by On a visit to South Australia last week I didn’t quite believe what I was hearing when told that the Government had moved to ban anonymous comments in online forums. This post is possibly old news to some of you (I know Craig Thomler blogged about it a while ago) but I wanted to write about it because it is truly outrageous and should serve as a warning to others who would attempt to limit freedom of speech through web censorship.
The Minister responsible has now very publicly back- flipped after an outraged response from the community. His mea- culpa seemed at the time to be very genuine. However, the subsequent activities unearthed by media watch (see below) where he has tried to threaten a forum participant with legal action reveals an approach to censorship that would surely make Senator Conroy himself blush.
Now he has resigned to watch his son play soccer. Take care what you chant at Adelaide soccer matches.
One interesting point to come out of this whole shambles is the claim by Michael Atkinson (the now former Attorney General) that people of his generation find the idea of criticising Government through anonymous forums to be somehow objectionable.
In my view Government shouldn’t need to know who is criticising them, they should be open to criticism and should listen to it. That 95% of Bang the Table users choose to be anonymous shows that people feel comfortable contributing in this way. Perhaps it says something about the nature of Government these days that people don’t want to be identified.
More importantly perhaps, many of us feel we cannot criticise Government perhaps because of our jobs or simply because we do not feel that we want to be exposed to ridicule. Anonymity protects us and lets our inputs be judged on their content rather than on who made the comment. This is liberating and I believe that anonymity is an aid to transparency. I have blogged about this before.
I hope this episode will serve as a warning to those everywhere (especially in Canberra) who are tempted to try and get in the way of the increased transparency and empowerment being facilitated by the web.
This work by Bang the Table Pty Ltd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License.
Nah, most people just do not want to be held accountable or responsible for what they say. They can shoot off whatever they like directly at targets with no chance of having to deal with responses personally… lol
You can lie to the hilt, make outrageous claims and accusations, misrepresentations and insults, and hide behind the anonymity. Excellent.
Elections are a prime time character assassination season, many people have pretty pointed agendas which have nothing to do with truth, and anonymous blogging really does help people who have little or no interest in the truth. Cool tool to fool and drool.
Um, thanks for that input Anonymous!
Funny.