Mr. Morrison seems to be a senseless populist that doesn't understand what he is talking about.
> The new legislation will introduce a complaints mechanism, so that if somebody thinks they are being defamed, bullied or attacked on social media, they will be able to require the platform to take the material down.
If you cannot predict the consequences, I believe you cannot craft sensible policy either. No offense to those that voted for him.
Ehhhh, not to deny the existence of Hanlon's razor but ever since W* (well, Reagan**) weaponized a veil of affable incompetence to plausibly deny wholesale corruption, the trend has exploded across the world.
From Boris Johnson to Trump to Morrison, the idea that these 'morons' could ever be performing calculated evil seems impossible for many on the left to grasp. Meanwhile, they have facilitated the transfer of unimaginable amounts of wealth from the middle class to their friends in weapons and fossil fuel.
And the media (with very few exceptions) who are dependent on money from the same evil entities, have played up their image as bumbling but fundamentally well-meaning blokes, who somehow stumbled into these most powerful positions.
I honestly am staggered that we're still offering these people the benefit of the doubt, even after seeing these countries literally go up in flames.
* Bush graduated from both Yale and Harvard, after studying how companies can fail while making their owners and investors a shit-ton of money. It's amazing how few people see anything worth reporting in this. Hey how much do we one on those interest payments for our forever wars again?
** This shit was probably first developed thousands of years ago - Boris Johnson did study Ancient Greece
You are correct, but I believe that allegations like these need evidence which I cannot provide.
But on its own it is still just bad policy. Easy to sell though, since negatives are difficult to explain in a short paragraph, so it would file under politically untenable.
I think reducing the harms that are done by trolls and various other bad actors on the internet is an important question for this era. But this might not be the main motivation behind these new proposals. One of the most concerning parts of this is that the rules around what trolling is and who gets to determine who is a troll have not been a prominent part of the discussion. There's important recent political context here that international readers may be missing, the current federal government campaigned at the last election with a promise to introduce a independent federal anti-corruption commission but in recent times has completely backflipped on this (https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/morrison-must-honour...). Australia's mass media ownership is remarkably centralized with Murdoch owning an extremely high percentage of the print media in the country (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-14/fact-file-rupert-murd...). This has led to a number of high profile people including two former prime ministers from both side of the political divide to speak out and say there's a major problem (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/21/forme...). This is also why we had that legislation that aimed to force social media to pay the print media for links, there's very clear evidence that the Murdoch media machine has very deep influence with the current system of Australian politics. This is relevant because for many years this same media organization was being exceedingly supportive of the Berejiklian government in NSW and was actively avoiding reporting on their corruption and generally reported in a persistent positively biased way on certain people in that government (and important to note that this positive reporting was done on people who's conduct wasn't ethical). As a result a lot of local populace just simply didn't know how bad things were, discussions on other non-Murdoch media and social media was the way in which many people became aware of just how bad the corruption really was in NSW. I mean sure you didn't have to dig that hard, or maybe even at all, because the deputy premier liked to boast about how he engaged in pork barrelling and other such conduct (for foreign readers, this is not satire or an exaggeration, he literally used to openly claim this as a badge of honor: https://happymag.tv/barilaro-blue-mountains-bushfire-relief-...). But the corruption was by Australian standard bad: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/australia-nsw-premier-berejik..., had it been other politicians involved it would have been in the newspapers frequently. Once news of this finally got out this eventually led to the leaders of the NSW State government being ousted. The persistent corruption and unethical behavior of a small group was brought into the open by an investigation of the NSW anti-corruption commission and the news was impossible to ignore at this point. This episode also involved the arrest without a warrant (with proper process not being followed, the questioning of the attorney general about this is entirely worth watching: karmakaze↗
s/trolls/persons-of-interest/g
At least until a concise and narrow/limited definition of troll is included.
5 comments
[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 20.1 ms ] thread> The new legislation will introduce a complaints mechanism, so that if somebody thinks they are being defamed, bullied or attacked on social media, they will be able to require the platform to take the material down.
If you cannot predict the consequences, I believe you cannot craft sensible policy either. No offense to those that voted for him.
From Boris Johnson to Trump to Morrison, the idea that these 'morons' could ever be performing calculated evil seems impossible for many on the left to grasp. Meanwhile, they have facilitated the transfer of unimaginable amounts of wealth from the middle class to their friends in weapons and fossil fuel.
And the media (with very few exceptions) who are dependent on money from the same evil entities, have played up their image as bumbling but fundamentally well-meaning blokes, who somehow stumbled into these most powerful positions.
I honestly am staggered that we're still offering these people the benefit of the doubt, even after seeing these countries literally go up in flames.
* Bush graduated from both Yale and Harvard, after studying how companies can fail while making their owners and investors a shit-ton of money. It's amazing how few people see anything worth reporting in this. Hey how much do we one on those interest payments for our forever wars again?
** This shit was probably first developed thousands of years ago - Boris Johnson did study Ancient Greece
But on its own it is still just bad policy. Easy to sell though, since negatives are difficult to explain in a short paragraph, so it would file under politically untenable.
At least until a concise and narrow/limited definition of troll is included.