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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: 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
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  • (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?