Juno News - April 05, 2019


Australia to jail social media executives over user content

Hosted by
Andrew Lutton
Mentioned
Ralph Goodale
The secret weapon that could destroy North America Canadians are turning their backs on Justin Trudeau. Literally.

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

181.09

Word count

637

Sentence count

30


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the wake of the recent mass shooting in Christchurch, Australia has passed a law that could see executives of social media companies imprisoned if they don't clean up their platforms the way the government wants them to. Andrew Lutton explains why this is a bad idea, and why we should be worried.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Whether it's firearms or free speech, a country should never use tragedy as political cover to take away freedoms.
00:00:09.180 But unfortunately, it's seeming increasingly as though that is all that governments are interested in doing when horrific events happen.
00:00:17.040 Such as the Christchurch mosque attacks in New Zealand a few short weeks ago,
00:00:20.620 which were used not only as a springboard for sweeping gun control in New Zealand,
00:00:24.660 but even indicated by Ralph Goodale in Canada as possibly fodder to justify a gun grab in Canada.
00:00:32.740 One of the most bizarre overreactions from what happened in Christchurch has been from Australia's Parliament,
00:00:38.380 which this week passed a law that could imprison the executives of social media companies
00:00:44.160 if they don't clean up their platforms the way that the Australian government wants them to.
00:00:48.640 It's specifically looking into violent streams, such as the one that the Christchurch killer used,
00:00:55.800 a live stream on Facebook and YouTube, I think, of his horrific crime.
00:01:00.420 And these things are, generally speaking, against the terms of service of pretty much every social media company imaginable.
00:01:07.380 Companies try to take these things down, but people upload them at a quicker rate than they can be deleted in many respects.
00:01:13.860 This is where the Australian approach is so flawed.
00:01:16.460 The bill would, if a social media company does not do, in the eyes of the Australian government,
00:01:21.920 a sufficiently good job at getting rid of these types of snuff films from their sites,
00:01:27.720 put a penalty towards the executives of the companies of up to three years in prison.
00:01:34.020 Now, whether they could enforce on a Twitter executive in San Francisco,
00:01:38.820 this Australian law still stands to be seen.
00:01:41.060 Although it stands to reason that these giant tech companies wouldn't want to have anything to do with Australia,
00:01:45.820 if this is the way it views them.
00:01:48.020 But more importantly, it is a fundamental lack of recognition
00:01:51.520 that the companies themselves are the ones that are on the front lines here.
00:01:55.740 Most people, when they log on to Facebook or Twitter, don't want to see someone being violently gunned down.
00:02:01.020 The companies have an incentive to meet up with their user base to get rid of these things.
00:02:05.740 But to start criminalizing footage like this when there is, say, a journalistic value in being able to share clips of these things,
00:02:15.340 are they going to start jailing reporters that show car crash footage?
00:02:18.780 Are they going to start jailing someone who takes a cell phone photo of a terrorist attack if they happen to be there?
00:02:25.380 I mean, where do we draw the line?
00:02:27.500 The problem is that status will look for any excuse to be status.
00:02:31.240 And most people are not going to stand up and defend the idea of social media snuff films.
00:02:38.560 So an overarching policy like this, a sweeping policy like this, gets passed with little criticism.
00:02:44.820 But you don't need to defend what is in the footage to defend that companies have the right and the prerogative to deal with their own platforms.
00:02:52.860 And Australia has proven that it thinks government should be able to control what people access on the internet.
00:02:58.040 Regardless of the specific content that was driving this policy, this is what the Australian government is saying.
00:03:03.960 That it should be able to decide what any ordinary Australian is able to do on the internet.
00:03:09.460 And even to such a point that they can jail someone for running afoul of that.
00:03:14.180 That is not free speech. That is not a free society.
00:03:17.640 And for Australia, which is very similar in demography and history and heritage to Canada,
00:03:23.200 this is something we need to be very concerned about.
00:03:25.640 If this is the mentality sweeping what are supposed to be liberal democracies.
00:03:29.340 For True North, I'm Andrew Lutton.