Prominent nationalist activist Joel Davis has been censored on the social media app Telegram, the latest example of Big Tech interference in Australian politics.
Mr Davis had his channel “app banned” without warning on Thursday evening, meaning it cannot be viewed by Telegram users who have downloaded the app from Google or Apple.
Telegram did not tell Mr Davis why his channel was blocked for app store users, and there is no appeal process, but the platform has previously restricted channels at the request of the American technology giants, the German government, and law enforcement agencies.
Mr Davis, whose now-censored channel has more than 13,100 subscribers, told Noticer News: “This is clearly an act of politically motivated censorship, I avoid the use of racial slurs and don’t advocate for violence.
“It’s ridiculous that Apple and Google can effectively censor people on a platform they don’t directly control, with no recourse or official TOS [terms of service] standards.
“Nevertheless, I will simply make a new channel and continue on with my political advocacy. Navigating censorship comes with the territory of being a political dissident and it won’t stop me from continuing to advance White racial advocacy and expand my influence.”
Mr Davis’s old channel is still visible for Android users who download the app directly from the Telegram website, or for Apple users who access the platform via a web browser.
European Australian Movement leader Thomas Sewell has his channel with more than 10,000 subscribers restricted, and a previous channel with over 16,000 subscribers was removed entirely.
And after the October 7 attacks on Israel, pressure from Apple and Google resulted in Telegram blocking two of the main channels used by Hamas.
University of Zurich researcher Aleksandra Urman told WIRED after the Hamas bans that both Google and Apple were able to influence the moderation decisions made by Telegram.
“What we seem to know from experience is that when Google and Apple say, ‘Hey, remove this,’ that’s when Telegram comes in and starts removing things,” she said.
A spokesperson for Google told WIRED at the time that all Play store apps must implement “robust moderation” and provide processes for reporting “objectionable” content and users and taking action “where appropriate”.
The blocking of Mr Davis’s channel comes after he was named in a submission to the Australian Senate’s controversial ongoing inquiry into “right-wing extremist movements” made by international think tank the Counter Extremism Project (CEP), which focused on his weekly live-streams with Blair Cottrell and Mr Sewell.
Mr Cottrell recently spoke out about his own experiences with Big Tech censorship after being removed from YouTube and having his appeals against his X ban ignored. He told Noticer News he did not violate the terms of use of either platform, and suspects they were acting on instructions from the Australian government.
Mr Cottrell warned that the ongoing persecution and censorship of nationalists recommended by unelected “counter-extremism” experts working for global think tanks was “ironically feeding extremism”, and questioned whether this was deliberate.
“There are plenty of young men in Australia who are already sceptical of popular social life and government policy, ‘counter-extremism’ finds these guys and targets them with hate-speech crimes and brutal censorship,” he said.
“This doesn’t make these guys disappear, it just makes them more disenfranchised and more radical.
“It’s a worrying trend.”
Mr Urman also warned in her comments to WIRED that Telegram channel restriction could be counter-productive.
“People who are likely to follow these groups even after they are restricted, who really want to see that content and are going to seek out the technical possibilities to do that, are more likely to be more radical,” she said, adding that the content could become more extreme also as channel operators no longer needed to self-censor.
