The mendacious Australian Mainstream media, Coalition Government and Labor Opposition demand via a news media Bargaining Code that Google and Facebook pay Murdoch and Nine media huge sums for quoting Links to their “information” for free.
Google seems to have surrendered to this Australian blackmail and negotiated a private deal to avoid damaging its core Internet operation of quoting Links to information for free.
Facebook has finally responded to this Australian blackmail by saying that it will not pay, and as a law-abiding organization will accordingly not quote Links to Australian media “information”.
Murdoch-dominated Australian Media and MPs are censoring Google and Facebook in a qualified fashion – they can escape this Government-imposed censorship if they pay huge sums to powerful Australian media chosen by the Government.
If US citizen Murdoch’s Australia can censor 2 of the biggest media organizations in the world, what hope is there for the little guy or indeed for democracy in Kleptocracy, Plutocracy, Murdochracy, Corporatocracy, Lobbyocracy and Dollarocracy Australia? In Murdochracy and Corporatocracy Australia Big Money purchases people, politicians, parties, policies, public perception of reality, votes, more political power and more private profit.
As a scientist and scholar, for 55 years I have been routinely and extensively quoting “links to information” (references to books and scientific papers) in scientific papers (over 100), chapters in 20 books, science-informed humanitarian articles (hundreds), and in 7 huge, science-informed, information-rich books. Indeed this process of documentation is fundamental to reporting scientific or scholarly findings.
Thus a typical scientific paper (hard copy or electronic) has successive Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion sections, with a final Reference section systematically detailing supporting scholarly references (“links to information”).
Where will this compulsory Australian monetization of “links to information” and attack on free expression go? Presently it is confined to Murdoch’s Australia blackmailing Google and Facebook into paying huge sums to the dangerously mendacious Murdoch and Nine media that heavily determine the outcomes of Australian elections in an ongoing travesty of democracy.
However the logical extension of this news media Bargaining Code in free market, neoliberal Australia is for Government to eventually demand similar draconian payments from all scientists, scholars, writers, journalists, publishers (on-line or hard copy), bookshops, library catalogues, and libraries.
This is a massive threat to freedom of expression in Australia and the world. Even before the Enlightenment scholars were freely quoting Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Euclid and Pythagoras.
And to make it worse, the variously Stupid, Ignorant and Egregiously Greedy (SIEG as in Sieg Heil) fascoids proposing this government-imposed censorship through compulsory and massive monetization of “links to information” are arguing for further censorship of already significantly censored Google, Facebook and other media.
These disgracefully mendacious purveyors of “fake news through lying by omission” are now disingenuously claiming that a Facebook that has withdrawn from reporting Australian media will be increasing the relative incidence of “fake news” on Facebook at the expense of “truthful Australian Mainstream media reportage”. What utter self-serving rubbish. Lying by omission is far, far worse than repugnant lying by commission because the latter at least permits public refutation and public debate. Australia’s Murdoch-dominated Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat presstitutes have an appalling and entrenched culture of “fake news through lying by omission”.
Indeed, to the best of my knowledge, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), that is helping the Australian Government censor Google and Facebook, has not taken any action against oligopoly Australian Mainstream media for egregiously deceiving its paying customers via entrenched, massive and anti-democratic “fake news through lying by omission”.
There is an extremely serious existential dimension to this travesty. The world is existentially threatened by (a) man-made climate change (unless requisite action is taken, 10 billion people will die en route to a sustainable human population in 2100 of merely 1 billion; see my recent huge book Climate Crisis, Climate Genocide & Solutions (846 pages, Korsgaard Publishing, Germany), and (b) nuclear weapons (a post-nuclear holocaust nuclear winter will wipe out most of Humanity and the Biosphere). Indeed one of humanity’s greatest minds, Stephen Hawking has stated “We see great peril if governments and societies do not take action now to render nuclear weapons obsolete and to prevent further climate change” (Stephen Hawking, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, John Murray, 2018, Chapter 7).
Yet the effective climate change denialist and pro-nuclear terrorism SIEG fascoids and mendacious Murdoch media proposing this massive imposition on human inquiry have already (a) put Australia among world leaders in 16 areas of climate criminality, and (b) as craven US lackeys strenuously and criminally oppose the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) that came into effect in International Law on 22 January 2021 (it prohibits State parties from possessing nuclear weapons or supporting such possession “in any way”).
I am a forthright, much-published, half-century career scientist and humanitarian writer, and have been trying for decades to inform my fellow countrymen of these horrendous realities. However in the last dozen years I have been rendered “invisible” in the land of my birth and sole allegiance, Australia, by mendacious Mainstream gate-keepers acting for malignant, racist and anti-science foreign interests. I won’t give up, and am very encouraged that half a million of my fellow Australians signed the petition launched by former PM Kevin Rudd for a Royal Commission into Murdoch media in Australia.
Science-informed Australians will utterly reject Murdoch media and the dangerously anti-science Coalition, vote 1 Green and put the Coalition last. Please inform everyone you can.
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Gideon Polya | Radio Free (2021-02-21T16:40:33+00:00) Murdoch’s Australia Censors Google, Facebook, Science and Freedom of Speech. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/02/21/murdochs-australia-censors-google-facebook-science-and-freedom-of-speech/
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