15 January 2025

CIT debunks 'email' posted on social media claiming it prioritises international students over locals

| Oliver Jacques
Join the conversation
28
CIT Reid campus

Misinformation on Twitter fired people up against the government and the CIT. Photo: File.

The Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) says it did not create a message circulating on social media with a CIT logo that says it prioritises international students over locals.

An account named Far Fox Ache posted on X (formerly Twitter) what he purported to be a response email from the CIT to his application for a fee-free place in a cyber security course.

“As previously advised, your application … has been assessed and meets the eligibility criteria under the fee-free TAFE initiative,” the message reads.

“At this time, it is unlikely you will be offered a place due to an unexpected intake for international students for semester 1 2025 which we have been instructed by the directorate to prioritise.”

The misinformation has been viewed 60,000 times and received more than 50 replies from people who took it to be a genuine CIT email. Many expressed their outrage at both CIT and government for supposedly favouring foreigners over locals.

READ ALSO A guide to driving the Kings Highway and saving everyone’s sanity

The fake email purports to have been sent by infoline@cit.edu.au and includes the CIT logo.

Independent MLA Thomas Emerson was tagged in on the message on X by a user and responded by saying he’d look into it.

CIT told Region the email did not come from them.

“The message copied on X (Twitter) was not created by the Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT),” a spokesperson said.

“CIT does not prioritise international students over local applicants. There is no ‘unexpected intake’ by international students into the Certificate IV in Cyber Security at CIT. CIT is investigating this matter.

“There are places available in Certificate IV in Cyber Security at CIT, however there are no longer fee-free TAFE places available in this course this semester. Information about fee-free TAFE at CIT can be found at: Fee-Free TAFE : Canberra Institute of Technology.”

Riotact reached out to Far Fox Ache and requested evidence he’d received the email from CIT. He told us to do our own research and to obtain the email via a freedom of information (FOI) request. He also said he didn’t want to engage with us, as “legacy media was dying”.

“Long live X, we are the media now,” he said.

READ ALSO Frustration as MyWay+ continues to fail to live up to expectations

There are 600 fee-free places available for Canberrans in each semester at CIT until December 2026.

To be eligible, you must be 17 or over, an Australian citizen, permanent resident or eligible visa holder, live or work in the ACT and not have enrolled in the course previously.

Approved students need to pay for any learning resources, such as textbooks or other equipment required for the course.

Join the conversation

28
All Comments
  • All Comments
  • Website Comments
LatestOldest

If anything, for the letter to exist, it does point to discontent with Labor and Greens immigration policies and subsequent issues, such as housing, inflation, cost of living and available positions. Labor’s immigration policy involves suggested caps that are not enforced. The Greens refuse to set limits, therefore they support unlimited immigration. It’s a deviation from normal caps that are enforced.

Counterpoint: No it doesn’t.

Concluding one person attempting to propagate an outright lie anonymously is evidence of a wider society problem is self-serving and wrong.

Racism and race-baiting is hardly new.

We shouldn’t need to resort to doing an FOI form something like this. If the email actually exists, the act of providing it in its original form to backup your claim becomes trivial. Rather than doing this, the response from this person comes straight out of the cooker playbook. This doesn’t necessarily guarantee they are wrong, but when you can’t be bothered to forward the original email on request to back your claim up because supporting mainstream media doesn’t suit your narrative, it doesn’t add to your credibility. We’d be potentially doing an FOI just to justify someone presenting a random brainfart as fact to get some clout on the internet, and I’m not convinced that’s a good use of anyone’s time.

Alimo Dodson12:05 pm 17 Jan 25

If they forward on the email how will you know it is genuine anyway? What difference does a fake picture of an email make compared to a fake email that is sent to you?

ISPs can trace email origins and there’s email header information as well…the biggest tip that this is a bogus claim, besides the fact that the person making the claim would not identify themselves or provide any evidence including the original email is that there are no other similar emails sent to other users corroborating the claim.

It’s been made up by an internet troll.

It is possible to forward an email in a way that preserves the original email headers in most email clients. These headers show a path of every email server that processed that email.

Put that email in front of someone who knows how to read those email headers and verification of the source could be done in maybe a minute or so? It’s normally very obvious to those that know what they’re looking at whether the email headers match what I would expect to see from just organisation.

