How can the Australian population disagree with computing professionals in such a fundamental and insane way? How, I ask?
I was shocked by Hungry Beast’s results on opinions for internet regulation. Perhaps if they had clarified what they meant by ‘refused classification’:
YouTube’s rules already forbid certain videos that would be classified RC, such as sex, violence, bestiality and child pornography. But the RC classification extends further to more controversial content such as information on euthanasia, material about safer drug use and material on how to commit more minor crimes such as painting graffiti.
Conroy basically asked youtube to block all of that content as well!
I mean, over 60% of respondents claimed we need regulation on the internet. The shit that baffles me is the little things, like that the ones who think that content on the internet should be free from government regulation are still in favour of having a mandatory government internet filter. What are these people on? Do any of these people have the internet, or even a computer in their homes?
OK, so at least 37% have a computer with internet access used by under 18s, but that’s... not a lot of the respondents... Even then, roughly half have some sort of internet filtering, so what’s the problem? At least a lot of them (70%) are concerned about free speech. In any case, this probably shows a lack of understanding among the Australian people about what this means, and a lack of understanding about the internet in general (esp. since 62% believe we need regulation of content the same as content for other media).
Frankly, I’m a little in shock over these statistics.