The attitudes down under towards social media have turned barmy.\u00a0 While there is much to take Elon Musk to task for his wrecking ball antics at the platform formerly known as Twitter, not to mention his highly developed sense of sociopathy, the hysteria regarding the refusal to remove images of a man in holy orders being attacked by his assailant in Sydney suggests a lengthy couch session is in order.\u00a0 But more than that, it suggests that the censoring types are trying, more than ever, to tell users what to see and under what conditions for fear that we will all reach for a weapon and go on the rampage.<\/p>\n
It all stems from the April 15 incident that took place at an Assyrian Orthodox service conducted by Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and the Rev. Isaac Royel at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, Sydney.\u00a0 A 16-year-old youth, captured on the livestream of the surface, is shown heading to the bishop before feverishly stabbing him, speaking Arabic about insults to the Prophet Muhammed as he does so.\u00a0 Rev. Royel also received injuries.<\/p>\n
Up to 600 people subsequently gathered around the church.\u00a0 A number demanded that police surrender the boy.\u00a0 In the hours of rioting<\/a> that followed, 51 police officers were injured.\u00a0 Various Sydney mosques received death threats.<\/p>\n The matter \u2013 dramatic, violent, raging \u2013 rattled the authorities.\u00a0 For the sake of appearance, the heavies, including counter-terrorism personnel, New South Wales police and members of the Australian domestic spy agency, ASIO, were brought in.\u00a0 The pudding was ready for a severe overegging.\u00a0 On April 16, the NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb deemed the stabbing a \u201cterrorist incident\u201d.\u00a0 NSW Premier Chris Minns stated that the incident was being investigated as a \u201cterrorist incident\u201d given the \u201creligiously motivated\u201d language used during the alleged attack.<\/p>\n After conducting interviews with the boy while still in his hospital bed on April 18, the decision was made to charge him with the commission of an alleged act of terrorism.\u00a0 This, despite a behavioural history consistent with, as The Guardian<\/em> reports<\/a>, \u201cmental illness or intellectual disability.\u201d\u00a0 For their part, the boy\u2019s family noted<\/a> \u201canger management and behavioural issues\u201d along with his \u201cshort fuse\u201d, none of which lent themselves to a conclusion that he had been radicalised.\u00a0 He did, however, have a past with knife crime.<\/p>\n Assuming the general public to be a hive of incipient terrorism easily stimulated by images of violence, networks and media outlets across the country chose to crop the video stream.\u00a0 The youth is merely shown approaching the bishop, at which point he raises his hand and is editorially frozen in suspended time.<\/p>\n Taking this approach implied a certain mystification that arises from tampering and redacting material in the name of decency and inoffensiveness; to refuse to reveal such details and edit others, the authorities and information guardians were making their moralistic mark.\u00a0 They were also, ironically enough, lending themselves to accusations of the very problems they seek to combat: misinformation and its more sinister sibling, disinformation.<\/p>\n Another telling point was the broader omission in most press reporting to detail the general background of the bishop in question.\u00a0 Emmanuel is an almost comically conservative churchman, a figure excommunicated for his theological differences with orthodoxy.\u00a0 He has also adopted fire and brimstone views against homosexuality, seeing<\/a> it as a \u201ccrime in the eyes of God\u201d, attacked other religions of the book, including Judaism and Islam, and sees global conspiracies behind the transmission of COVID-19.\u00a0 Hardly, it would seem, the paragon of mild tolerance and calm acceptance in a cosmopolitan society.<\/p>\n On April 16, Australia\u2019s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, got busy, announcing that X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, had been issued with legal notices to remove material within 24 hours depicting \u201cgratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail\u201d.\u00a0 The material in question featured the attack at the Good Shepherd Church.<\/p>\n Under the Online Safety Act 2021<\/em><\/a> (Cth), the commissioner is granted various powers to make sure the sheep do not stray.\u00a0 Internet service providers can be requested or required to block access to material that promotes abhorrent violent conduct, incites such conduct, instructs in abhorrent violent conduct or depicts abhorrent violent conduct. \u00a0Removal of material promoting, instructing, or depicting such \u201cabhorrent violent conduct\u201d, including \u201cterrorist acts\u201d can be ordered for removal if it risks going \u201cviral\u201d and causing \u201csignificant harm to the Australian community\u201d.<\/p>\n X took a different route, preferring to \u201cgeoblock\u201d the content.\u00a0 Those in Australia, in other words, would not be able to access the content except via such alternative means as a virtual private network (VPN).\u00a0 The measure was regarded as insufficient by the commissioner.\u00a0 In response, a shirty Musk dubbed<\/a> Grant Australia\u2019s \u201ccensorship commissar\u201d who was \u201cdemanding *global* content bans\u201d.\u00a0 On April 21, a spokesperson for X stated<\/a> that the commissioner lacked \u201cthe authority to dictate what content X\u2019s users can see globally.\u00a0 We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court.\u201d<\/p>\n In court, the commissioner argued that X\u2019s interim measure not to delete the material but \u201cgeoblock\u201d it failed to comply with the Online Safety Act<\/em>.\u00a0 Siding with her at first instance, the court\u2019s interim injunction requires X to hide the posts in question from all users globally.\u00a0 A warning notice is to cover them. The two-day injunction gives X the opportunity to respond.<\/p>\n There is something risible in all of this.\u00a0 From the side of the authorities, Grant berates and intrudes, treating the common citizenry as malleable, immature and easily led.\u00a0 Spare them the graphic images \u2013 she and members of her office decide what is \u201cabhorrent\u201d and \u201coffensive\u201d to general sensibilities.<\/p>\n Platforms such as Meta and X engage in their own forms of censorship and information curation, their agenda algorithmically driven towards noise, shock and indignation.\u00a0 All the time, they continue to indulge in surveillance capitalism, a corporate phenomenon the Australian government shows little interest in battling.\u00a0 On both sides of this coin, from the bratty, petulant Musk, to the teacherly manners of the eSafety Commissioner, the great public is being mocked and infantilised.<\/p>The post Censorship Wars: Elon Musk, Safety Commissioners and Violent Content<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The attitudes down under towards social media have turned barmy.\u00a0 While there is much to take Elon Musk to task for his wrecking ball antics at the platform formerly known as Twitter, not to mention his highly developed sense of sociopathy, the hysteria regarding the refusal to remove images of a man in holy orders [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Censorship Wars: Elon Musk, Safety Commissioners and Violent Content<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,92,4116,725,16,37,78816],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1624493"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1624493"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1624493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1624501,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1624493\/revisions\/1624501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1624493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1624493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1624493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}