Censorship
This topic considers a broad range of issues relating to the freedom of information, free speech, and the role of government in new media (including ISP-level filtering).
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Topic Summary - On ABC3 and Internet Filtering
Details of other versions of topic summary »
Part 1
My family and I have enjoyed the commencement of ABC3 children’s channel. Over our children’s pre-school and school years we have watched ABC Kids and Rollercoaster etc. and by and large found it wholesome viewing. Where it is not it is unhelpful more than damaging and when there is a show that falls into the category of “Mum and Dad won’t let us watch it” our children understand why and turn it off.
ABC Children’s television has been, by and large, a safe place for my children.
One of the few times when this trust has been betrayed came this week. We were watching the new show “Tribe” – a sort of post-apocalyptic show exploring what the world would be like if all the adults disappeared. It was already starting to get a bit too soap-opera for us, modelling relationships in a way that is both unrealistic and unhelpful. But the line was crossed when there was a depiction of a rape attempt. The TV went off in an instant and the issues unpacked with the children.
I was left feeling annoyed, somewhat angry, that such a show should be allowed to be broadcast as children’s television.
Part 2
This morning, I read this piece, by fellow pastor Ruth Limkin talking about the proposed government mandatory Internet Filter. Countering those who are against the Internet Filter she writes:
…Conroy has indicated an independent body, as opposed to the Government, will determine classification of internet sites. We currently have the Office of Film and Literature Classification classifying films and publications. So it seems a ”steady as she goes” approach is being proposed…
They suggest that for the Government to enact such a filter is censorship at its worst, limiting the freedom of the internet and trampling our civil liberties.
However, if we’re talking liberties, one could also suggest that we, and our children, deserve the liberty and freedom to browse the internet free of the worst forms of exploitative and illegal material.
As those who read this blog know, I am against an Internet Filter. The proposal is for useless expensive bureacratic censorship that has no benefits in terms of safety and therefore only reaps the costs pertaining to redirecting funds from effective policing and, yes, the issues of free speech and censorship.
Part 3
So I whinge about the ABC3, yet I am against filtering. Some of my acquaintances would accuse me of inconsistency here. Why would I have the “speech” of TV limited, yet not the Internet? Why would I seek to filter TV broadcasts, but not the Internet. Why would I be happy to have smut on the Internet, but not on TV?
Well, firstly, I am not happy that there is smut on the Internet. Pornography is degrading, demeaning, dangerous to the human psyche and human relationships. And I would speak to those trapped in it and seek to show them a better way of living.
But secondly, there is no inconsistency if we correctly understand the interplay of technology, society, safety and trustedness.
Whinges and action come when a trust has been betrayed. If my children are hurt while playing unsupervised in a working quarry, my whinge would be empty. If my children are hurt by faulty equipment while playing sensibly on a playground, my whinge is more justifiable. Why? Because in the first example there is no expectation that the quarry company should care for my children – I extend no trust to the powers that be and if I take my children there – for an educational exercise or some such – the onus is on me to watch them closely. But when I am at a playground trust has been extended to those who have designed and built the place. It is right for me to let down my guard and relax somewhat.
ABC Kids TV has become for our family a “trusted place” of information input. That trust has been broken somewhat, and that makes me both sad and angry. They have a right to be safe there.
The Internet however is not like the playground. It is a workplace, like the quarry. An information transport, like a busy highway. It is a public leisure place, like a beach in summer time. It is all these things. Some places are safe. Some places are not.
It is simply naive to consider “The Internet” in the same way as a “TV Station” that you can turn on by clicking on the “Blue E” on the computer screen – something over which someone has responsibility, something that can be controlled by a trustworthy someone. The Internet is not the TV Station it is air waves, the entire spectrum, the digital representation of the world at large. The expectation of safety isn’t and can’t be the same.
To demand the right for the entire Internet to be safe is, in effect, a demand that the whole world be safe – exactly the “nanny state” demand that Ruth Limkin thinks she can get around. And that is impossible. The Internet is the digital representation of the whole big dangerous world. If it is not, it is not the Internet.
And so my views are not inconsistent. It is one view on what it means to trust someone to provide an inherently safe environment.
When I should expect it, but don’t get it – I can complain, because that’s dangerous.
When someone says they will provide it, when they can’t – I should complain, because that’s dangerous.
| Tags: Internet Filter | Posted in: Censorship | 12 Comments »
12 comments for “On ABC3 and Internet Filtering”
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Ben says:
Good on you Will.It's about time more people that the ACL claims to speak for, spoke out against this pointless, stupid and dangerous censorship policy.
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The difference Will, is that there are some webpages that have been defined as RC – Refused Classification. It is illegal to display these pages or the content in them on the Australian internet. No Australian, adult or not, has a legal right to demand those pages be viewable. Governments must at some stage draw the line as to what can and cannot be allowed to enter into Australian society, just as they do with drugs and other substances or materials. There is simply no justified reason for wanting access to such materials to be allowed in Australia. Just as we stop damaging and detrimental stuff at our borders whenever we can, thus we should be stopping the RC materials from appearing on our internet. Kids or no kids…
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Roddy said…"The difference Will, is that there are some webpages that have been defined as RC – Refused Classification. It is illegal to display these pages or the content in them on the Australian internet."You misunderstand how the Internet works. Going to a website is like not like tuning in to a TV station. It's like going onto someone else's property. It is NOT illegal to view or possess RC content in Australia (with the sole exception of child abuse material, which is not on the WWW anyway). There is no "Australian Internet" there is only the Internet, a network of interconnected computers all over the world.
