The last couple of weeks have seen a fair bit of furore about those intertubes. Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook about the defacing of a couple of memorial sites for a child and a teenager who’d been murdered in Queensland. Nick Xenophon suggested an Internet Ombudsperson, a suggestion Kevin Rudd applauded. There’ve also been numerous controversies about high school students posting racist groups, or offensive ones (for instance, effectively calling for attacks on sex workers). All this no doubt warrants condemnation – but it’s also worth observing that only a certain subsection of offensive content (usually involving children in one way or other) comes to the attention of the media and politicians. Little outrage is directed to the much larger subset of racist groups on Facebook (which don’t happen to be set up by high school kids), or the everyday misogyny that permeates much of the online space.
There’s no doubt that there are problems with Facebook’s method of dealing with offensive content. But the fundamental errors in this debate are twofold:
(a) Social networking sites are far more akin to phone networks than a traditional publishing model. A huge multiplicity of users constantly and simultaneously post content. Unlike talking on a phone, it leaves a permanent trace, but it’s a much better analogy;
(b) The direction of causation is the wrong way round. It’s not that the internet encourages people to do dumb and wrong things. It’s that people do dumb and wrong things, and they do them on the internet too.
The noise coming from politicians, and the ’solutions’, make one wonder whether they understand at all how social networking works. Part of the problem is one very easily resolved through taking more responsibility on the part of group creators for the little bit of the internet they set up, and using privacy and content management tools intelligently.
There’s an interesting take on all this from Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia, from whom I’ve borrowed the title of this post, and for a deeper examination of the issues, I’d also recommend the Oxford Internet Institute’s report on balancing freedom of speech and child protection online, which seeks to find some common ground between interlocutors who often seem to talk past one another.
Breaking the CPRS deadlock
Almost two weeks ago, I suggested that something positive might come of The Greens’ suggestion that Ross Garnaut’s interim measure on carbon emissions should be the circuit breaker for the CPRS impasse.
In the intervening period, I’ve been surprised that so little attention has been paid to the negotiations between Senator Penny Wong and Senator Christine Milne on behalf of The Greens, which began last week. I’ve sought to emphasise that there are possibilities of Senate passage via a Liberal floor crosser (perhaps Judith Troeth, who is retiring) and Nick Xenophon. In any event, I’ve argued that there are political benefits for Labor in staking out a new position which could demonstrate the desire for immediate action, and perhaps take a different bill to a double dissolution.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that the media would ignore these developments, but I’ve also been surprised at the attitude of a number of commenters on several threads, which seems to assume that Labor’s posture is somehow frozen in stone.
So, in light of all this, I was very interested indeed to hear Bob Brown give a very articulate and well argued interview to Tony Jones on Lateline tonight where he discussed these negotiations, and revealed that he had also been talking to other non-Government Senators.