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, writes Jack Houghton.
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.
Meta maintains its fact-checking operation is at arm’s length and independent, but Sky News can reveal the tech giant signed a secret commercial contract directly with RMIT which allows the fact checking unit to be paid up to $740,000 a year from an Irish Meta subsidiary.
Zuckerberg has given promises globally that Meta does not seek to be the arbiter of truth on the internet and has insisted his platform is policed by an opaque entity known as the International Fact Checking Network.
However, while RMIT was certified by the IFCN at the time the contract was signed, Sky News can reveal the certification expired in December, leaving the operation free to censor Australian journalism with no oversight at all.
It is just one of 55 fact checking operations around the world which remain signatories of the IFCN despite having expired credentials.
The commercial contract between the Melbourne university and Meta has strict clauses which allow Meta to tear up the agreement if RMIT ever loses certification, but the tech giant has not done so despite being aware that the prominent fact checker is deplatforming journalism while expired.
