Is it time to censor the internet?

IT'S a free-for-all where racism, hardcore porn and casual cruelty flourish. The internet is now the most

Constable Susan McLean, of the Cyber Smart Detectives Program, teaches kids about cyber bullying. Picture: Trevor Pinder

LATE last summer Denise Morcombe decided, on a whim, to visit the Facebook webpage "One million in the search for Daniel Morcombe". Daniel is Denise's son and for seven haunted years she has had to live with the knowledge that her child is missing.

Daniel disappeared from a bus stop on a busy road on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, about 2km north of the exuberantly kitsch landmark The Big Pineapple, on December 7, 2003. He was 13. The adolescent with the wide grin and striking blue-green eyes had set out on a shopping trip to buy his family Christmas presents. His disappearance sparked one of the biggest manhunts in Queensland’s history, but neither Daniel nor his abductor has been found.

It’s easy to see how Daniel’s mother took comfort from acquaintances and strangers reaching across the vast, humming expanse of cyberspace to offer support on that webpage. But on that February day earlier this year, Denise Morcombe noticed a link to another Facebook page about Daniel she hadn’t seen before. “So I clicked on it and I thought, ‘Ah, this is disgusting’.” She had opened a Facebook page called “If 1,000,000 people join, I’ll give back Daniel Morcombe”. This page, categorised as “just for fun”, mocked Daniel and his parents’ steadfast efforts to find out what happened to him.

Denise’s grief over Daniel’s disappearance cut so deep, she once said she had not been able to part with the rubbish from his bedroom bin. Nevertheless, she was determined to find out who had ridiculed her family’s anguish in such a casually cruel way. She noticed a name on the offensive page. She clicked on that user’s Facebook friends and saw which schools they attended. She telephoned those schools and by the end of the day, the creator of the webpage - a year 12 student from Brisbane’s Marist College Ashgrove - had been suspended.

Yet it took Facebook - the social networking behemoth with 400 million followers worldwide - much longer to respond. “There was no administrator on the site,” explains Denise. “I contacted the school and the school contacted Facebook and the police contacted Facebook and no one could get it off.” She says the page remained on the largely self-regulating site for 10 days after she reported it electronically to Facebook. (By then, the media were on to the story.)

Debbie Frost, a US-based spokeswoman for Facebook, insists that complaints about the offensive webpage were handled “in a timely manner”. She reveals the page was eventually removed by a Facebook user rather than Facebook staff, and she implies that the company’s staffers did not consider it objectionable enough to merit taking it down. “While a group or page may be in very poor taste, or offensive to some, we typically do not find that is reason alone to disable a group,” Frost wrote in an email response. Although this cyberbullying incident made headlines as far away as New York, the Morcombes have not received an apology from the company. “No, we’ve had nothing from Facebook,” says Denise ruefully.

Along with her husband, Bruce, Denise Morcombe is pushing for an inquest into her son’s abduction. She spoke to The Weekend Australian Magazine by telephone from their second home in Tasmania, bought as a sanctuary from grief rather than as a lifestyle decision. She has since met the student who created the mock webpage and, in an extraordinary act of compassion, “I asked the principal to take him back, if possible. I didn’t want to ruin the boy’s life”.

While internet giants such as Facebook, Google and MySpace argue that the web is too big, too globalised and evolves too quickly to be regulated by governments, Denise Morcombe believes Australian laws must be changed to better keep pace with technology. “With Facebook, people can just go on and type whatever they want and start groups and people can’t get it down… It’s pretty hurtful.”

The Facebook page ridiculing Daniel Morcombe was discovered in the same month that two other Queensland children’s Facebook tribute pages were vandalised. One of the children, Elliott Fletcher, 12, was killed in an alleged schoolyard stabbing. The other, Trinity Bates, was abducted from her home in Bundaberg and murdered. She was eight years old. Within days of their deaths, these children’s Facebook memorials were sabotaged with offensive material, including pornography. Weeks later, a Facebook memorial for drowned surf lifesaver Saxon Bird was also vandalised.

Deriding the newly bereaved, and dead or missing children, represented for many Australians a new low by internet vandals, who typically hide behind the protecting veil of anonymity. These and other recent instances of serious online abuse provoke important questions that are rarely asked of the worldwide web, the biggest and fastest-growing communications network in history: Why do we permit racist abuse, hate speech, cyberbullying or content that is harmful to children to flourish online when it would be illegal or unthinkable for newspapers, book publishers or broadcasters to carry such material? Is it time the internet - that raucously democratic yet often lawless forum in which anyone can be a publisher or commentator - developed a conscience?

Plague proportions
Certainly, cyberbullying is increasingly under challenge. In Australia, those who have declared open season on their peers or teachers, often on social networking sites, are increasingly being dragged before the courts. Last month, 21 year-old Melbourne man Shane Gerada was convicted of stalking and sentenced to 200 hours of community service after he sent threatening texts and MySpace messages to a former friend, Allem Halkic, 17, who subsequently committed suicide.

