Australia has an international reputation as visionary for the way we managed the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. While countries like the US were being sidetracked by extremists claiming the virus was a sign God was venting his wrath on homosexuals, Australians acted rationally.
Our governments, our health experts and our media got the message out: HIV was primarily spread through blood and semen. Safer sex and injecting practices could stem the tide.
If you go online today you’ll find countless websites devoted to that message. Many of them are hosted overseas. Many of them give detailed instructions on drug injection and describe, in necessarily explicit language, sexual activity that would be deemed illegal to show in a film made for entertainment purposes under Australian law.
Under a new mandatory filtering regime being proposed by the Federal Government many of these sites could wind up on a blacklist that internet service providers will be required to block.
Our current media content regulation regime is a bowl of spaghetti - actually, it’s a bowl of left-over spaghetti someone stuck at the back of the fridge in the 1980s and that successive governments keep reheating.
Let me explain: under our current regime some parts of the media are largely self-regulating (most news and current affairs media, advertising), some are co-regulated (talkback radio), some are highly regulated (video games) or banned from sale entirely (X18+ material in all Australian states). It’s a system which was built reactively, inconsistently and as a result of political pressure by minority groups rather than through careful consideration of what Australians want, what they think should be available to whom, and how they actually negotiate media use in their own families.
The online world makes it imperative that we rethink this system from first principles. It’s a world in which media consumers have become media producers and in which the means of distributing media content is open to even very young consumers.
The other day I discovered my son and his friend videoing their bums with my mobile phone and trying to work out how to upload the “hilarious” results onto YouTube. They’re seven years old. It’s a great anecdote for his 21st birthday. But it also underlines the complexity of the digital, mobile and online era.
Parents, educators and child guardians are all faced with enormous challenges when it comes to balancing the risks and opportunities of the internet. So is our Federal Government. If we simply apply parts of the current flawed and inconsistent media regulation scheme – however window dressed – we miss a huge opportunity for reform.
The current government is clearly committed to embracing the opportunities of the online and mobile media era. The National Broadband Network is proof of that. But in dealing with the risks they need to deal clearly with the public policy detail.
Under a mandatory filtering regime – which would mean that Internet Service Providers were required to block content hosted overseas as well as here – serious questions arise about the scope of content filtered when the pool of material will be so large.
According to Minister Conroy’s announcement yesterday the mandatory filtering of internet content in Australia will proceed according to a list drawn up on the basis of the RC classification. It’s a category that doesn’t just deal with abhorrent material like child pornography, bestiality and active incitement to violence. Given the current broad terms under which material is slotted into the category it would also potentially embrace sites where people talked therapeutically about child sex abuse experiences, accessed information about safe sex and drug injecting practices, or engaged in serious political dialogue about what motivates terrorist groups.
An equally important question that remains unanswered by Senator Conroy’s announcement yesterday is what kind of information ordinary Australians will have about what goes on the mandatory filtering list.
If Australia adopts a mandatory internet filtering regime – a regime that puts responsibility for blocking at the access end of the spectrum – it will distance us from our Western liberal counterparts in the US, the UK and across the great bulk of the European Union. They have all adopted systems that emphasise collaboration between industry, government and the public to prevent access to the worst kinds of material. Where there is mandatory filtering – in Italy and Germany – the mandatory filtering is carefully confined to child pornography and gambling sites.
Blocking the worst kind of content should be a public priority. The real question is whether a mandatory regime is the best system for doing that and whether Australia’s current system is set up to do it well.
In a world where much of the media content people access is online there are some serious questions that remain unanswered about what will disappear from our computer screens and whether we’ll have a right to know when and why.
Given the video provided above, who knows if you’d even get the chance to read this column under the proposed mandatory filtering regime.
Untangling the Net - The Scope of Content Caught by Mandatory Internet Filtering
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