An elderly man has been dragged out of his Sydney home in handcuffs by social media police after allegedly posting Nazi symbols online.
The 73-year-old was arrested in Mount Colah on Tuesday by an Australian Federal Police National Security Investigations (NSI) team, which also seized electronic devices, including a mobile phone and a USB drive.
The man was charged with four counts of publicly displaying prohibited Nazi symbols, and was granted conditional bail to appear in Hornsby Local Court on November 11. He faces up to five years’ imprisonment if convicted.
The NSI teams are special units of social media police set up last year by AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett, who calls them her “flying squad of hate disruptors”, to target groups and individuals “causing high levels of harm to Australia’s social cohesion”.
In recent months they have arrested a man in South Australia for allegedly posting threatening messages aimed at police, a man in Sydney for allegedly creating an anti-Semitic website, and two other elderly men in NSW and Western Australia over alleged racist emails and online threats directed at federal MPs.
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.
Header image: The man being arrested (AFP).
