Cleanfeed

Just in case Punch readers believe what people tell them, here are some of the things that have been said about internet filtering…and exactly why they shouldn’t be believed.

Lie # 1: The filter will help in the fight against child pornography.

I wish this were true. But it isn’t. Even child protection group, Save The Children, has come out exposing Conroy’s plan as unworkable and the wrong way to protect children online. The filter will not (and Stephen Conroy admits this) work for the areas where unwanted material actually lives, namely: peer-to-peer networking, instant messaging, torrents, direct emails and chat rooms.

Continue reading "Top 10 internet filter lies" »

Journalists tend to adopt a natural default position whereby censorship is deemed to be one of the purest forms of evil, and that we should fight any government which tries to curtail the freedom of adults to make up their own minds on what they say, watch and read.

Over the past few months I’ve found that my personal default position has been challenged, oddly enough, by the anti-censorship lobby. Lobby is a bit of a loose term - there is no formal lobby as such - it’s a pretty diverse and disorganised conglomeration of humanity, containing authors, artists, journalists, information technology experts, social media enthusiasts, twitterers and the like.

Large - and in my view, largely stupid - sections of this group have had the surprise effect of turning me into a closet fan of Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Not because his internet filtering plan is a work of genius. Far from it.

Continue reading "Vacuous critics give censorship a good name" »