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Australia Passes Law Requiring Social Media to Remove Content Within one Hour

posted by martyb on Wednesday April 17 2019, @05:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the waiting-until-they-try-to-legislate-"abhorent"-text dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Australia has rammed through another law requiring “abhorrent” video, audio or still images to be removed within an hour. This will apply to content providers both in and out of Australia as long as the content is available to Australians. Individuals and companies face jail time and/or huge fines if the content is not removed "within a reasonable time". If the content is found to be hosted in Australia then the Australian government must be alerted. This is yet another knee jerk reaction to the NZ shootings which were streamed live online.

Who is paying for someone to be awake at 3am to curate and remove this stuff?

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 17 2019, @05:54PM (3 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 17 2019, @05:54PM (#831182) Journal

    Your views on freedom of speech are not shared by other countries, and your laws regarding freedom of speech are not applicable in other countries.

    Flat Earthers have views on the shape of the Earth which is not shared by others too.

    At some point, you have to decide what's important to you, laws or speaking your mind without concern that some bureaucrat or personal enemy will find a way to punish you for that and/or hide your speech. Here, freedom of speech is an issue no matter what the rules of the land are. The law supposedly targets "abhorrent" content. But what happens down the road when your criticism of a government policy becomes the abhorrent content? What happens when the forum you wrote your criticism decides to excise your inconvenient words using the excuse that it violates their terms of service (even though you aren't)?

    If you live in a society that you would like to become and stay a democracy, then you need really broad freedom of speech even if the "viewpoint" is otherwise.

  • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:07PM (2 children)

    by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:07PM (#831239) Journal
    IMHO, most of Europe and elsewhere has laws regarding freedom of speech which are less permissive in specific instances than the US law. There are already laws covering hate speech, incitement to commit various offences, supporting terrorism and others. It doesn't mean that those nations want to change their laws, or that democracy in those countries will collapse in the future. Freedom of speech is a spectrum but no nation on earth that I am aware of permits free speech entirely, not even the USA. Knowing and speaking about specific information can be restricted to a subset of the community. e,g. classified information etc

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:22PM (1 child)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 17 2019, @07:22PM (#831254) Journal

      It doesn't mean that those nations want to change their laws, or that democracy in those countries will collapse in the future.

      Those nations aren't Australia. Australia has passed this law, indicating intent to change laws on free speech. Further, it's worse than most such laws because it mandates the creation of censorship apparatus which can then be reused - we already have problems with that. This sort of thing does have the power in conjunction with other underminings to collapse democracy.

      Freedom of speech is a spectrum but no nation on earth that I am aware of permits free speech entirely, not even the USA.

      Even North Korea is on that spectrum. It permits some forms of speech after all. It's not a valuable observation to make.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 18 2019, @12:50AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 18 2019, @12:50AM (#831444)

        You are Australian?