Thinking before you post

I am not a fan of censorship.

I am not a believer in excessive government regulation.

I believe in free speech.

However I think the time has come for us to consider how we as a civil society conduct ourselves in the online world. For it has become an unfortunate fact that there is a group of cowards who hiding behind the veil of anonymity abuse their right to free speech to perpetuate lies, abuse other, commit hate crimes, libel others and behave in an unacceptable manner.

I am realistic enough and technically adept enough to know that no legislative effort cannot stamp out this behavior.  I believe that the responsibility for policing the comments on news and blog sites lies with the owners of those sites.

Take PerthNow, WAToday or THEWests news sites, they allow for posting of comments on their sites with minimal identification of the poster. It is often possible to post a comment on a very public site without there being any need to provide real validated identification. This gives fools courage to those who may not otherwise be willing to stand behind their comments and face the consequences of their opinions.

It would be a real tragedy if we were faced with the need to create more regulation in order to deal with this problem and I call upon the owners of the major news/blogging sites in Western Australia to have a good hard look at their own policies and clean up their own act before it gets to that.

A vibrant society has a heathy ongoing political debate, a debate where people can stand behind their own views, a debate where the facts should prevail, vicious nasty anonymous trolls have no place in that debate, we are not interested in flame wars, I call upon the proprietors to fix this and fix it fast.