There are reverse ferrets and then there are reverse ferrets, like the spectacular one made by Peter Dutton yesterday.
Last year, the government’s innocuous misinformation bill, which would impose the same kind of half-baked co-regulatory regime on social media companies as that imposed on broadcasters, was, at least according to the opposition, a “very bad bill” that gave the Australian Communications and Media Authority “extraordinary powers”, “appalling and will be strongly opposed”. Communications shadow minister David Coleman joined the goons of Sky News to conjure up the “horror scenario” of ordinary Australians being forced to attend inquiries into their own statements.
Well, no more. Yesterday, asked if he would back Labor’s misinformation laws, Dutton was all thumbs-up: “Yeah, we are, and happy to have a look at anything the government puts forward.”
Peter Dutton doesn’t just support the government’s misinformation bill. He also had this to say about violence against women:
I think social media has a role to play here. The computer games that young boys are playing where violence is a very significant part of what’s being enforced into their minds on a regular basis … the treatment of women, what they’re seeing in some of the computer games, what they’re seeing on social media, the normalisation of all of that, it’s just the lack of manners in society more generally…
Attempts to link video games and violence (or even “aggression”) are decades old, and part of a long line of scapegoats for youth behaviour — rap, television, rock music, radio, novels, the waltz, etc. There is literally no evidence from anywhere of any connection between computer games and violence, except possibly that releases of major new games lowers violent crime. But this is a politician who only two weeks ago was bandying about references to Australia’s worst mass murder since the frontier wars, desperately looking for a place to hide in the aftermath of what happened at Bondi and Wakeley.
It’s rare for such a superhuman backflip as Dutton’s to go unremarked in the media, but we’re in the middle of a social media-style pile-on on social media, by the corporate media, as well as politicians. Meta, of course, continues to be the object of seething hatred from media outlets for its refusal to be shaken down under Australia’s absurd news media bargaining code. But the villain du jour is Twitter for its refusal to take down the video of a western Sydney cleric being attacked last week.
The issue requires going back to first principles. And on Twitter, the first principle is that, yes, Elon Musk is a vile piece of work with a penchant for extreme right-wing views, who has destroyed both the monetary and cultural value of Twitter and allowed the sewer that was always underneath the site to flood it. But that doesn’t make everything he says automatically false.
Why should the video of the attack on Bishop Emmanuel be taken down? It wasn’t posted by the perpetrator with the goal of glorifying or incentivising his heinous act — content that is illegal under post-Christchurch laws — but resulted from the routine livestreaming of a religious service. The perpetrator may have targeted an event for its public profile, but that’s what terrorists always do, hoping for maximum coverage. That doesn’t mean we ban the broadcast of footage that has innate news value but which might also publicise the act of terrorism. And this has innate news value.
The Scott Morrison-appointed internet censor, Julie Inman Grant, said about the Wakeley footage that “I am not satisfied enough is being done to protect Australians from this most extreme and gratuitous violent material circulating online.” Inman Grant, it should be noted, is a strong advocate of a draconian online “papers please” scheme that would force people to produce identity documents in order to access adult content — a scheme also endorsed yesterday by Dutton. But the logic of Inman Grant’s position — that footage of an unsuccessful stabbing attempt must be taken down to “protect” Australians — surely means that even relatively innocuous footage of violence should be removed.
What about Melbourne Victory supporters attacking a goalkeeper, a referee and security guards? Where would the commercial networks be without the footage of (inevitably) “wild” brawls that are routinely used to pad out evening news bulletins? How about someone being deliberately run over (plus a “wild brawl”, naturally). Or that reliable input to weekend news bulletins, the air show crash?
These fall outside Inman Grant’s remit. But Seven (the home of neo-Nazis, war criminals and rapists), Nine and Ten literally can’t do what they call “news” without a steady diet of junk that comes from our relentless self-surveillance via CCTV, phone cameras and dash cams and the quotidian interpersonal violence and human-made and natural disasters that they capture.
The corporate media savaging Musk for refusing to comply with Inman Grant’s view that she should determine what anyone in the world can see online is deeply hypocritical. And it’s motivated not by a prim concern for the “protection” of Australians but by the realisation social media is destroying them. The refusal of Meta to be shaken down and its threat to dump news off Facebook for good, the nearly complete abandonment of the 20th century free-to-air television model for social media by young people, and the growing inevitability that sports content will gravitate away from the clumsy linear broadcasting model, are the reason for the hysterical editorials against social media (“repugnance”, “malign”, “defying decency”), not an abiding concern that Australians be shielded from harmful content.
Social media can be blamed for many ills of society. But the corporate media — and their obsession with “if it bleeds it leads” news non-standards — pretending they get to sit in judgment is laughable.
Do we need greater regulation of online content and social media? Or are mainstream media outlets behaving like hypocrites? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
