Internet Censorship

Internet censorship. The Australian Government wants to "clean feed" the net to ensure that all "objectionable" material is made unavailable... it is a complete furphy and impossible to achieve.

Now there is a movement to stop social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace to remove material of a racial or sexist nature. I am not a racist, but come on people... I think we need to realise that there are racist bigots of all sorts in every part of the world and you cannot legislate against stupidity.

In the age of printed media, we used to try and ban subversive political, racial and sexually explicit material. Given it was a material medium, it was somewhat successful but at the end of the day those who wanted to produce and/or read that kind of material were still able to.

Now in the digital age where it is impossible to stop the physical production of material, it cannot be stopped. I think that people should realise no matter what your sense of right and wrong is and no matter how good you think people are there are people who have a different view to you.

Rather than trying to legislate people into good moral decency and campaign against websites to monitoring the millions of words of content that they host how about we focus on education programs and ensuring that we eradicate the bigotry and an ability to turn the other cheek when people sprout rubbish.

Sticks and stones hey?