Sarah Gall is a political data scientist and membership secretary for the UK’s Conservative Friends of Australia. She previously headed up political and policy research for the Prime Minister of Australia.
On the eve of Anthony Albanese’s announcement of when Australia’s Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum will be held, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has suspended its partnership with Australian fact-checking organisation, RMIT FactLab.
The immediate suspension came after complaints of bias and unfairness relating to the upcoming referendum. Meta’s Regional Director of Policy stated yesterday in correspondence to James Patterson, a Liberal Senator, that:
“We have recently become aware that one of our Australian fact-checking partners – RMIT – did not have current IFCN accreditation and that there have been complaints made to the IFCN about possible bias or unfairness in some of the fact checks being applied by RMIT with respect to content relating to the upcoming referendum on the Voice to Parliament.”
One fact check in question was the decision by RMIT FactLab to censor Sky News presenter Peta Credlin’s Facebook post and place a label on it saying “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers”.
In the post, Credlin disputed the length of the Uluru Statement from the Heart (the petition by Indigenous Australians to create a constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament and Makarrata Commission to oversee Treaty-making and “truth-telling”).
This came after the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) released documents in March relating to the Voice under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. One document, entitled Uluru Statement from the Heart (Document 14), was a 26-page document; 25 pages longer than what the Prime Minister had been claiming it to be.
In fact, co-author of the Uluru statement, Professor Megan Davis, had previously implored all Australians to read not just the statement on the first page, but the addendum that supported it as well.
“It is actually 18 pages, the Uluru statement. People only read the first. But after the first page, there’s about four pages that explain why the Voice was chosen and not a non-discrimination clause…”
The 18 pages, which Davis makes reference to, were extracts of the full 26-page document published in the publicly-available Final Report of the Referendum Council which noted the additional pages as “extracts from the Uluru Statement from the Heart”.
These pages were then confirmed as being extracts of the Uluru Statement from the Heart by the NIAA lawyers, who wrote: “this is to confirm that the extracts in the Referendum Council’s Final Report are taken from the Uluru Statement from the Heart”.
Armed with these facts, RMIT FactLab “investigated” Credlin’s claim that the Uluru Statement from the Heart is a 26-page document and determined that it was false. The fact checkers, relying upon tangential pro-Voice campaigner arguments, did not directly refute the claim and instead stated:
“And while the Referendum Council report described Our Story as “extracts from the Uluru Statement from the Heart”, council co-chairs Mark Leibler AC and Ms Anderson have both disputed that characterisation.”
But the Referendum Council report does describe the 26 pages as the “Uluru Statement from the Heart”; a fact that has still not been explained. It is therefore only reasonable for anyone to conclude that the statement goes beyond the first page and that it is RMIT FactLab who have provided false information and not Credlin.
This however, isn’t the first time that RMIT FactLab has provided false or misleading information. Currently on their website, they claim to be “a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s code of principles”. But according to the IFCN website, RMIT FactLab’s signatory status expired in December of last year.
Given that part of the IFCN’s accreditation requires fact-checking organisations’ staff to “not get involved in advocacy or publicise their views on policy issues the organisation might fact check”, it is difficult to see how RMIT FactLab will regain its signatory status with the IFCN.
This comes after several staff, including the director, of the RMIT FactLab had previously shared pro-Voice content on their own social media pages, including one post referring to the opposition leader as a “fear-mongering racist”.
Yet these are the same people who have been able to censor Australian journalists online, aided by a lucrative commercial contract with Meta. This rightly prompted Senator Patterson to raise the concern directly with the social media company, stating:
“A private company interfering with the free speech of Australians is cause for concern under any circumstances. But the decision of a foreign headquartered social media platform to interfere with legitimate public disclosure during a referendum to change the Australian Constitution is particularly egregious and cannot go unaccounted.”
These revelations raise concerns regarding censorship online, not just in Australia but around the world. This is particularly the case when biased fact checkers are given the tools to restrict freedom of speech and shut down opposing views.