Why are so many countries like Australia, UK, EU, etc suddenly pro censorship. Aren’t these all liberal democracies? I would think these policies would be very unpopular. Is there some analysis of how this came to be normalized?
I'm an everyday Australian, I'll take a few guesses. (I don't support these new laws)
1. we don't have as an antagonistic relationship with our government and we trust that most of what will be banned will be gross stuff we don't want weirdos watching.
2. I think most people feel social media really is breaking young people, and its easier if all kids are banned than just trying to ban your own kids. It's really hard to explain to a kid why they are not allowed to watch you tube when every other kid is.
Update: Also, the only thing this law is going to do is to force every parent in Australia to create accounts for their kids.
To use the Donald Horne quote "Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."
Unfortunately, this has propagated down to a lot of the people. They want the government to be the parent instead.
As Jordan Shanks once said - "I have 6 investment properties" is the entire personality of a lot of Aussies. Many others are the same they just don't have the opportunity.
This whole situation appears to be a failing on all angles. From government over reach, corporate greed by forgoing morals to the people who are so worn down they just don't have anything left to give.
I'm not sure I would describe it as government overreach, to me it looks more like the government doesn't understand the tech and what these new rules mean.
I would have more respect if they just came out and said you can't be anonymous on social media any more. When you post, somebody needs to know who you are, how old you are, and where you live.
I think the world would be a better place if everybody would just pull their head in and get off social media.
With respect to Donald Horne, its not the 60's any more, and there are plenty of great Australian ideas and culture. The hottest 100 last weekend is a great reminder of how much great Australian music there is.
There are multiple studies showing the negative impact of social media on teen's health.
It's not about censorship but about forcing companies that don't care at all to be held accountable.
I'm not sure the approach taken by Australia will be effective (i'm not sure how it can be implemented), but i don't see the problem with doing something against harmful companies like meta, tiktok, x/twitter
We're talking about social media here. There's nothing throwing the whole society under the bus.
I don't agree with the approach from the Australian government and I don't see that at being effective but regulating shady companies using deceptive techniques to maximise their profit is a necessary thing.
Personally I think differentiating impact on kids/teens and adult is a mistake and the approach should be around really strict control on data collection as well as strict control on the use/abuse of manipulative techniques to create addictions.
The decision Australia is making is not an individual one. It’s a societal one. It’s “do we want our kids to grow up in a society free of social media”.
Australia tends to be more willing to make collectivist decisions like this, unlike America which places immense value on individual choice.
So the government is going to manage that better? It is funny there is a push to lower the voting age to 16 but also this push to keep adolescents away from information about the world until that age.
Australia used to have energy for protesting this sort of shit, but its all spent.
We used to have a pretty decently funded anti internet censorship lobby. It died in the 2010s.
Since then its just been hit after hit after hit. Any minute justification is seized upon to wind up internet freedoms.
Former PM Turncoat said “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” That was 2017. And so far its been a bipartisan position.
The truth is that industry used to also oppose censorship. But its been completely captured. Every time one of these censorship proposals come through, Ausnog gets the usual "Should we act this time?" emails, and nothing comes of it.
Its over. Freedom of Communication is dead in this country, instead of our politicians.
I think a key point of it is that those in power know that if there is bipartisan support, they can ignore all protests.
All the campaigns I was involved in for well over a decade achieved absolutely nothing because of this. It is worse than that now, seeing the screws slowly get tightened on peaceful protests makes this even worse. They cant just ignore it but actively suppress it and get away with it.
A few years back I wrote an essay about the passing of Ted Kaczynski, it was never published as they said to be a topic you do not touch. However my conclusion was that I fear the "children of Ted", those that end up being so silenced, end up radicalized by their own oppression that violence becomes their only answer. I suspect we are only a decade or two away from this on a lot of issues.
Did you post the essay anywhere? I've always had kind of a soft spot for Ted--not his actions, mind, but his manifesto raises some rather prescient ideas. I also think he was..."justified" in a sense; again, not in his actions, but his decision to check out of society, only for society to come back to get him.