Alimo Dodson10:43 pm 17 Jan 25

Can the email headers be faked? And more importantly, does the journalist know how to verify it faked or otherwise? Sounds like a bunch of technical things need to be done which might be outside the realm of a journalist. And that’s assuming the source knows how to forward the email on in the approved manner too.

Faking email headers is not a trivial task. Relying on SPF is a fairly standard thing now. The simple explanation is that SPF provides a list of computers that would be allowed to send email on behalf of the CIT domain. No matter how you ‘fake’ the email headers, you’d have a hard time doing that without it failing SPF verification so it’s almost guaranteed that any email that does that would end up in the recipients spam email folder without ever being seen or read by the recipient.

As to whether the journalist has access to that technical knowledge, they may not. But most of us have that ‘computer literate friend’ who understands this stuff. I would at least expect the journalist to be aware enough that this _might_ be fake and rather than just reporting everything someone says at truth, I would expect a journalist to rely on this ‘computer literate friend’ to at least verify the source of the information.

“Can the email headers be faked?”

It doesn’t matter whether they can be faked or not at this stage. Why? Because the claim is not credible.

The person behind it has refused to provide the email. You’re talking about investigating something that doesn’t exist.

Capital Retro10:14 am 16 Jan 25

The Mediscare mailbox flyers attributed to the Labor Party were anonymous too.

And the award for today’s irrelevant seque goes to…

Capital Retro1:10 pm 16 Jan 25

Seano has to keep up his quota so he will attack anything CR says.
Seano is paid on quantity, not quality.

He is a unique individual I’ll give him that.

‘segue’ not ‘seque’.

@DJA…yeah, as we can’t fix typos on this site you must be busy pointing them out.

@Capital, yeah OK champ…how is your comment relevant. I’ll wait.

@Johnny ??? mate you’re the one pasting the same nonsense under multiple handles.

Has anybody done an FOI to see what the ratio of international to domestic students are or do we just accept what they say at face value?

You seem to want to take an anonymous person who refuses to back up their claim at face value.

Two Johnnys with identical words probably equals troll factory.

Well why would I take the CIT who just had to fire their CEO for “corrupt behaviour” at face value? The party with the least credibility is the CIT. So instead of assuming either way, how about we FOI the data and look for ourselves?

No the party with the least credibility is the anonymous person with no evidence.

That’s how it works with adults champ.

Has anyone FOI the statistics on domestic vs foreigners from CIT or do we just take their word for it? Here is their annual report but it does not seem to mention the domestic v foreign student ratio https://cit.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/298373/6211855950_CIT_2023_Annual_Report_FA.pdf

Yeah, we take their word at face value. Why? Because the person making the claim has no credibility and refuses to back it up with any evidence.

I don’t want to see my taxes wasted with staff answering bogus claims, from anonymous trolls.

Opening the floodgates on having to respond in detail to every crook, crank and troll making up nonsense claims to score points in the culture wars would grind this country to a halt.

This is not a sensible position to take. Discrediting something because you do not like the individual is wrong. You should look at the data for yourself. Ask CIT for their ratio on domestic v foreign students and see if they will give you the information. if they will not, you must start to wonder why. Remember that this organisation just had to fire their CEO for “corrupt behaviour” so from what I see the party with the least reputation is the CIT.

“This is not a sensible position to take”

Oh, grow up.

You can’t just make an anonymous accusation against an organisation or individual with no evidence at all and expect people to spend time debunking it. Your position is puerile. CIT has already pointed out that the claim is not even remotely true.

The coward behind the accusation refused to back it up. That should be enough.

Just because you want some to be true (and we can guess why champion) doesn’t make it true.

‘“Long live X, we are the media now,” he said.’….it’s going to be real funny when they find out Australia has strong defamation laws and their anonymity won’t necessarily protect them.

I think the comment “long live X” tells you everything you need to know about the email’s validity and the sender…

The catch phrase “do your own research” is used by followers of QAnon.

They were prolific during the pandemic, posting lies about vaccinations.

Daily Digest

Want the best Canberra news delivered daily? Every day we package the most popular Riotact stories and send them straight to your inbox. Sign-up now for trusted local news that will never be behind a paywall.

By submitting your email address you are agreeing to Region Group's terms and conditions and privacy policy.