CENSORSHIP Law’s ‘Grassroots’ Backers Had a Secret

Laptop displaying censored news article — Photo: monticello / Shutterstock

The most useful question to ask about any government-funded advocacy campaign is not whether the money existed — that is usually a matter of public record — but whether the funding bought a particular policy outcome or merely paid for education that happened to align with one. Australia’s Teach Us Consent and its Fix Our Feeds campaign sit squarely in that gray zone, and the evidence available does not let either side claim total vindication.

Key Points

Teach Us Consent received several million dollars in Australian Government grants, documented across at least two departments and multiple ministerial releases, though the exact figures vary between sources.
The organization publicly and explicitly advocated for the Digital Duty of Care’s opt-in algorithm provision, tying its government-funded platform to a specific legislative outcome.
No document reviewed shows a grant condition requiring censorship advocacy, nor any instruction from government to the group on messaging — the policy alignment appears to be organic rather than contractual.
The group discloses its government funding publicly, which undercuts the strongest version of the “hidden origin” accusation even as it leaves the subtler blending of education and lobbying intact.
The underlying legislative debate has drawn far sharper criticism from a separate direction — the eSafety Commissioner’s informal takedown practices — than from the funding question itself.

What the Funding Records Actually Show

Australia’s Department of Social Services lists a grant agreement signed in February 2024 under the Promoting Consent Initiative, with $3.8 million earmarked to support Teach Us Consent over two years. A separate ministerial release from the same portfolio cites $3.5 million in direct funding tied to the 2023–24 Budget. The Department of Infrastructure’s formal response to the Roadmap for Age Verification lists a further $3.5 million committed under the National Plan specifically to “curate, develop, and distribute social-media resources” and to stand up a youth advisory group. These are not contradictory in the sense of fabrication; they more likely reflect overlapping budget lines, revised appropriations, or separate tranches reported inconsistently across departments. But the inconsistency matters for anyone trying to pin down exactly how much public money flowed into a campaign that later lobbied for a specific regulatory mechanism.

Teach Us Consent itself does not hide the funding. Its own About page describes a “Government Funded Promoting Consent Initiative” and claims the campaign reached 6.3 million young people in its first month. The group’s Fix Our Feeds page goes further, stating plainly that its money comes from “a mix of sources — including government grants, philanthropic support, and partnerships,” and that these are disclosed through standard charity filings. That transparency is the single strongest fact working against the sharper version of the astroturfing allegation: an organization that names its government funder on its own website is not concealing its origin in any meaningful legal sense, whatever one thinks of how prominently that disclosure is surfaced to casual readers.

Where Education Ends and Advocacy Begins

The harder question is not funding disclosure but function. Teach Us Consent’s Fix Our Feeds page states that the federal government “committed to introducing opt-in algorithms for social media platforms as part of its Digital Duty of Care legislation,” and credits a campaign in which more than 15,000 Australians signed an open letter. An earlier filing shows the group, alongside Digital Rights Watch and Reset Australia, wrote directly to Communications Minister Anika Wells citing over 10,000 signatories and “a growing list of influential Australians and experts”. That is not neutral consent education in the manner of a classroom pamphlet on healthy relationships; it is organized, named, targeted policy lobbying aimed at a specific legislative provision — the opt-in default for recommendation algorithms. Communications Minister Wells has described the broader duty of care as requiring tech companies to “take responsibility for the harms that their products, tools and features are causing”, and founder Chanel Contos called the resulting reforms “a great first step,” framing them explicitly as a response to public demand for control over online feeds.

None of that proves coordination between government and campaign on messaging, and no document surfaced — not the grant agreements, not the FOI logs, not the departmental responses — shows a funding clause tying the Promoting Consent Initiative dollars to support for the Digital Duty of Care bill specifically. The government’s own description of the funded work is narrower: trauma-informed, age-appropriate social media resources for people 16 and older, framed under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children. The policy alignment between a government-funded consent-education group and a government-favored regulatory bill appears to be a matter of shared worldview and genuine advocacy choice by the organization, not a directed outcome purchased with the grant.

Why the Astroturfing Label Overreaches

Astroturfing, in the academic literature, has a specific and narrower meaning than “a government-funded group did advocacy”: it describes manufactured, deceptive, top-down activity dressed up to look like spontaneous citizen mobilization. Teach Us Consent’s 15,000 signatories are not shown anywhere in the record to be fabricated, paid, or government-generated — the group reports them as voluntary, and no retrieved source identifies duplicate, automated, or incentivized participation. A funded organization running a genuine public campaign, with disclosed sponsorship, is a familiar pattern across online-safety policy generally; Australia funds digital-literacy and prevention programs through multiple channels, including the eSafety Commissioner’s own education mandate. The stronger criticism of Australia’s online-safety architecture, in fact, has landed elsewhere entirely — on the eSafety Commissioner’s use of informal, unappealable “shadow notices” to remove content outside the statutory process, a practice that has already lost in the Administrative Review Tribunal and Federal Court multiple times. That is a documented enforcement-overreach problem, distinct from and arguably more consequential than the funding-transparency question surrounding a single advocacy group.

What Remains Unresolved

The honest accounting is this: government funding for Teach Us Consent is real, disclosed, and larger than casual observers likely appreciate; the group’s advocacy for opt-in algorithms is explicit and self-described, not inferred; and the leap from those two facts to “covert censorship operation” is not supported by anything in the public record. What would resolve it is the kind of document trail critics have not yet obtained — the full grant statement of work, any departmental correspondence referencing Fix Our Feeds by name, and a reconciliation of the $3.5 million, $3.8 million, and $4 million figures scattered across official releases. Until those records surface, the fair conclusion is narrower and less dramatic than the headline version: a publicly funded education campaign that also, transparently, lobbies for its preferred policy outcome — which is advocacy, not concealment.

“This is by far the worst censorship legislation we have seen in the West.”

Michael Shellenberger, founder of Public and CBR Chair of Politics, warns that the Albanese government’s proposed Digital Duty of Care could give the government sweeping censorship powers and allow it to… pic.twitter.com/e87JY2akYR

— Institute of Public Affairs (@TheIPA) October 13, 2026