This case, in which a police prosecutor described cyberbullying as “almost a plague in our community”, was widely reported as Australia’s first cyberbullying prosecution.

But Susan McLean, who runs the Cyber Safety Solutions consultancy, says this is wrong; that in every state, minors have appeared before children’s courts charged with offences arising from cyberbullying. Apprehended violence orders are increasingly being taken out by students acting against other ¬students who have cyberbullied them, she adds. (Cyberbullying is not a crime per se, but stalking, harassment, cyber-racism and misusing a carriage service are.)

McLean was researching cyberbullying in the mid-’90s, before most people had even heard of the term. The former policewoman declares in her no-nonsense fashion: “We have to develop a social conscience online … I think we’ve got to do something because it [online behaviour] is going down the tubes in a very big way.”
In February, in a judgment that made headlines around the world, a court in Italy convicted three senior Google executives of breaching Italy’s privacy code and gave them suspended jail sentences. The executives were effectively held responsible for footage that was uploaded to Google Video in 2006, showing an autistic boy being bullied and beaten at school – and that remained on the site for several weeks after complaints were made about it. Google was outraged at the court’s decision, saying that “it attacks the very principle of freedom on which the internet is built”. One question Google did not address is this: Is footage of a disabled child being bullied a form of free speech, or hate speech?

In Britain in March, the police, along with the mother of a 17-year-old girl murdered by a man who posed online as a teenager, called for social networking companies to introduce tougher safeguards against internet predators. Even though this offender was a convicted serial rapist, he was able to use Facebook, Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger and other internet services to lure the girl to her death.

In the same month, British doctors called on websites to delete material which romanticises self-harm, following a sharp rise in the numbers of children and young people - some as young as 11 - admitted to hospital after intentionally injuring themselves.

In Australia, pressure for change is coming from the top: the Federal Government wants to introduce a contentious internet filter to keep out material it says has no place in a civilised country. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says the filter is aimed at stamping out child pornography - at last count, there were 355 child abuse URLs on the web - along with sites featuring bestiality, rape and instruction in crime, drug use and terrorism. The minister’s spokeswoman says that “under Australia’s existing classification regulations, this material is not available in newsagencies, it is not on library shelves, you cannot watch it on a DVD or at the cinema and it is not shown on television”. The filter would not apply to social networking and user-generated sites, however, because of the sheer volume of material they handle.

The plan has no shortage of critics, ranging from the US State Department to cyber-guerrillas who have attacked the Prime Minister’s website in protest. Nevertheless, the Government is determined to introduce legislation into parliament later this year. It has also established a joint parliamentary committee on cyber safety, and is thinking about appointing an Internet Ombudsman who would pursue social networking companies that are slow to remove grossly offensive material.

Critics argue the filter will curb free speech and won’t work. They say offenders such as pedophiles will find ways around it, and that it will block information that falls into grey areas, such as euthanasia sites. Lelia Green, professor of communications at Edith Cowan University, says the proposed filter reflects “a moral panic around pedophiles and terrorists”. Late last year she wrote that a government consultation paper on the filter “suggests that our nation could soon have the most restrictive internet regime in the Western world”. She argued the mandatory filter - which would block a secret list of sites - would give “tacit encouragement” to repressive regimes including Burma, North Korea and China.

A clearly irritated Kevin Rudd said recently of such claims: “This is where we get into this really stupid debate with what I’d describe as extreme civil libertarianism, which says any move in that direction means the imposition of Soviet communism à la 1980. Look, it’s not like that… This stuff is off - and responsible governments have to act.”

Meanwhile, following a dramatic spike in complaints of cyber racism, the Australian Human Rights Commission has launched an official investigation into the issue. The commission says 20 per cent of the race-hate complaints it receives now relate to online racism, a trend that has accelerated in the past two years. It will investigate whether a tighter regulatory approach is needed, or whether the answer lies in persisting with self-regulation, coupled with better public education.

Steve Hodder-Watt, an indigenous radio broadcaster from Alice Springs, took a public stand against cyber racism, and won - only to see anonymous cyber bullies target him personally. Last year Hodder-Watt, an announcer with the indigenous community radio station CAAMA, based in Alice Springs, Googled the words “Aboriginal” and “Encyclopedia” and found a 13-page entry on the website Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED). With spectacular understatement, he says “I was obviously quite offended” at what he found on the site, which claims to be a satirical version of Wikipedia. Among the litany of racist insults on ED: that Aborigines are “the most primitive animals on the planet” and “one of God’s mistakes”. The entry listed their hobbies as “drinking petrol out of jerry cans” and “raping their young”. An involuntary, incredulous laugh escapes from Hodder-Watt, a quietly spoken father of three, including a newborn. “It’s hard to try and detach from it… this is how they are,” he says of ED’s creators. “They’ve become so desensitised, they think the rest of the world should be, too.”

