Facebook bungle threatens to silence The Chaser before social media backflip

Facebook banned a satirical post from The Chaser about Senator Matt Canavan and the Wiggles and threatened the group with unpublishing their page, leading both the comedians and the senator to hit out at the tech giant’s censorship.

The offending image took aim at Nationals Senator Matt Canavan.Credit:The Chaser

The US company took issue with a Chaser gag mocking former resources minister Senator Canavan’s reaction to the Wiggles’ decision to hire more diverse cast members. It reversed the decision on Tuesday, but only after the limitations of its artificial intelligence censors had been exposed.

The offending post was a satirical image saying: “New ‘White Wiggle’ introduced to help Matt Canavan feel represented.” That “White Wiggle” was in a Ku Klux Klan robe.

Senator Canavan had suggested the Wiggles’ move to add another man and three more women to their ranks, including an Indigenous Australian and another with Ethiopian heritage, was a “woke” move that could send the group broke.

On Monday, Facebook unilaterally decided the post had breached its standards and warned The Chaser its page was at “risk of being unpublished”. It also restricted the group’s earning ability from supporters on Facebook and blocked advertising.

Following complaints from the Chaser and questions from The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Facebook said the post had been mistakenly removed under the company’s “Dangerous Individuals and Organisations” policy.

“Content from the Chaser’s page was removed in error and has since been reinstated. We apologise for this error,” a Facebook spokeswoman said.

Senator Canavan said he had found the Chaser’s joke funny. “I don’t have an issue with the joke that the Chaser made,” Senator Canavan said. “It’s edgy but they’re an edgy comedy group. I laughed when I saw it.”

Instead, Senator Canavan took issue with Facebook, a US-headquartered company, policing what Australians see online according to what he said were vague and inconsistent standards.

“While this case has got a bit of publicity because of the profile of the Chaser there are other cases that we don’t hear about from ordinary Australians and they have very little recourse,” Senator Canavan said.

The Chaser’s managing editor Charles Firth said Senator Canavan’s free speech advocacy should not detract from the original thrust of the Chaser’s joke. “The substance of that was criticising that he didn’t seem to want diversity in the Wiggles’ group, and that was a really abhorrent thing,” Mr Firth said.

But Mr Firth was also scathing of Facebook, saying its AI had entirely misinterpreted the post and it was too cheap to employ local content moderators who understood politics here despite making huge amounts of money from the Australian market.

“I’m not imagining that those poor benighted souls who have to trawl through our jokes would be in the mood to say ‘I get the intricacies of Australian politics, and obscure references to our former resources minister,’” Mr Firth said of Facebook’s overseas moderators.

“The fact that they can just flick the switch on and off is pretty scary really,” he said.

The Facebook policy that caught the post bans groups that “proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence” and prohibits the sharing of hate symbols and imagery linked to the KKK. It states that users are allowed to share content that references these groups providing it is to “report on, condemn, or neutrally discuss them or their activities.” But Facebook’s artificial intelligence censors â€" which initially detected The Chaser post â€" struggle to grapple with satire. The restrictions were only lifted after a human reviewed the decision.

Those limitations of the robocensors were made doubly clear when only hours later the same image was removed from the Chaser’s Instagram page, where it had previously been untouched. Again Facebook, which owns Instagram, told the Chaser its account risked being deleted but by Wednesday morning had reversed course.

”We want Facebook to be a platform where people can discuss timely news topics. However, we do not allow people to post content that represents ideologies that promote hate, unless it is clear this content is being shared in a condemning context or posted for news reporting purposes,” the spokeswoman said.

Facebook’s capacity to abruptly pull down a post that it has a problem with stands in contrast to the process that others who had taken issue with the group’s comedy, such as commentator Chris Kenny, who pursued a months-long legal battle before the ABC capitulated, had to follow.

Mr Firth said Facebook, where about 7 million people a month view Chaser content, was key to its business but said the group knew they were taking a risk when they signed up to Facebook’s platform for supporters to give money to content creators they supported.

“We are making a deal with a heroin dealer,” he said the Chaser group thought at the time.

Senator Canavan is drafting a bill to try to prevent companies like Facebook, which permanently removed the page of fringe Liberal turned Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party MP Craig Kelly for sharing coronavirus vaccine misinformation, making their own decisions on speech and censorship.

Nick Bonyhady is industrial relations reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based between Sydney and Parliament House in Canberra.

Lisa Visentin is a federal political reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, covering education and communications.

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