Vikki Campion: Facebook should stop allowing protesters to livestream crimes

Selfie-wielding apprentice narcissists looking for ‘likes’ have discovered the ultimate vanity project — protests — and Facebook is aiding and abetting them, writes Vikki Campion.

Protests in Australia have become the ultimate vanity project of selfie-wielding apprentice narcissists looking for likes as they launch themselves into actions that could kill hapless workers on their big tech-endorsed thrill.

Once upon a time, you would quietly tie yourself to a tree. Now pseudo-profound students from Blockade Australia stream their own faces live as they frolic around our biggest coal port, pressing random buttons with the self-awareness of toddlers.

They are malevolently oblivious that they could have killed a father who would never have gone home to his kids — they could have dumped tonnes of coal on workers or turned their cars, packed with missiles parked on train tracks, into grenades.

A Blockade Australia protester looking for their 15 minutes of fame on Facebook, which won't delete the illegal activity.

It’s not enough to protest any more, now you have to stream your trespassing on Facebook live while espousing your self-endorsed world view, as one law student who pressed a button and “ran around putting stickers on equipment” on Thursday did.

“It is a bleak landscape … like the moon … I can’t believe we chop down trees to make things like this,” she said.

What was she expecting to find at the world’s biggest coal port?

In one Blockade video, “Adrian” had no idea what button he was pressing or whether it would start another conveyor belt, dumping six to seven storeys of coal on an innocent person at work. For safety reasons, the port has as few people as possible where those protesters have been playing to minimise human error, with extensive safety protocols and automated equipment.

Not only has Blockade Australia played around with manual override, but had the protester who barricaded himself in his car on a rail line not been found, he would be dead, and most likely so would the train driver and potentially others, with debris bulldozed for kilometres. You can’t just stop an 8000-tonne train at speed like you can a moped at a pedestrian crossing.

But has Facebook shut down these crimes? No, the opposite. In a single week, Blockade Australia got 208,000 views on their videos — higher than entire episodes of QandA — and they could also fundraise on them, raising $30,000 as of Thursday to support their illegal activity. No other media organisation would actively livestream crime.

This picture was posted on Facebook, showing a car that could have caused a fatal train collision.

Facebook abrogates its responsibility to create the latest influencer — the celebrity protester, who sells criminal activity instead of teeth whitener, and posts protests instead of pictures of their toast.

Facebook’s fact-checking unit goes into overdrive on conservative content, but when was the last time the social media giant fact-checked anti-greyhound propaganda driven by a single greyhound protest group and cheered on by the ABC?

After a colossal industry overhaul, drawing injury rates and euthanasia to historic lows and rehoming to record highs, over a single year more than 40 individual ABC presenters devoted airtime to shut down greyhounds, interviewing the Coalition of Protection of Greyhounds.

A media analysis found that while the ABC accounted for nearly a third of all greyhound stories, they accounted for roughly half of all negative stories — all generated by the same group.

While commercial media cared about rehoming greyhounds, the ABC sought a total industry ban in one in every nine stories. The underlying narrative to the ABC appears to be bush hillbillies shouldn’t gamble on dogs, though in many cases, the greyhound is also a beloved family pet, fed fresh meat and walked more than any puppy-farmed micro-mix.

The real criminals in the dog world are not greyhound lovers, but people mass breeding puppies in remote scrub which attracts little coverage on the ABC or Facebook, or attention from protesters who aren’t so brave to take their advocacy deep into the isolated bush where there is no mobile coverage to live stream their exalted faces in the adventure.

Opinion writer Vikki Campion.

They won’t take their advocacy into territory where their target might be a little less law-abiding than a train driver on a rail line, deep in the scrub where people may be less concerned about protecting a trespasser, and a lot further away from the police the protesters would insist protect them.

They break the law but demand the law protects them. They call for closure of industries and the decimation of livelihoods but crowd-fund the tokenistic fines they get.

It’s easy to protest a dog race or a coal port, but protesters are a little less gallant when it comes to puppy factories. They want to be seen as a martyr without the risk of martyrdom. Even the farm-shaming map Aussie Farms doesn’t list a single illegal puppy farm, focusing instead on the taxpaying, export-producing, law-abiding farmers feeding us and millions worldwide.

On Facebook, private groups exist solely for the purpose of selling kittens and puppies, and if you identify as part of a rescue group, you are immediately blocked.

Even after reporting these pages, rescuers get the tired old line from Facebook saying that they haven’t breached community standards.

So what are the standards? You can farm puppies, livestream trespassing, seek out and close with law-abiding citizens.

There is healthy protest, and then there is trespassing and interrupting businesses trying to feed and fuel the world, or using the taxpayer-funded broadcaster to try to shut an industry down single-handedly, not because of its sins of the day, but the sins of the past.

When will it be the case that if you are outside the law, you are offline, no matter your political affiliation?

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