Australian politician, Craig Kelly’s Facebook page has been suspended over five quotes he’d posted in February. Each post gave expert opposing viewpoints to the accepted expert narrative over treatments for C0VID-I9.
The Liberal Party member for Hughes told The Australian’s Richard Ferguson that ‘Facebook went through thousands of my posts and only found five that led to the ban.’
Kelly, who isn’t an “anti-vaxxer”, said he “supported the Morrison government’s message on vaccinations,” and that all he is “advocating for treatments in concert with the vaccine.”
According to The Australian, Facebook declined to comment, but said ‘that social media giant would crack down on any C0VID misinformation on its site.’
“We don’t allow anyone to share misinformation about C0VID-I9 that could lead to imminent physical harm.”
Kelly has been a strong advocate for civil liberties throughout the C0VID-I9 crisis. He is one of the few politicians with the moxie to tell it like it is. Up until his public confrontation with Labor’s Tanya Plibersek, and a subsequent ‘dressing-down’ by the Prime Minister, Kelly took a strong stand for Australians to have the right to “weigh the evidence” before taking the vaccine.
In a blunt explanation for Kelly’s ban, Rebel News explained that he was “booted” for one week for ‘touting the benefits of hydroxychloroquine.
The Guardian, outlining reasons for the social credit score reduction to Kelly’s page stated that
“The three posts related to: unproven claims about hydroxychloroquine by professor Dolores Cahill; a profile of professor Thomas Borody in The Spectator which includes advocacy of ivermectin to treat coronavirus; and claims by pathologist Roger Hodkinson that masks are “useless” for children and ‘paper and fabric masks are simply virtue signalling.'”
In response, Kelly told The Guardian that,
“The points are a legitimate point of view. I’m not posting my opinions; I’m posting the opinions of medical experts. “whether [the views are] right or wrong is a matter of debate, but their views should be debated.”
When asked for comment, Craig Kelly told Caldron Pool that “it was a sad day for free speech and public debate.”
He explained that,
“The five they’ve identified are actually not my opinions but opinions of highly ranked medical professionals, which I’ve put direct links to. In fact, one of them was nothing more than a cut and paste job from a story published in The Spectator magazine, on Australia’s professor Thomas Borody, and how he was suggesting Ivermectin could be an effective treatment against C0VID.”
The minister commented on the leap-before-looking, heavy-handed nature of the ban, stating
“The real danger of this is, Facebook argue, ‘It’s against our Community Standards – it’s dangerous stuff. With the studies that are coming through, it’s very likely in the next couple of weeks that the World Health Organisation will actually recommend Ivermectin, which Borody tried to do six months ago; now that debate has been shut down and over a million and a half people have died.”
Speaking directly about the mounting number of reckless bans, and blocking of reasoned content providing an opposing viewpoint, Kelly added,
“The effect of censoring debate on these early treatments could have possibly been responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
So, where we should have been having more open debate and more free debate, shutting down debate is likely to have killed people. Not just one or two people, but probably hundreds of thousands. This is why throughout the last 250 years people have said free speech is so important. This is why people have said, ‘I may not agree with what you say but I’ll fight to my death your right to say it.’”
Cancel Culture’s C0VID-I9 fanatics may have scored a temporary win over Kelly, but in doing so they’ve added to further erosion of civil liberties.
Noting the word, “crackdown” used by Facebook, a better headline here would be: Fascistbook suspends truth-teller for advocating the right of informed consent.