Archive for the 'The Web' Category

Government: Don’t feed the trolls

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.

Lead buried

Drum Editor Jonathan Green appears to have capitulated to braying demands for a false balance.

Next week: The Drum-Unleashed will feature a series of pieces commissioned from noted writers on the sceptic side of the climate science debate. Included will be Alan Moran, Tom Switzer, Mark Hendriks, Bob Carter and Jo Nova.

My questions to him are these:

Will the commissions be drawn against the ABC’s editorial policies that demand information be factually accurate?

Or will he give these already widely published writers a pass and allow them to disseminate their speculative theories without them having been drawn against the scientific facts for accuracy prior to publication?

Will this opinion at the Drum defy gravity; somehow exempt from objective fact?

Update I: Alan Moran is first cab off the rank and sure enough there is at least one big misrepresentation. A total misquote of Phil Jones’ position on the pace of warming.

Warming itself has appeared to have stopped, perhaps temporarily, a fact that even the defrocked high priest of the rising temperature trend, CRU’s Professor Phil Jones, has been forced to concede.

Moran cops a hammering from the smarter commenters but the usual denialist trolls come out to play, and Green cynically gets what he wants, with 498 comments to date.

Update II: John Quiggin gives us a whole post centered around Phil Jones’ quote. Another reason why Green should pull Moran’s post and abandon his misguided “project balance”.

Update: [by Mark] Bernard Keane takes aim at the ABC’s “balance without judgement” and rebuts Moran and Tom Switzer’s Drum post today.

Clive Hamilton on climate change denialism

Over at The Drum, Clive Hamilton begins a five part series on climate change denialism, beginning with a look at cyber-bullying.

Previously on LP: Communicating climate science.

Crikey turns Ten: cheap subs

Crikey celebrated its tenth birthday yesterday.

To coincide with the anniversary, you can get a discount annual subscription for $100 if you subscribe by midnight tonight.

Rudd on Qanda open thread

The first Q&A for the year features Kevin Rudd and an audience of yoof in Old Parliament House (no doubt screened according to approved Abetz principles to include quotas of Young Libs, LaRoucheites, etc).

I won’t be liveblogging it, because of the delay caused by the lack of daylight saving in Queensland. But here’s an open thread should you wish to comment.

No doubt there will also be a lively discussion on Twitter at #qanda. [And just a reminder that LP is on Twitter, and the new new Facebook, for that matter. If you are too, we'd love you to join us elsewhere in the social media-verse!]

The Australian Education Union writes to Federal Labor MPs about MySchool

…and here’s the text of the letter.

Continue reading ‘The Australian Education Union writes to Federal Labor MPs about MySchool’

Google v. Australian government

In the wake of Google’s changed stance toward the Chinese government, the company has now raised concerns about the Rudd government’s internet filter.

In a piece in Crikey today, Jason Whittaker reported: Continue reading ‘Google v. Australian government’

The ABC of Drumming up some online opinion analysis

When the ABC’s Drum was launched, Margaret Simons cited a piece by Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes on internal discussions of ABC journos writing opinion pieces, which I referred to in this post:

Simons then looks at the cult(ure) of personality attached to high profile journos, and questions whether non-witty, non-pretty, non-Tweeting writers are perhaps missing out in a new age of “audience engagement”. She also worries about objectivity, which is another distinction which is hard to maintain.

I was thinking about this again yesterday, prompted partly by the renewed criticism of the right wing balancing act on the ABC, and partly by a snippet from a Crikey reader (more of that later). Annabel Crabb also popped up to discuss her practice as a ‘political sketch writer’ [deconstructed here by Andrew Elder]. Continue reading ‘The ABC of Drumming up some online opinion analysis’

Guest post by Tim Watts: “I’m not Racist, but… I’m Complacent”

My mate Tim Watts, who’s been doing some great work online on violent racist incidents in Melbourne, has provided this guest post. Previous discussion of the spate of attacks on Indian students at LP can be found here. -MB

“I’m not Racist, but… I’m Complacent”

Australians are rightfully proud of the good thing we’ve got going on here. We know that we live in god’s own country and most of us wouldn’t swap it for anything in the world. There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact I couldn’t agree with it more. However, one area in which we’re certainly not world leaders is self reflection. Most of us are pretty happy with our lot in life and don’t feel the need to risk it by asking too many questions of ourselves. As a result, we’ve made avoiding direct public discussions about the (relatively minor) imperfections in the Australian way of life an art form. It’s trite, but it’s the Australian way to dodge any issues that have the potential to make us uncomfortable with a dismissive ‘She’ll be right’ or ‘No worries’.

