national pride ‘hateful’, and linking it all in with violent extremism through shifty language. That is some Orwellian Communist shit.”
Step Together’s website states that its primary focus is on “on diverting individuals away from violent extremism”, but says that unlike deradicalisation programs it does not “argue ideology or police thought, but supports individuals to move towards safe and healthy life pathways”.
It defines violent extremism as “a willingness to use unlawful violence, or support the use of unlawful violence by others, to promote a political, ideological or religious goal”, but its film about “warning signs for early intervention” is explicitly aimed at White Australian males with national pride.
The film shows a hooded White teenager playing a first-person shooter game, before the camera pans to a bible, a bomb-making handbook, Australian flags and knives, while ominous music plays in the background.
“Is someone you know headed down the wrong path” then flashes up on the screen. More Australian flags are then shown in the boy’s bedroom as the video lists “warning signs”. The video ends with his mother seeking help from Step Together, and speaking to him in the kitchen.
Mr Cottrell described the video as “vicious anti-Australian propaganda”, and said it showed the state was trying to make young people afraid to be proud of their nation and its heritage by associating them with violent extremism by default.
Noticer News asked Step Together and Facebook why Mr Cottrell’s name triggered the prompt, what criteria was used to determine whether an individual was flagged, and how a person could go about having their name removed, but did not receive a response.
It is unclear whether the partnership will continue now that Mr Zuckerberg has admitted that Facebook was “over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions”, and said that up to 20% of removed content could have been acted upon in error.
The Meta boss said on Tuesday that along with replacing factcheckers with an X-style Community Notes feature, Facebook and Instagram would stifle political content, stop using automated censorship systems, and remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and “gender identity”.
The teams that write content policy and review content are also being moved out of left-wing California and into Texas and other states.
Here’s one way state governments in Australia try to control what you see on social media☠️ pic.twitter.com/S95wfi2a7e
— Blair Cottrell (@b_cottrell89) December 10, 2024
Header image: Left, Blair Cottrell (Telegram). Right, the Facebook/Step Together warning prompt.
