On 4 March 2015 staff of the Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, uploaded this post to his Facebook page. It was all about Tony pledging his support to the pro-feminist #HeforShe campaign which I discuss here.
I then contributed my own thoughts on the matter. Oh, wait you can’t see anything. That’s because the site administrator filtered it out of the timeline. I assume this was because he/she is either pro-feminist, or anti-MRA, or both. I can’t think of any other reason, for example, there is no profanity in my post. It was not due to my post containing a hyperlink (many other visible posts include hyperlinks), and I note that there are some fairly strident pro-feminist posts left visible.
Anyway, after I logged into my account, there was my post (visible in the second screen save), just below the post by Henry Poulsen.
That, folks is what you call ideological censorship. Whereas the office of the Prime Minister should be right at the forefront of protecting our democratic right to self-expression, here they are seen to be inhabiting a very different place.
Yet another of the tremendous advances achieved by the feminist movement.
#sarcasm
Malcolm Turnbull (then Minister for Communications) uploaded a very similar post onto his Facebook page on 2 March, and I provided the same response. It’s pleasing to note that in his case my post was not removed.
Ah, but then in September 2015 Malcolm Turnbull was appointed Prime Minister, and guess who suddenly fell into lockstep with the feminist lobby?
“The PM told Today’s Lisa Wilkinson that “the issue of family violence, or domestic violence as it’s often called – which is just violence against women, which is the way I prefer to describe it – is an enormous one.” (Source)
No Malcolm, domestic violence is emphatically not “just violence against women”.
On 24 September 2015 the Prime Minister announced a huge swathe of public funding to address the issue of domestic violence. Here is the media release … you will see that public comments are enabled. That’s great, but unfortunately once the tide of comments turned against the Prime Minister’s position, the moderator stopped uploading all contributed comments (no matter how civil they were).
In the screen-save provided below (from my Disqus account) you can see a number of posts marked “pending”. Thus rather than deleting comments, the moderator simply didn’t approve/upload those critical of the Prime Minister’s approach.
