Aussie political bloggers to be forced to name themselves
I was just reading my rss feeds, and got to The Age RSS Feed titled Bloggers, spammers face clampdown (free subscription may be required to view).
Curious, I clicked. And I read.
Here is the first sentence:
Bloggers and spammers could be forced to put their names to political commentary in a bid to close a loophole in the nation’s electoral laws.
Hrm, I wonder how they will enforce this?
Will every political blogger that blogs about Australian politics, even if they are based overseas be forced to put their names on what they’ve written?
Another quote from the article…
Australia’s electoral laws force publishers of any electoral material to identify a person who agrees to authorise the content. But the laws do not say whether online publications must also comply.
Fair enough though, people do have a right to know who the content publisher of the article is.
Knowing this, you can do as much of a background search on the individual as you like via the various search engines and other sources. And then decide if the article is of your preferred “bias”.
But on a more serious note, will this have an overall affect upon our Australian blogosphere?
I don’t mind putting my name to my blog, I’m sure I’ve got it there somewhere already. But I can also understand those who wish to remain anonymous whilst offering their views.
I’ll update this post if I see any more articles on it…
March 18th, 2005 at 04:00 am
Interesting. In the US when the conservatives started thinking that the blogs were having an influence they decided that must crack down on them.
The issue is really about subversion. How easy is it to subvert the blogs? Very. You could pay a few people to create fake blogs. Or they could go around and argue on real blogs under fake names. For example, I’m here and while you might be smart enough to find my IP address and trace me back, most people have no way of knowing that information.
Have you had any “astroturffing” in your local papers? Fake grass roots. Where someone creates one letter and then gets people to send copies of it to various papers under the assumption that you wrote it yourself and didn’t just send along what some paid consultant told you to write.
I’ve spotted a variation of this practice about the topic of social security.
On one hand I want the right to be able to post my political views under my pseudonym. On the other I don’t want some rich political consultant to pay a bunch of people to create fake blogs.
I’d like to think that people would be able to tell the difference, but they already listen to fake experts who are paid off by the various parties all the time. The American Enterprise Institute. They quote them in response to various issues. Some times they tell people they are a conservative party other times they don’t. Although you can find out who funds them (big oil, big pharm) on their website and you can find out that Dick Cheney (the US VP) was a member and his wife is a current member most people just hear “think tank” the innocent sounding name and the well thought out pitches to promote killing for oil around the world.
So in that case, people might know who they are, but they don’t connect the dots.
March 21st, 2005 at 11:58 am
There’s a few different aspects to this proposed change. As with many plans to change laws, my concern is the possible unintended consequences. Often a change is made to address one thing, but has flow on consequences to a lot of other areas that weren’t anticipated. Goven that lawmakers tend not to have too strong an idea of the wide variety of ways people use the Internet, there’s a chance that could happen with this too.
I’ve written some more on this over at my site – http://andrewbartlettonline.blogspot.com/2005/03/changes-to-electoral-act-for-political.html
March 23rd, 2005 at 08:49 am
Hi Will,
Please see this related entry on my blog.
cheers
-weez
March 23rd, 2005 at 11:57 pm
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