17/03/2024
Any day now…
More than forty major elections are scheduled to take place in 2024, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Russia, the United States, the European Union, India, Ghana, Pakistan, Taiwan and Mexico.
That’s why so many countries have spent the last year or so, pushing a whole raft of new censorship laws through their parliaments.
All in the name of “keeping you safe”, of course.
The truth is, global elites are terrified that free speech on the internet, could lead to outcomes that they cannot control – as happened with Brexit, the election of Trump and, more recently, Australia’s ‘Voice’ Referendum.
Which is why no-one should underestimate the significance of Labor’s Online Safety Bill.
It represents an all-out attack on our most fundamental rights: the right to privacy and anonymity, the right of free discourse, the right of free debate, the right of free thought and the right to free expression.
The Bill’s stated aims are deeply authoritarian and should provoke our deepest outrage.
It is about taking the internet out of the people’s hands and putting it in theirs.
The internet is the one place left, where independent thinkers and dissidents can communicate with each other anonymously, and where people can still hear and debate alternative viewpoints.
That’s why they hate and fear it so much.
And why they are doing everything in their power to convert the internet into a closed propaganda system, where only THEY get to be heard and where there will be NO ONE left to challenge what THEY say.
Dissent in all its form is to be demonised, then criminalised and, ultimately, banished altogether.
Protecting free speech on the internet is not just some abstract concept.
It is crucial for preserving open debate and accomplishing anything.
If we lose the ability to organise and be heard – if everyone becomes subject to the same messaging, then our ability to challenge or counter anything, will cease to exist.
“Our lives begin to end when we become silent about the things that matter”!
Dr Martin Luther King