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Hi all, Thanks for the comments.Roddy – you have demonstrated a common misconception. Aaron has answered you well about the concept of what the Internet is.Aaron also touches on the issue on the interplay between "illegal" and "Refused Classification" – a distinction deliberately obfuscated in straw man arguments. Illegal content is illegal and subject to normal police procedures. Please, if people in Australia are currently viewing child porn from sites that are on the blacklist (or any other site known or detected by the authorities) and are not being visited by the police – with or without a filter – what are we paying our taxes for? I just assume that that is happening – and I will be the first to cry out if it can be shown that it is not. I am not against policing the Internet.However, RC material includes a large swathe of non-illegal material which may be disgusting but not criminal to view or possess. Ethically this is a complicated area of when communication is private or public, "sharing" or "broadcast" and how free speech should be and in what context etc. No time to go into that here.Having said that – please hear what I'm NOT saying. I'm not saying that Refused Classification material SHOULD be available on the Internet. I'm simply saying that it IS. And the proposed filter won't prevent it, or prevent children or anyone else from accessing it, even in the rare circumstance of inadvertent stumbling upon it.Firstly – even if you could find every piece of RC content, assess it, and add it to a blacklist, the proposed filter is easily bypassable.Secondly – the blacklist being filtered is only 1,000 pages. It will only be added to by slow (nonsensically slow given the rate of genesis of new material online) bureaucratic process. 1,000 pages is a drop in the ocean. Even if it were 10,000 pages it would be that. Even this supposedly "100%" accurate filter would catch only one bee in the plague-like swarm.And so the point of my article remains: the Internet is a dangerous place which cannot be made inherently safe without stopping it being the Internet.Safety inheres to trust not technology. There is no object for "trust" in the Internet, just as you cannot trust "the world." There are safe places on the Internet just as there are in the "real" world. But that security is earned through trust – so I "trust" the providers of moshimonsters.com, or abc.net.au/playground just as I have trusted the providers of ABC3.I can be appalled when trust is betrayed.I can be appalled when trust is requested which can never be honoured. That is what the government is doing.The "nanny state" accusation is valid. The nanny state thinks that it can eliminate risk and danger through bureaucracy. In so doing it usurps the role of human trust and dehumanises us all.W.
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@ Will Briggs There are no guaranties that this so called list will not be expanded to serve higher purpose for any ruling political party as they see it fit. Conroy has started with protecting the children but now it goes to RC material which you have clearly pointed not illegal to own or view and to top it off very easy to circumvent.This is why it is absolutely vital for those of both the left and the right to come together at least on this issue, in the realisation that when any foundational right or freedom is diminished for one group of citizens, it diminishes that right or freedom for all of us – and we will all mourn that loss sooner or later. If I'm allowed by the present governmental powers to pick your pocket to take your property, then some day another set of rulers will allow you to pick my pocket and take my property. Even more important is the right of free speech, which is perhaps the most critical freedom in any society bearing the label "free", because it is so absolutely important to the free-flowing communication of ideas, information, petitions, and complaints that keep the society free. If government puts constraints on free speech for any reason, ultimately those constraints and their reasons will change as times, governments, and crises change. And the reasons used to block free speech will multiply and distort themselves over time until nobody has free speech about anything… whereupon government will dominate us unchecked – which is despotism.The appropriate methods of protecting oneself and one's family from disturbing exercises of free speech are to block it out at the thresholds of our spheres of legitimate personal control – our households, our families, and so on. It can not, should not, must not be made the responsibility of government to emplace limitations on the free exercise of speech. Those limits will ultimately be used against the citizenry in ways none of us on the right or left can imagine or accept… but then it may be too late. The testimony of history is unrelenting about this danger.
