Editorial: NZ Government fails to provide Internet protection for the young and vulnerable
By Media Matters President, JOHN TERRIS
Tuesday, 29 October 2013
Facebook announced last week that it was working on new ways to keep users from stumbling across gruesome content on its website following an outcry over the discovery of beheading videos there.
The controversy - which has drawn critical comment from British Prime Minister David Cameron - illustrates the difficulty of setting a universal standard across the social network used by 1 billion people, reports the Dompost on October 24.
Facing sharp criticism, Facebook issued a statement clarifying that violent videos were only allowed if they were presented as news or held up as atrocities to be condemned.
"If they were being celebrated, or the actions in them encouraged, our approach would be different," the company said in a statement. "However, since some people object to graphic video of this nature, we are working to give people additional control over the content they see. This may include warning them in advance that the image they are about to see contains graphic content."
British Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech in July this year on the regulation of pornography on the internet, the social responsibility of web companies and what, if anything, the state should do to police the sexually explicit material that is accessible on digital devices.
Cameron notes that "the internet is not a sideline to 'real life' or an escape from 'real life'; it is real life. It has an impact: on the children who view things that harm them, on the vile images of abuse that pollute minds and cause crime, on the very values that underpin our society." So, he went on, the big internet companies like Google, Bing, and Yahoo have "a moral duty" to act,- or they ought to face legislation that will force them to do so.
The UK government is currently contemplating filtering all internet material to see to it that providers like Google, Facebook and others, are subject to some sort of rules other than those they make themselves.
This is light years away from the situation in NZ, where, under pressure from our own media, the Government of John Key back in September this year, passed up on a recommendation of its own Law Commission that we regulate all media including the Internet. Mr Key and his colleagues decided instead to do absolutely nothing. This is not out of a desire to protect Freedom of Speech, so much as a desire to shmooze the media as the election year looms.
Even their counterparts, the incoming Federal Liberal National Government of Tony Abbot in Australia, have a policy to provide internet filtering and the funding of safety programmes in schools, as well as parental guidance programmes to support parents who want to monitor what their kids are watching on their laptops and smart phones. The EU is studying similar legislative proposals.
In short, all round the world, politicians are responding to legitimate concerns within their communities about the lack of protection of the young and the vulnerable, while here in NZ the government sits on its hands, blind to concepts like "moral duty" fearful of buying a fight with the media, which it needs on its side to win the next election.
So the kids of this country continue to be open to the predations of cyber stalkers, and to be exposed to violence on TV and the Internet, and we will continue to be obliged to watch helplessly, while crimes of violence involving young people go up, at the same time as the rate of crime in the country as a whole, goes down.
John Terris is National President for Media Matters in NZ, and is a former Deputy Speaker, NZ House of Representatives.