I had cause to reflect on this recently when I posted a bit of a spray about the inadequacy of the police response to the recent attacks on Indians in Melbourne on my Facebook profile. This deliberately direct comment provoked some very odd responses (both public and private) from ordinarily sensible people. While the content of these responses was extremely varied, they had one fairly consistent theme – a desperate avoidance of confronting the role that racism (subjective or structural) has played in these attacks.

I knew that Mark shared my frustration at people’s reluctance to confront the issue head on, so to try and keep up the momentum for addressing the core of this problem I offered to set out a factual basis for discussion and respond to some of the more common dodges that I’ve seen employed to avoid these facts.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Tim Watts: “I’m not Racist, but… I’m Complacent”’

Senator Kate Lundy speaks out against mandatory filtering

Jason Whittaker has an article in today’s Crikey, which I’ve reproduced below the fold. Continue reading ‘Senator Kate Lundy speaks out against mandatory filtering’

Guest post by Colin Jacobs: It’s the edges that matter

Colin Jacobs, Vice-Chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia, writes in response to my piece from the other day on the direction of the No Clean Feed internet filtering campaign [MB]:

I’m afraid you’re going to hear a lot about some pretty unpleasant subjects this year. Among them will be bestiality, incest, child abuse, and occasionally even “snuff films”. The person you are most likely to hear talking about these things is Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy, as he is out defending the Rudd Government’s controversial decision to legislate mandatory Internet censorship in 2010.

I don’t blame him for talking about these things, because we all agree they’re bad. Blocking something universally agreed to be bad probably seems like a pretty uncontroversial policy. Naturally, nobody is actually arguing in favour of bestiality, incest or child pornography, the possession of which is a serious criminal offence. But by mentioning these things, you can try and reframe the debate – not whether the Government has identified a real need for secret new censorship powers, but whether it should be possible to view incest movies or not. (If that was the debate, then opponents of the filters would have to be a bunch of creeps, and who cares what a bunch of creeps have to say?)

But here’s the thing. When you throw a net around something, to be sure you’ve gotten it all you need to make sure the net is big enough. With a physical net you might get the occasional dolphin with your tuna. With a censorship net, things are just as fraught. No matter what criteria you set for inclusion on the blacklist, there will be some around the edges that are controversial inclusions. There has to be some grey between the black and the white, information that violates the letter if not the spirit of the law. This is where the debate should be focused.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Colin Jacobs: It’s the edges that matter’

The No Clean Feed campaign

Alex White has posted on what he describes as soul searching in the campaign against internet filtering about its direction. White’s post is replete with useful links, and is well worth a read. He disagrees with the focus on censorship, arguing that there are few points of connection with the lived experience of the public to shift opinion.

I’m not sure I agree.

White’s alternative messages focus on the ineffectuality of the filter, and its expense. However, that’s not, in my view, a persuasive theme for a public campaign. A lot of what the government does is ineffectual and expensive, and pointing this out also doesn’t necessarily create a public. It’s really just akin to the everyday niggling of oppositions and newspapers.

Any campaign does need an overarching theme, and this angle should be a subsidiary message.

The other question that needs to be posed is that of the audience. It’s no doubt right that few votes will shift in the right places to enable an argument to be made about an adverse electoral impact on Labor. White cites Possum and Bernard Keane. More broadly, findings from the AES over many years suggest that even the biggest issues only account for a few percentage points in vote switching at elections. For instance, the final data on the impact of WorkChoices (an issue which connects with lived experience, if there was ever one) on 2007 voting patterns hasn’t been fully analysed, but it’s unlikely to have been worth more than a couple of percent of the vote to the ALP. Labor strategists and pollies are well aware of this sort of thing.

The actual target for the No Clean Feed campaign needs to be non-Labor Senators. There, the issues of civil liberties and censorship are well chosen for their resonance with small l Liberals and The Greens. It’s also necessary to demonstrate that concern exists in the community beyond those who are active in the campaign itself, but this doesn’t need to be a clincher argument about seats falling in droves, which no one would believe. Rather, a point of connection with the messages particular parties want to send is necessary, and the best way to find that theme is to test it via polling and focus groups rather than speculate in a vacuum. The dilemma, though, that this causes for the campaign is that the most germane themes may not be the ones that resonate with activists in the campaign itself. So that needs to be balanced as well.

