Joe Hildebrand: Time to unplug from world of hate speech and online bullying

The future will be increasingly online and interconnected. But as the Knox Grammar chatroom scandal clearly demonstrates it might not be actually better, writes Joe Hildebrand.

“You can’t stop progress” is the catchcry of everyone from property developers to web developers to the educated elites who call themselves “progressives”, no less.

But maybe it’s time we did.

For starters, what the hell is “progress” anyway? For a property developer it’s the inevitable bulldozing of old houses to make way for new flats.

For a web developer it’s the inevitable race towards an ever more interconnected world. For a “progressive” it’s the inevitable erosion of old institutions and traditions in favour of new structures and language.

And yet all these supposed inevitabilities are in many ways at odds with each other.

Inner-city progressives are the first to chain themselves to trees when their own heritage is under threat and an intimately hyper-connected world paves the way for torrents of the unrestricted speech that progressives demand requires regulation.

Meanwhile the vast majority of people around the world who maintain strong religious and cultural ­traditions might not see the progressives’ vision of progress as very ­progressive either.

And all of these humanity-scale conundrums are writhing around in the Knox Grammar chat room scandal that has rocked Sydney over the past week.

The fallout from Knox Grammar’s chatroom scandal, exposed by The Daily Telegraph last week, continues to rock Sydney. Picture: Tim Hunter.

The repugnant language and ideas in this online “community” – ranging from Nazi sympathies to forced abortions – includes not just hate speech but clear incitements to violence.

The cliche would be to call it every parents’ worst nightmare but it is very real, and not just at Knox.

These chat rooms are ubiquitous, often driven by a minority of extreme participants who are trying to outdo each other in the violence of the language used.

These online networks were also turbocharged during the pandemic, in which they were kids’ only means of communicating with their friends, as well as often necessary platforms for remote learning – another dark side-effect of lockdowns.

But the Knox story is particularly nauseating because these are kids from the most privileged families in society.

There is no socio-economic oppression to point to. These are hardly voiceless or marginalised youths crying out for attention.

Moreover, parents make the deliberate – and very expensive – decision to send their children to Knox because of the supposedly strong traditional values it espouses. And so there can be no claims of a lack of moral guidance.

But it’s not like it’s just kids doing it either.

There are countless adults on social media who use vile language, encourage violence and perpetuate abuse – and that includes plenty who think that they’re the progressive ones.

School kids aren’t the only ones spreading vile abuse online, writes Joe Hildebrand.

And perhaps the biggest irony is that almost all this explosive rage comes from a minority of hardliners on both the left and the right with little bearing on what most people think – just as the vilest stuff in these chatrooms seems to come from a minority of hardcore kids while most appear to be tellingly silent.

Minority is the key word in both cases and yet it is the tail that wags the dog.

Among the angry online adults, the hard right believes that our institutions are being hijacked by woke cultural Marxists hellbent on extinguishing Western civilisation while the hard left believes that anyone who questions the latest progressive dogma must be a fascist.

If you got your world view from social media, you would be utterly convinced that one of these two things was true. In fact it is a picture of the world that is utterly false.

The vast majority of people don’t think or care about life in these terms at all – they are overwhelmingly focused on their families, their work, providing a decent home and promising future for their children or having a good time with their friends.

The Knox saga demonstrates social media’s capacity to twist minds young and old. Picture: John Grainger

Indeed, it is only when out of touch leaders of our institutions try to kowtow to some of the more ludicrous “progressive” demands that normal people pay attention, such as health departments eliminating terms like “mother” and “breastfeeding” from the process of childbirth.

In this case Government Services Minister Bill Shorten stepped in to halt such idiocy.

And while this sent the ideological left into a frenzy, you can bet London to a brick it was unanimously supported by everybody else.

And so the question is why do we pander to ideologues and extremists at all? Neither has any claim to be on the right side of history, either in the past or future sense.

Do the majority of Australians want to live in a godless or genderless society with constant new waves of regulation governing what we can and cannot say? I doubt it.

But nor do we want the other extreme of laissez-faire online communication that exposes children to hate speech and abuse. And so should we just accept that technology will become an ever more integral and intimate part of all spheres of our lives?

That we can replace classrooms with chatrooms and there will be no negative consequences?

Already the world has taken massive steps to halt industrial progress in the extraction of energy despite its many economic benefits. Why? Because we realised we didn’t want to live in the sort of world that would lead to.

So why don’t we apply the same kind of test to social and technological progress too?

Do we want to live in a world where kids are so plugged in they cannot escape hate speech and online bullying?

And at the other extreme, do we want to live in a world where everyday language, frank debate and even jokes are regulated out of existence?

People may well say that you can’t stop progress, but surely it has to stop somewhere.