Australian eSafety FOI Reveals Gov Flagging of Caldron Pool Content, Raises Censorship and Shadow Ban Concerns

An FOI request to the eSafety Commission proves that my content and Caldron Pool’s posts are being flagged by the Australian government.

Search criteria included any information held by the commission about Caldron Pool or Rod Lampard regarding complaints, actions, or mentions.

Sixty-nine documents turned up. eSafety only made 59 accessible.

Ten documents were withheld “to protect the ability of eSafety to do their job.”

Letting us see our accusers, they stated, would or could “have a substantial adverse effect on the proper and efficient conduct of the operations of eSafety.”

Releasing such information might, the official letter explained, “affect the willingness of individuals to make future complaints or provide information to eSafety.”

In other words, people who denounce others in secret expect themselves and their comments to remain a secret.

They also said the decision to withhold what appears to be key information was about safety.

Withholding documents 1-10 is justified, the eSafety FOI asserted.

This is because their contents “contain the personal information of individuals who have made complaints to eSafety.”

As such, “this information could expose those individuals to unwanted contact, which may include harassment and doxing that causes significant detriment.”

On this, the eSafety Commission said it had redacted the names of public servants, citing FOI law and irrelevance to the FOI request’s parameters.

Calling the decision to hold back documents 1-10 “reasonable”, the Commission described it as having “overriding public interest factors against disclosure of the documents.”

The commission’s letter did not state why they couldn’t just redact the personal information and allow us access to the complaints, and or accusations.

In total, the 59 documents covered 179 pages. Of those, 6 were spreadsheets mentioning Caldron Pool. Each one was heavily redacted.

Most of my social media mentions were generic reports from Meltwater and Isentia; souped-up versions of Google Alerts, favoured by governments for keyword surveillance.

Despite the Commission’s letter reassuring me that eSafety does not use Meltwater’s reporting services to monitor individuals, generally speaking, any Meltwater mention warrants concern.

Outside the Meltwater mentions, 80 of those 179 pages related to the Spectator Australia’s Flat White newsletter, which had links to my Caldron Pool articles published by The Spectator.

Some of these were:

It’s not clear if my Caldron Pool articles were the target or if The Spectator Australia was being monitored.

What is clear? Someone at the eSafety office receives the Spectator Australia Flat White emails.

If that’s not monitoring conservative content, what is?

It’s also pretty clear that the eSafety Commissar doesn’t like being criticised.

Overall, the FOI request lodged with the eSafety Commission has left us with more questions than answers.

Particularly when there is documented proof that the Commission pressures social media companies. This is to either lower rates of engagement on content or completely remove content that the 43-million-dollar government department doesn’t like.

When compared with social media accounts smaller and similar in size, Caldron Pool and I see a much lower engagement rate.

Making allowances for algorithm variables, both accounts are either victims of state-sponsored censorship or an active shadow ban.

Typically, X impressions for an account with 2,070 followers (like mine) should see over 800 impressions or 10-20% follower interaction per post.

I’m surprised if those impressions get over 35.

According to a Grok XAI analysis, “that’s quite low for the follower count, even with a verified (blue tick) account.”

With 34,000 followers, Caldron Pool should be seeing upwards of 5,100–20,400 impressions per post, 20,000–68,000 impressions on a good day.

Yet impressions seem to only hover between 500 and 700.

As Grok confirmed, CP’s X impressions were “below average compared to what’s expected for an account Caldron Pool’s size.”

That’s an exceptionally low return on investment, especially when X’s annual Blue Tick verification in Australia costs $126.

Lower engagement may have other factors, like inactive followers and a lack of quality engagement.

Another cause for the low impressions, Grok said, is “possible soft shadow banning due to algorithmic deboosting, which may be connected to content flagged as sensitive.”

This isn’t isolated to X alone. Suffice to say, Facebook is worse.

So much for free speech and fair play.

So much for transparency and truth.

So much for due process.

The system seems to be set up to allow competitors an uneven advantage.

All it takes is dropping a few complaints.