free speech: April 2008 Archives

The irony of this is palpable..  Labor have adopted the term 'clean feed' to describe their half-baked plan to force ISP-based Internet filtering upon us all.  And yet the company peddling Internet filtering software from the website cleanfeed.com has banned the website for registered Australian political party One Nation for containing 'hate speech'.  Screenshot:

You can verify this yourself on the cleanfeed.com website, using their 'test a site' facility on the front page.

But, there's a very serious side to this very funny example:

• Filtering products are inaccurate.  There will always be overblocking and underblocking.
• Blacklists and categorisations of websites are subjective.  Whether One Nation in fact engages in 'hate speech' is dependant on your point of view and there are arguments for and against.
• Government mandated filtering that has effects such as this may run into constitutional problems.  We have an implied freedom of speech on political matters in Australia.  If a government-mandated filtering system is going to block access to political websites -- especially websites of actual Australian political parties -- it would seem to be succeptable to a constitutional challenge.