Journalist Jack Marx once ventured the modest proposal that the parents of recently deceased children should have their mouths sewn shut. Marx wasn’t completely serious, of course, but he was making the entirely reasonable proposal that tragedy doesn’t qualify anyone to make public pronouncements on public policy. Worse, parents who’ve lost children to tragedy are among the least likely to make rational contributions to public debate, inevitably biased as they are by entirely natural emotions.
Marx’s case in point was Sydney teenager Anna Wood, who overdosed on ecstasy at a 1995 rave party. Her parents became vocal campaigners for ‘tough-on-crime’ drug laws. Yet, as Marx pointed out, they had no qualifications to speak on drug policy, apart from their daughter’s OD, which, let’s be blunt, is no real qualification at all. Indeed, the very ‘zero tolerance’ laws Wood championed would not only have seen their own daughter jailed for possession, but fear of such likely contributed to her friends being too afraid to call an ambulance when she overdosed.
Still, as Marx said, “I have the deepest respect and sympathy for Tony Wood as a father who has suffered the unbearable.” He, and we, should have far less respect for political ghouls “using his suffering as political cachet” and “our laws and legislature as some kind of Ouija board”.
“When the parents of dead children appear, the argument is distilled to mere emotional hysteria, all opposition branded as enemies of life and sympathisers of darkness, the reduction of reason to black-and-white absolutes and slick morality having less to do with a serious search for truth than a lust for propaganda” – Jack Marx.
Activists and authoritarian politicians posturing on the bodies of dead children is surely one of the most disgusting sights in politics. Yet, here they are, at it again, trying to use a teenager’s suicide to push their authoritarian digital ID laws.
Australia’s social media age limit has won the support of the European Commission president during an event at the United Nations.
Gee, authoritarian creep Ursula von der Leyen cheering on the stripping away of yet more freedoms? No!
Because that’s exactly what they want to do.
From December 10, Australia will ban children under 16 from accessing social media platforms, with the onus on tech companies to prevent their access.
This in practice means digital ID. The only way the rest of us will be able to access even YouTube is to hand over our personal identification data to a government server, who’ll then hand it over to social media companies. Who, as we know, aren’t exactly the most trustworthy lot when it comes to handling private data. We would be safer handing our bank details to the Nigerians.
And, as ever, these unconscionable ghouls are exploiting dead children and grieving parents to emotionally blackmail the rest of us into submission.
Emma Mason, whose 15-year-old daughter Tilly died by suicide after being bullied on social media, spoke powerfully at the event, in front of an image of her daughter.
“Death by bullying enabled by social media” is how the mother and lawyer described her daughter’s suicide, detailing the harassment Tilly faced leading up to the tragedy and explaining what happened on the day she died.
Here’s the thing, though: what happened to her daughter, beside being the endpoint of six years of unconscionable bullying, was already illegal. Gutless, vile bullies who’d targeted her daughter from eight years of age created a deepfake ‘nude’ image and circulated it.
Not only is that a crime under section 75 of the Online Safety Act 2021, and section 474.17(1) of the Criminal Code 1995, it’s also the heinous crime of distributing child exploitation material.
It’s true, though, that prosecuting such a crime can be difficult: While deepfakes have metadata that link them to an IP address, this can easily be circumvented through the use of a VPN, which makes it impossible to trace the person responsible. Yet the same VPNs can be used to bypass digital ID requirements.
So, this is yet another case of laws that will utterly fail to catch the determined criminal, but make life miserable for the vast bulk of law-abiding citizens.
No doubt those same ghouls who want to use a dead child as a political Ouija board will piously intone that ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about’.
Spare me.
Firstly, digital ID is just a hair’s breadth away from Chinese-style ‘social credit’ systems. Those who want to believe that couldn’t happen here need only look to the countless cases of people being debanked, deplatformed and losing their jobs because of perfectly legal things they posted on social media.
Secondly, by the same arguments as digital ID, we could make crime-solving easier by requiring every citizen to file their fingerprints on a national database. We could prevent many road deaths by requiring all cars to have drink-driving breath interlock and GPS tracking devices installed by default.
Would anyone tolerate any of those? Then don’t tolerate digital ID.
No matter how many moralising sob stories they throw at us.
