A South Australian man has been tracked down and charged after allegedly posting threatening messages directed at police on social media.
The 40-year-old man was arrested at a home in Adelaide on Thursday by an Australian Federal Police National Security Investigations (NSI) team, a special unit of social media police set up last year by Commissioner Krissy Barrett, who calls them her “flying squad of hate disruptors”.
The AFP said an investigation was launched in January into “allegedly threatening messages targeting the AFP, which were posted on social media platforms”, which were then linked to the Adelaide man.
An Adelaide man has been tracked down and arrested by the Australian Federal Police’s “hate disruptor” squad for allegedly posting threatening messages targeting them on social media.
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During a search investigators found a mobile phone which police said “identified alleged threatening messages posted over several months from social media accounts allegedly linked to the man”, and was seized for forensic examination.
The man was then granted police bail after being charged with one count of using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence, and will face court in September. The offence is punishable by up to five years’ jail.
The arrest comes days after an NSI team in NSW arrested a 60-year-old man for allegedly creating an anti-Semitic website which displayed Nazi symbols and a violent video.
The NSI teams were set up by AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett soon after her appointment last year to target groups and individuals “causing high levels of harm to Australia’s social cohesion”.
In November and December the NSI teams carried out a highly publicised series of raids and arrests over social media posts while the Bondi Islamic terrorists were planning their massacre undetected.
A week after the attack Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced funding to double the number of the teams, despite public outcry over the AFP’s focus on “hate speech” and the failure of security services to detect and stop the ISIS-inspired terrorists.
Then in February Ms Barrett said the NSI teams had ramped up their aggression since new “hate speech” laws were passed by the major parties a month earlier.
Header image: Left, right, the man being arrested (AFP).
