United Australia party leader Craig Kelly has used a parliamentary inquiry on social media and online safety to take Google and Facebook to task over the removal of his party’s videos from YouTube and his ban from Facebook for pushing unproven treatments for Covid-19.
United Australia Party has spent close to $5m advertising its videos on YouTube since Kelly became leader of the party in August, accounting for about 98% of all political ad spend on YouTube in Australia during that time. YouTube has not banned the account or ceased taking money from the party, but it has removed a number of the party’s videos for allegedly violating its community guidelines.
Kelly was also banned from Facebook and Instagram last year for posts promoting unproven Covid-19 treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
In a parliamentary committee hearing on Thursday, the member for Hughes questioned Google, Facebook and TikTok mainly using examples of each of these services taking action against content he or his party had posted.
He questioned why a speech he had given in parliament was removed from YouTube, and he had “countless examples” where content had been removed.
Google’s director of government affairs and public policy in Australia, Lucinda Longcroft, told Kelly that the same community guidelines that apply to the public apply to public figures such as himself.
“Our policies are applied regardless of the nature of the person [or] the position may hold,” she said.
Longcroft said Google’s Covid-19 policies had been developed based on advice from around the world.
“This information policy, which was developed at the start of the pandemic, is probably published on our website. It is quite detailed. It takes into account very clear guidelines from global authorities, [the] World Health Organization, as well as trusted medical and scientific authorities and governmental authorities.
“And it is constantly reviewed and revised as scientific medical information is updated, and we work very closely with experts.”
The UAP has so far avoided reaching the threshold of having three strikes against the account in 90 days, which would lead to a permanent suspension.
The deputy chair of the committee, Labor MP Tim Watts, had himself reported nine UAP videos to YouTube, but only six of those were removed. He asked why each video removed did not count as a single strike, and Longcroft said YouTube “bundled” reported videos together.
“If a number of videos are found to be violative at the same time they are bundled into one strike,” she said.
“I’ll remember to stretch them out next time,” Watts replied. He also criticised Google for continuing to accept money from the UAP – even after it had allowed the party to promote videos that were later removed.
“We are in the middle of a pandemic, we know he is a repeat offender, yet you’re doing nothing to stop him amplifying content,” he said.
“We certainly are doing everything in our power to stop him and every other person who might promulgate misinformation relating to Covid or other on our platforms,” Longcroft said. “We do not seek to profit [from] that misinformation and our ad policies and enforcement is in line with that.”
When the hearing moved to Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, Kelly said Facebook had “blood on its hands” for blocking information on Covid-19 treatments, and asked if they thought his ban from the platform had interfered with his duties as an MP because he was unable to communicate with constituents through the platform.
Facebook’s director of public policy in Australia, Mia Garlick, said Facebook was a tool politicians could use.
“I think people use our services in a range of different ways. And so I don’t really want to commit to any one generalisation for all of the members of parliament,” she said.
The then speaker of the House of Representatives, Tony Smith, had already ruled there was no evidence that the ban was targeted at Kelly in his capacity as a member of parliament.
When TikTok appeared, officials admitted Kelly had been suspended from the platform in error, and a video he had posted had been “over-moderated”.
In the absence of Twitter from the hearing, Kelly asked representatives from industry body DIGI about a tweet related to “a certain person in my electorate” calling that person “a massive fuckhead”. Kelly said it was false and defamatory and said it was a “massive failure” the tweet was allowed to be posted and had been up for three days.
A tweet matching the date of posting, the number of likes and retweets mentioned was a tweet about Kelly.
