Mob risk in West, says News CEO Robert Thomson

Society in “a strange phase of seeking affirmation through victimhood’’, says Robert Thomson.

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson. Picture: AAP

A mob mentality has taken hold across much of the West, with “illiberal liberals’’ on a “seemingly endless, insatiable quest’’ for indignation and umbrage, News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson has declared.

“We are going through a strange phase in seeking affirmation through victimhood,’’ Mr Thomson said, delivering the Keith Murdoch Oration at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne last night.

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Businessman Gerry Harvey with AFL boss Gillon McLachlan. Picture: Tony Gough

Sport Australia boss John Wylie with senator Mitch Fifield. Picture: Aaron Francis

Mr Thomson, who spoke on “truth, trust and tech’’, said the world was on the cusp of extraordinary developments in artificial intelligence. Yet collect­ively, he said, “our shared level of emotional intelligence is plumbing the depths’’.

One example, he said, was the “seething secularism that portrays any person of faith, whether an evanescent evangelical or occasional attendee at mass or synagogue or mosque or temple as a nutter, a fruitcake, touched, a devotee of the deviant’’.

Mr Thomson — a leading global voice against the rising dominance of Google and Facebook — said the “line of least compliance” should not have been the starting point for the world’s journey into the future.

He said society’s leaders had been “sanguinely supine’’ about bad behaviour by dominant digital companies that were culturally ill-equipped to cope with contemporary challenges. “Had fewer politicians, and not just in Australia, not been seduced by net narcissism, we may have cognisant communities better able to cope with the e-existential challenges,” he said. The “verticals in digital’’ ran deep, he said, with some having the potential to radicalise neo-fascists or jihadists.

Former minister Gareth Evans and wife Merran. Picture: AAP

“Why has the village square shrunk and been subdivided?’’ he said. “At least there is a more vigorous debate on those subjects, and it’s clear there will be more regulation of companies who have sought to defy definition and avoid a reckoning.

“That we in the West are clumsily grappling with these ­issues as developed nations makes one wonder what the impact will be on countries, like China, India and Indonesia, that are combining their industrial revolution with a digital revolution.” News Corp is publisher of The Australian.