Day 9: Filtering doesn't breach free speech -- Stephen Conroy, Communications Minister
In Australia, thousands of people blog – but to my knowledge only The Australian, principal newspaper of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘News Ltd’ stable, has ‘Super Bloggers’.
“SuperSize it!” said the magnate (or the magnate’s minion). And it was done.
Super blogging began on February 5th, to debate the hottest topic in the Australian blogosphere: the proposed Great Australian Firewall. This is the Rudd Government’s spook-sponsored attack on Internet freedom (for the good of the rather reluctant Australian public – because government knows best).
There's more!
How long ago it seems today, when I first read the Australian newspaper’s introduction to the battle of the super-bloggers, introducing Super Blog entry No 1: Why Australia needs to trial net filters:
The federal Government’s contentious plan to introduce internet filtering comes under the microscope in this series of Super Blogs starting today.
Nine Super Bloggers will argue for and against filtering and thrash out the technical problems with the project.
As the series evolved, the name of each selected ‘super-blogger’ was revealed, along with his/her article.
Comments were invited in each case. Many would-be contributors complained their own comments weren’t posted; even so, as usual and in common with web coverage of this issue elsewhere, opponents of Internet censorship were overwhelmingly in the majority.
By the beginning of this week, I’d read up to number eight in the series and wondered who the ninth and final Super Blgger might be?
In my dreams, I hoped Rupert Murdoch might take the superblog podium and tell us all why we’re really having this vile policy rammed down our throats.
More realistically, I thought the ninth blogger would probably be Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, who did run a busy blog for a few days before Christmas but decided to close comments (presumably because he got too many and didn’t like to read or even think about them?)
The Australian's Ninth 'Super Blogger'
As it happened, Stephen Conroy was the ninth super blogger. His entry appeared in the Australian on Wednesday 18th February. I didn’t catch up with that fact until the following evening (Thursday 19th February).
When I did, I discovered to my surprise that Minister Conroy’s article consisted of a title and white space! (see above)
I clicked my way through the other superblog entries, and found most of them appeared as before – with one exception. Clive Hamilton’s article was also a title-only blank page. What a mystery! What had happened to the articles by Stephen Conroy and Clive Hamilton? I considered a few possibilities. Each of them seemed unlikely:
- their articles had been hacked
- they decided to drop out of the super-blogging contest
- they had been elimated for lousy super-blooging
- someone in the Australian’s website production team is on the bottle
- they hated the comments too much and took down the articles
- they decided to cut the fluff and just present headlines (easier for readers to comprehend?)
I checked out Somebody Think of the Children – a great source of reliable, up-to-date info about the Internet censorship issue in Australia. That’s where I learnt about the apparent flooding of the two articles in question over the last two days with comments that seemed to come from ill-informed but passionately committed advocates for censorship.
The SToC article in turn referred readers to a quite extraordinary forum topic on Whirlpool, Australia’s forum for internet buffs, entitled ISP Level Content Filtering Part 28.
On page 10 of the forum topic, I read:
Message from ACL,
Dear ACL Supporter,
We need your help today in the public debate on internet filtering.
For the past week The Australian newspaper has been running a ‘Super Blog’ aimed at putting the Federal Government’s internet filtering initiative “under the microscope”. The way it works is that they run an opinion piece either for or against the initiative and then open up the issue for people to post their blogs. There have been some very good opinion pieces in favour of the internet filtering initiative (as well as several against) but the vast majority of blogs being posted are strongly against the initiative. In today’s ‘Super Blog’, Clive Hamilton of Charles Sturt University (and previously the Australia Institute) has written an excellent and well-informed article entitled: ‘Web doesn’t belong to net libertarians’.
However, disappointingly, most of those who have posted blogs in response are once again opposed to the initiative and what Clive Hamilton has to say. If you’re in favour of Internet filtering – and if you read Clive Hamilton’s article you’ll see even more reasons why you should be – could you please consider posting a blog to support Clive Hamilton and the points he is making. All you have to do is click here and it will to take you to the article. You then just scroll to the bottom where it says ‘post a comment’.
Please do take action on this as it is very important that those people in favour of internet filtering make their voice heard – and not just those who are part of the orchestrated campaign against this important initiative. It should only take a few minutes and if you need some ideas about what to write you could go to our ‘Keep IT clean’ campaign by clicking here and it will give you some assistance. While you are there you might also like to send an email off to your Federal representatives on this issue, if you haven’t already done so.
Many thanks for your support on this issue” link here
And….. “For today’s ‘Super Blog’ in The Australian, Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has written an article entitled ‘Filtering doesn’t breach free speech’ which puts forward the need for internet filtering as part of a range of measures to help protect children online and also debunks ‘freedom of speech’ arguments against filtering.
Filtering critics have once again been out in force against the initiative, posting blogs criticising the article, usually with alarmist rhetoric. We need to reinforce to the Minister and the general public the importance of internet filtering and the fact that there are many people in the community who want to see filtering go ahead.
And here’s a link to a blog from Conroy where you can post your 2c as well.
I have no idea whether this email, which purports to be a ‘Call to Action’ from Australian Christian Lobby’s Managing Director, is genuine. I’m not on the ACL mailing list. It’s easy to invent a spoof letter.
Did ex-SAS Commander and ‘terrorism expert’ Jim Wallace really send out an appeal to followers to get blogging? Did they really stuff up so badly it became an embarassment? Who took down the two articles and why?
Fortunately, Australia has a fiercely independent, courageous and free mass media. Doubtless we’ll get answers to these questions soon.
Meanwhile, here are a few screenshots of the articles as of 10pm Thursday 20th February 2009, so you can see what I’ve been talking about with your own eyes:
Day 1: Why Australia needs to trial net filters - Bernadette McMenamin, Child Wise CEO
Day 2: Blanket ban on the internet a folly - Cory Bernardi, Liberal Senator, South Australia
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Day 8: Web doesn't belong to net libertarians -- Clive Hamilton, Charles Sturt University
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Postcript
The mystery is solved… sort of.
A commentator pointed out that the articles by Conroy and Hamilton are visible in Internet Explorer (see comments below).
Why would these two articles be invisible in certain browsers (I was using Opera) – while the other seven show up as normal? Why those two particular articles – the ones heavily commented by pro-censorship advocates?
Reportedly it has been more difficult to post comments on those two articles using some browsers, but not others. Any theories?