Hodder-Watt complained to the Human Rights Commission and the Sydney human rights lawyer George Newhouse, who warned Google Australia that the ED entry on Aboriginal people breached the Racial Discrimination Act. In a partial victory for Hodder-Watt and other indigenous complainants, Google removed some local search links to the offensive webpages. But the malicious entry about Aborigines can still be accessed via the ED website. Clearly, Google’s decision was narrowly legal¬istic rather than moral.

Hodder-Watt then discovered that ED’s anonymous editors had written a new entry vilifying him, including a cartoon of him sitting at a desk next to a petrol container. It called him an “Ozzy-nigger” who doesn’t have “a real job” and listed his contact details. It included photos of him with extended family members from the remote Queensland community of Aurukun. One image features Hodder-Watt cuddling a distant relative, a boy aged about five with a luxuriant mop of curls; picking up on the previous entry’s malevolent claim that raping children is a hobby for Aboriginal people, the caption reads: “You gonna get raped.”

The broadcaster, as quietly dignified as he is articulate, says: “It makes you feel very powerless when there is no way to respond … when they personalise it - devastating. Me, as an educated man living in a more contemporary setting, I have avenues to be able to correct that, but the family up in Aurukun don’t even know this exists.”

What does he think of the site’s claim that it is satirical? “I don’t agree that racism should be allowed to hide behind satire. I would say that qualifying racism as satire would be the same as qualifying rape as sex.” He sounds like a reluctant activist as he adds: “I don’t want to censor people, but freedom of speech is not freedom to hate.”

Newhouse points out that, while the Racial Discrimination Act can be used against racist websites with an Australian connection, “many of the offensive sites hide behind foreign jurisdictions where racial vilification is not outlawed”. Because ED is hosted in the US, Hodder-Watt is exploring the possibility of suing for defamation there; he is also considering taking legal action against Australian-based contributors to the site, should they be identified. ED’s owner, an American called Joseph Evers, remains defiant, saying the site “will never be censored in any way”. He equates the Federal Government’s proposed internet filter - which, it is rumoured, would ban ED in Australia - as a form of “Soviet-style communism”.

A mirror on society
At Google Australia’s harbourside headquarters in Sydney you sign in via a computer screen, which then invites you to sign a non-disclosure agreement. I decline but am still admitted to the building, which is trendily kitted out with a colony of beach umbrellas and a blackboard for staff to doodle on. Nevertheless, it’s telling that the search engine which aggressively defends free speech should be so protective of what visitors to its building might divulge.

I am here to meet Iarla Flynn, head of policy for Google Australia, an Irishman who seems more insurance broker than career nerd, with his sober manner and pale blue business shirt. Asked if the internet has become a breeding ground for anti-social behaviour, he raises an eyebrow and says: “I haven’t seen evidence to say that the internet encourages anti-social behaviour … The internet reflects the real world – we see bullying in the real world, we see cyberbullying. We see people saying nasty things in the real world, we see it online.” He says of the defaced Facebook memorials: “The vandalising was terrible.”

Flynn insists it is valid to debate whether the net should be regulated, yet later says that platforms such as Google, which simply “facilitate access”, should not be “content police”. “The scale of the internet,” argues Flynn, “the sheer quantity of material on the internet, is almost beyond our comprehension … we shouldn’t assume that regulatory frameworks that made sense for books or movies would just automatically make sense for the internet.” YouTube, the user-driven video site owned by Google, receives 24 hours of material every minute. Flynn says that vetting every contribution uploaded to the site “at a practical level, is impossible”.

Google Australia is one of the most powerful opponents of Canberra’s proposed filter. Nonetheless, Flynn says Google is concerned “the scope of the filtering is far too broad”. He points out that the search engine already filters out child pornography websites from its search index, because such material is “abhorrent” and illegal in most countries. But he is quick to add: “Once you start to move into other areas, there are more grey areas that come into play.” He says of the Government’s plan to ban terrorism sites: “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.”

Yet Google censors material if it breaches a particular country’s laws - even when those laws represent an extreme form of censorship. In Turkey, it has blocked videos sending up Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the nation’s founder, because insulting Atatürk is a crime there. And Google was censoring content on its China-based search engine until it dramatically abandoned this practice - attracting the ire of the Chinese Government - in March.

