Australia plans 'penalties' for social networks that don't think of the children Australia has devised a small stick and big stick approach to cyber-bullying material stored on social networks. The nation's recently-installed government ran on a policy of Thinking Of The Children that proposed the creation of a new “Office of the Children’s e-Safety Commissioner” with the power to compel social networks to …
Quite apart from the offensive 'deemed to be' and 'compelled to remove', how in hell is any of this going to apply to the vast majority of social networking sites, which are based outside Australia and not subject to Aussie laws?!
Another severe case of what I have come to term 'Canute Syndrome'.
Could we please stop "thinking of the children" and start doing something about them... like, for instance supervising them when they go online in the same way we would supervise them while they cross the road.
No, wait we don't do that now, do we? That's why we had to lower the speed limit in our suburbs to a ludicrously slow speed, because nobody was obeying the road rules.
What, you mean cutting funding for school counsellors and replacing them with Christian chaplains isn't enough?
But no, you're right.
Laws as substitute for parenting. Awesome.
Wrap the world in enough foam and no one will ever have to worry again. Except the foam will probably be claimed to cause cancer . . .
According to an edict , schools are to stop referring to instances of bullying & harassment in any official documentation, and systems are being changed accordingly (they are changing the terminology in our "referral" system).
Why?
Because when teachers document cases of (sorry I have forgotten what the new term is) in their referrals (ie letting the the school admin know what transpired), parents have been getting these and suing the department for instances of (***) .
My sister tried to take on one of the #chan "social media" sites because someone had found her photos of her kids dance recital and had packaged them up in a format more suitable for an adolescent boy's use. My sister was intending to log in and tell the guys that they violated her copyright on the photos and should stop making degrading comments about the girls. Lucky for her, she didn't know she could post anonymously and her attempts at getting a user id failed since they are only available by invite only. She contacted me looking on ways to get an invite when I explained that if she made those comments on that site, her daughters face may be a nude and then plastered on thousands of other sites around the world and will eventually end up in printed form at her school where if she just ignored it, some kids would have the archive with terabytes of others and it will silently disappear. She still wants more laws to shut down messages on boards.
"legally required". Are they kidding?
As some others have already mentioned, since all the notable social media sites are outside of australia, said social media sites don't have to even lift their legs to fart on the "legislation".
As per usual, all talk and hot air coming from a bunch of politicians who have no idea how real life works.
I suppose this will work great... for Social Media sites *actually hosted in Australia*... not that I can think of any.
What do the Aussies think this is going to achieve, other than driving sites underground, where they end up hosted exclusively over the Tor DarkNet, and are no longer reachable via the public internet?
This happening will mean that the sites will still be reachable by anyone who wants to use them for cyber-bullying purposes, but those sites will no longer be GeoIP locatable, further complicating matters by making certain that these sites will now be impossible to trace, track, or silence, because the politicians wanted to tinker with something they didn't fully understand.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