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I agree entirely. If we want an internet that is safe for children, a blacklisting filter will never work. You need an entirely new filter product where ONLY sites that are classified will be displayed to children.This of course will NEVER work for adults because only a very small fraction of sites could ever be classified, it would harm the economy significantly as people could not do the work necessary. A blacklist will also not work for this reason, in order to get a site refused classification, it actually has to have a classification attempt made. This is not economically possible, the reason it works for books, DVDs and movies is that there is a limited amount, and it is paid for by the publisher.I think some people need to look up the type of content that will be filtered. It is NOT content which is illegal to own in Australia. It is simply content which is illegal to broadcast or sell, you can't compare it to drugs or other substances, which are illegal to own. I think there would be significantly less opposition to this filter if it just filtered material that was actually illegal for the recipient to posess. However in this case, are we not better off just monitoring and removing that individual from a position where they will cause harm, rather than forcing them into an alternate, unmonitorable means of obtaining that data (which is incredibly easy and takes about 5 minutes).Ten of the 50 most popular internet sites in Australia, would legitmately be blocked using this filter. Three of them are in the top 10. The reason these are so popular is outside of the most hard-line countries in the world with the worst human rights records, they are perfectly legal businesses. All we're doing is shifting the revenue offshore.A computer game was recently refused classification, and modified for the Australian market. I actually agree with this decision, but the modifications were over the top (publishers fault) so that it achieved classification on the second attempt guaranteed. The end result of this is that tens to hundreds of thousands of Australian's found a way to buy the international version in a way that would not be blockable by this filter, the result is that Australian businesses lost a large amount of revenue, for no gain.That Australian classifications are more restrictive than the rest of the modern world is a debate that has largely been avoided by the lack of those classifications being applied to the modern world.My biggest concern with the filter being mandatory also was that parents would assume it protected their children. The number one danger for children is being unsupervised on legitmate, classified sites that allow communication with others, particularly those actually designed for a younger audience. There are all sorts of potentially nasty people targeting children on those sites. If you want to protect your children, there are only two actual options, a whitelist where you choose every site they are allowed, or very close supervision (sitting next to them). The job can't be done for you. As they get older you are just going to have to trust they will do the right thing because it will no longer be something you can control, internet or no internet.We shouldn't continue to confuse broadcast media like TV and Radio with user accessed media like DVD, Books and the Internet. That is akin to saying because you can't be naked in public you can't ever be naked in a bathroom. Material that should be banned of any kind, physical or literature, should be limited to that which causes actual harm to others.
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An insightful entry I hope more filtering proponents read.Of course, the liberty of viewing the web through a filter can still be granted to those who wish to do so without removing the liberty of others to access an unfiltered internet.This is where all the arguments for the filter break: they are all achieved by an /optional/ filter.I've yet to hear of any reason the filter must be /mandatory/.
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It should also be noted that the proposed filter, will filter URLs, not whole sites, (unless of course the whole site is classified RC).So, a porn site with 10000 videos, of which 100 are RC, will require the Australian public to report every single RC video to the ACMA for inclusion in the filter.Meanwhile of course, another 1000 videos have been added, of which 10 are RC and so on and so on.The filter CANNOT stop children or adults from accessing RC content. It is simply not possible as currently proposed.One wonders why the Government is introducing it…
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@ Rod Rye….Another farcical classification of computer games recently…The yet to be released Aliens vs Predator. The ACMA stuck a RC rating on it.The manufacturer of the game told the ACMA to get lost, we're not changing the game for some stupid classification law Australia has, bye.So what happened? There is no R18+ classification in Australia, so the ACMA backed down and rated it M, (Or MA, i forget).So the game skipped from RC all the way down to M due to our silly classification system.
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Hi Will, Roddy, Aaron and everyone else,
For the moment, I’m sitting on the fence about the filter – I don’t have the free speech concerns about the filter as it is proposed (although let’s see if they’d expand it like someone suggested they might), but I doubt that it will work.
Problem is, the free speech argument is obscuring the debate. Although child abuse material is the only RC material whose possession is illegal, it is still illegal to sell any RC material in most Australian states. Penalties are up to two years in gaol (eg s. 15(1)(d) of the Victorian Classification (Enforcement) Act [90/1995]. Given that most of the “target” websites are commercial, and therefore already acting illegally by selling these materials, the free speech argument is pretty weak. Unless, of course, you want to argue that people should be allowed to sell hardcopy films/publications that are currently RC in the real world too.
None of this is to suggest that free speech doesn’t matter (it does), but there shouldn’t be any special pleading for the internet. It is, after all, a reflection of the real world.-
Hi James. It’s been a while since I interacted with this post so excuse any rehash or inconsistency.
You hit the nail on the head – the Internet is a reflection of the real world. It is not a reflection of a television broadcast. There is a difference between passing film distribution system through a censorship system and passing everyday conversations through a censoring system. The internet is more like everyday conversations than it is about film distribution.
Of course is not like we do nothing. In the real world if people do something illegal they are tracked down and jailed. This should be the case for people who deal with illegal material. But the analogy is this – you could theoretical (not practically) eliminate the distribution of drugs by putting road blocks on every highway and searching every car. But we don’t – for many numbers of good reasons! Because the problem is not traffic but some of the people who misuse the traffic.
Similarly, we don’t make Australia Post responsible for the content of the envelopes. Yes, sometimes we open mail and pursue prosecution – when there is just cause. But we don’t open every envelope – for many numbers of good reasons!
These are real world examples and the internet reflects the real world
The misconception that people have is that this is technological problem and so they offer a technological answer. Such an answer will never work because the problem is a criminal problem and it needs a judicial answer.
So yes, there is free speech issues, but also privacy, and also efficacy – invest in the real solutions to illegal material, not the theatre of a “filter” that will have negligible benefit in return for opening up risks and costs in all the other areas.
Anyway, it’s probably a coffee conversation
W.
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I'm still with you. Keep on singing the same tune Will.The ABC3 thing sounds terrible. I'm glad we didn't experience it. Internet filtering… yeah for politicians.
Rob.