Officially, YouTube doesn’t tolerate hate speech. Yet while researching this story I came across a skinhead song with the lyric “smash their yellow faces” on the video site. It had been there for two years, and had attracted 1.5 million views. Last year, a doctored image of US First Lady Michelle Obama with monkey features was posted on a blog called Hot Girls and topped search results on Google Images. Google initially refused to remove the image but eventually did so, not because the picture was racist but because the Hot Girls blog carried a malware virus.
The offensive image has since resurfaced on another website. In late April, just before this story went to press, it was again topping search results on Google Images. In a notice to users, Google says it does not endorse offensive results. But it also says that to remove a page or image “simply because its content is unpopular or because we receive complaints” would compromise the “integrity” of its search results.

Bullying the teachers
During the first term of the 2010 school year a slew of high-school students in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia were suspended for attacking their teachers on social networking sites. In one case in Queensland a student bragged about her harassment of a female teacher, including slapping her. In another post, a Catholic school student in ¬Victoria falsely accused a male teacher of being a pedophile.

With rising indignation, cybersafety expert Susan McLean tells of the relentless victimisation of another male teacher at a Catholic school in Melbourne. Weeks ago, anonymous users set up a fake Facebook profile in the teacher’s name, using photographs of him taken from the school’s website. They superimposed the cross-hairs of a shotgun over his face and bombarded the site with defamatory insults. “It’s just horrible and you can’t get rid of it,” McLean says. According to her, the private school that employs this teacher reported the fake profile and telephoned Facebook in the US seven times, to no avail. “It took 27 days to get it removed,” she says, clearly unimpressed.

“I get calls once or twice a week from people trying to deal with this [kind of abuse]. What happens if a teacher suicides? The thing is, society as a whole seems to think that what you do online doesn’t matter, but I have seen in the last 12 months a massive increase in the number of teachers having these [fake] profiles set up and people leaving disgusting things, denigrating comments, on them.”

McLean says that in theory, self-regulation makes sense for social networking and user-generated websites which have millions of users uploading content around the clock. But in practice, such systems are “just laughable” because they aren’t properly resourced to keep pace with the sites’ growing following - and escalating complaints. In spite of having seven million users in Australia, the Facebook memorials scandal exposed how this company, said to be worth billions of dollars, did not have staff based here to deal with serious complaints. “We deserve better than that and we should demand better than that,” says McLean.

Debbie Frost, Facebook’s US-based spokeswoman, says the social networking site does not tolerate terrorist groups, or groups who threaten violence or express hatred towards others. As well as encouraging users to report abusive content, she says the company employs more than 100 complaints investigators around the world, and has developed technology to identify abusive posts.

“We receive tens of thousands of reports a week, many of which are for content that doesn’t actually violate our policies,” she explains. “The goal of these policies is to strike a balance between giving Facebook users the freedom to express their opinions and beliefs, while also ensuring that individuals and groups of people do not feel threatened or endangered.”

Although Facebook’s sluggish response to the defaced children’s memorials was heavily criticised, Frost asserts that it takes a more rigorous approach to abusive material than other online companies, saying: “We would contrast our approach to that of other online services that take no responsibility whatsoever for the horrible content they make discoverable.”

Hate figure for libertarians
Leftist public intellectuals tend to be wary of censorship. But not Clive Hamilton. The one-time radical libertarian volunteers that the Government’s planned web filter “was in fact my idea”. Several years ago, he co-authored a report which recommended that youth access to violent and extreme internet pornography be restricted. As a result, “I’m a hate figure amongst the internet libertarians,” he says, sounding almost boastful.

When Hamilton studied online porn, he was shocked at what he found. “It’s not [the same as] your dad’s Playboy magazine; if it was that, we wouldn’t be writing reports about it. It’s way, way beyond that and it becomes very disturbing.” For younger teenagers who access it, “it could be deeply disturbing for a long time”. (Other web critics point out that although some adults-only sites and webpages warn children they need to be 18 to enter, none ask for proof of identity.)

Hamilton concedes there are practical arguments against the Government’s proposed filter: many pedophiles, for instance, use peer-to-peer networks to share child pornography, and such networks won’t be covered by the mandatory filter. “But I say, so what? The fact that a law or regulation is not 100 per cent effective is not an argument for refusing to regulate.” A minority will always evade tax laws, he points out, but this does not invalidate such laws. “Also,” he adds, “I think that it [a filter] would send a very strong signal, because at the moment the social signal is ‘anything goes’ and many people are disturbed by that.”

Should the filter plan be enacted, Australia would not be the first country to vet online content. In the UK, the independent Internet Watch Foundation blocks all child pornography along with “criminally obscene” adult content and race hate content hosted in the UK. Germany and France ban pro-Nazi material.

Internet companies, says Hamilton, are “deliberately dragging their feet, hoping these problems will go away. But it will only get worse. It’s a classic case of an industry refusing to face up to a problem and resisting regulation. All industries do it, and sooner or later they have to succumb to social pressure … It just comes back to this fundamental argument: what is different about the internet? What is unique about the internet? It’s a medium of communication in the same ways films and books are.”