• Colin Jacobs

Image: ElDave / flickr

04 March 2010There are jerks on the internet. Given how many jerks there are off the internet, this shouldn’t surprise anyone. (I’m willing to bet that the first cave painting was barely dry before a jerk came along and drew an oversized penis on one of the animals.)

Nevertheless, the offensive defacement last week of two Facebook pages, tributes to slain Queensland children Elliott Fletcher and Trinity Bates, became a minor flap in the media. Words like “sinister”, “disgusting” and “sick” quickly appeared in various articles.

Where an outraged media go, politicians quickly follow. Barely one news cycle after the story about tasteless Facebook pranks, Senator Nick Xenophon has proposed an “online ombudsman” to “deal with such incidents”, an idea tentatively endorsed by the Prime Minister. Meanwhile, Queensland premier Anna Bligh wrote to Facebook angrily demanding an explanation.

This is the cue for tired cyber-libertarians to again point out the internet is global and dynamic and instructing the Australian civil service to police it might be a touch impractical. But this cycle — internet nastiness, media attention, government condemnation — is repeating itself with depressing regularity. (The mandatory internet filter and proposed crackdown on racist material online are still current news.)

Can anyone seriously imagine a government department, staffed by dozens of bureaucrats, investigating a tasteless Facebook page set up by a bored high-schooler? This appears to be exactly what our leaders are suggesting, and it’s easy to point out the flaws in such an idea. But has debating these schemes on their merits become counter-productive?

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(Originally published in Crikey.)

Image: ElDave / flickr