It’s a bit of a case study on the limitations, as well as the benefits, of crowdsourced campaigning.

Update: Colin Jacobs of the EFA responds on LP.

Open Democracy’s retrospective and prospective look at the decade/s

Open Democracy has asked a range of its contributors to answer the following questions:

A volcanic decade in global politics ends amid deep unease about the world’s ability to rise to key 21st-century challenges. openDemocracy writers draw breath and look ahead by reflecting on three questions:

1) What was the most significant trend in the century’s first decade?

2) What do you most hope for, and most fear, about the decade to come?

3) What idea do you see fading and/or emerging in 2010 and beyond?

Their reflections and prognostications can be found here and here.

Reading through the responses, a number of common themes emerge. One is the rise of China and the end of a unipolar world (and in this context, it’s interesting to observe more evidence surfacing about the snubs Beijing has been giving Barack Obama). Associated with this theme is the end of the liberal optimism of the 1990s, the decline of effective peacekeeping and conflict resolution, and the rise of the anti-terror security state in the 2000s. Whatever the views of the ideologues of globalisation, it’s difficult not to conclude that the first decade of this century saw the state come back. While much could be written critical of the emergence of international human rights law and international co-ordination which was one of the important trends of the 90s, conversely urgent problems like climate change are insoluble without concerted world action (while the last years of the late decade showed that the global financial sector could be bailed out at all deliberate speed).

Here too, it might be germane to observe that the sort of authoritarian state led capitalism characteristic of the Chinese model has both its parallels and echoes in the West (as civil liberties decline and torture becomes an acceptable subject of public discourse) and that its rise challenges the 90s end of history/democratisation thesis that market activity brings civic virtue in its wake. For many of the writers, the 2000s were a somewhat dark decade, characterised by rising inequality. Notable is a focus on the practice of multinationals buying up huge swathes of agricultural land in developing countries (particularly in Africa); for instance the leasing of almost half Madagascar’s arable land by a South Korean corporation. This issue warrants more attention than it’s received. It’s in stark contrast with pronouncements such as the Millennium Goals, and symbolises the end of the discourse of development and the entrenchment of a core/periphery model in the global economy, aside from its obvious human and ecological implications.

There’s much to ponder here.

Interestingly, only a small number of contributors referred to the rise of social media and the dissemination of the internet as a key development of the 00s. That’s something I’ll take up presently in another post.

To the beat of a different drum

With a fair bit of ado, the ABC launched its new opinion website, The Drum, on Monday.

It’s edited by Jonathan Green, formerly of Crikey, to whom congratulations are due, as they are to Sophie Black who’s had a very well deserved promotion to the top gig at that thing on the internet.

Margaret Simons, writing at her Content Makers blog, discusses two inter-related aspects of this ABC initiative. She first riffs on a piece by Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes, which questions the distinction between analysis and opinion, which apparently grounds the ABC’s dictates to its own journos (“analysis good, opinion bad”). Simons then looks at the cult(ure) of personality attached to high profile journos, and questions whether non-witty, non-pretty, non-Tweeting writers are perhaps missing out in a new age of “audience engagement”. She also worries about objectivity, which is another distinction which is hard to maintain.

All these are worthy points for discussion, though I’d also be interested in what people think of the quality of the writing and analysis to date. I’ve already noted some Crikey writers, such as Greg Barns, who may have come across with Green, featured (though Barns does have a tendency to pop up in a lot of places). Whether the ABC should cast its remit rather wider is another issue – which, of course, circles back to the glam/Twitter/name issue…

My own view is that it’s harder than some might assume to find good writers with different takes. It might well be that identifying, developing and mentoring such new voices would be a most valuable contribution. But that’s almost a full time publishing/editorial gig in itself, and it may be incompatible with the ABC’s desire to have an immediate impact. We shall see.

It might also be something we could make a small contribution to here…

Overland subscriberthon!

I’m a bit late to this party, because I was away on holidays last week, but I think I’ve just managed to squeeze in a plug for the Overland subscriberthon while it’s still going! There are all sorts of prizes to be won for new subscribers, and a host of content from all sorts of luminaries on the magazine’s blog to celebrate.

Overland is a fantastic literary and cultural journal, which while long established, continues to bring fresh and interesting perspectives to all sorts of debates – with a democratic and political tinge. So do yourself the proverbial favour…