I'm happy to be proven wrong about any of that though. It's been quite a few years since I read it.
I completely agree with your "Children of Ted" hypothesis, for that matter. Historically, oppression births revolutionaries, for better or worse.
>I think a key point of it is that those in power know that if there is bipartisan support, they can ignore all protests.
Charles Stross calls it the Beige Dictatorship. As long as they agree on 99% they can do whatever they want without public support. And you bring this up with low information voters and they just say "But Blorbus will decrease health spending by 3% thats a huge difference!!!" meanwhile all our civil liberties are eroded.
this is why "think of the children" is always used in these instances, it gets right past peoples defenses and if you try to argue against privacy invasive/life invasive/completely useless regulations/regulations ripe for abuse (by design) then you are somehow the "bad guy"
A majority of adult GenZs who've grown up with this stuff agree it was bad for their childhood and most older adults use social media and feel the negative effects too. Using some sophistry to argue it's all made up by the government is like Democrats arguing Biden was fit to run a second term when everyone can see with their own eyes he was not.
Sharpening contradictions of capitalism leading to an impasse, forcing its servile governments to clamp down preventively on workers rebellions around the western world. So yes, there are analysis for this and analytical/scientific tools to understand those phenomenon
Mass Internet censorship in the Western world started in 2020 with restrictions on Covid information and discussion. This is just the logical conclusion.
I'm an australian who completed the esafety survey which helped guide this policy. I pushed for anonymous temporary age verification tokens generated through a government app.
Social media is undermining the fabric of our societies and destroying a whole generations emotional development. I support this- in part because I know those who want to get around enough or be private will always find a way, but it has a positive, reality affirming effect on the public.
Watch the press conference from our PM and comms minister from yesterday to understand that this is coming from a place of compassion or control. They have said repeatedly they will always ensure a non id method is ensured. I know there are flaws in that though. https://youtu.be/SCSMQUmrh38?feature=shared
I think homomorphic encryption through a third party would be better. Gov app could be one side of it, blinded evidence provision to the identity, to the intermediary.
Maybe this is what you meant? it's what the CSIRO and the Privacy Commissioner said was their recommended method to do proofs of age/identity through government issued documents, without revealing what the URL was being accessed.
It used to be the case that you could rely on netizens to support the internet. You read about the old clipper chip stuff in yankistan and they had NSA Cryptographers risking their jobs speaking out publicly against the policy. We were lucky enough to have Bevan Slattery run a massive campaign against the (godawful) NBN economics for the LNP to silently correct half of the issues with no fanfare, when other people were getting silently cancelled over speaking out by their employers fearing NBN retribution. iiNet stood up to Conroy repeatedly.
I need you to understand that you have put at severe risk a lot of good honest people for a false sense of security that is more likely to push kids into worse places than actually prevent harm. With the inclusion of Youtube, its likely the government is going to ramp this up to apply to any website with a comment section. Civil Liberties are easy to destroy in this manner, but oh so difficult to restore. We fought, hard, against internet filtering in this country. We shouldn't have to re-litigate it every 5 years or so while getting white anted by our own.
If there's something worse than ashamed, its where you should be right now.
Careful I think you might be choking on all that strawman.
Terminally online types complain all day about how social media is terrible and needs to be regulated until the moment actual legislation is being passed then they complain about that instead.
>Terminally online types complain all day about how social media is terrible and needs to be regulated until the moment actual legislation is being passed then they complain about that instead.
Even if that were the case, demanding a solution doesn't mean accepting a bad solution.
"My dog is hungry" "Well I killed your dog and it no longer experiences hunger, please clap"
You really accuse me of a strawman argument and then literally write this after?
> Terminally online types complain all day about how social media is terrible and needs to be regulated until the moment actual legislation is being passed then they complain about that instead.
'Terminally online types?', 'complain all day?'
You have broad assumptions, exaggerations, and stereotypes in that one sentence. It could be the dictionary definition of strawman.
