... and other lessons we've learnt from Robbie Farah this week
Who knew footballers were also activists for legislative change?
An offensive tweet sent to West Tigers footballer Robbie Farah has inspired the State and Federal Governments to review telecommunications laws and impose tougher restrictions on social media.
We've previously written about the law which makes it a crime to use Twitter (or any other carriage service) in a menacing way ( The tweeting bomb). But the law is pretty weak and the government is considering how it can make trolls more accountable for their evildoing.
With any legislative change some time off, the Australian Communications and Media Authority has issued an alert aimed at children and youth to "protect yourself against trolling".
Here are our thoughts.
- Ignore the troll. Yes that's right, if it's that offensive or possibly defamatory, don't retweet it for all your followers to see or exchange insults with the offending tweeter.
- Block the troll. You can block users from being able to view your profile and send you messages. They can still tweet about you of course.
- Before you block the troll, get any information that you can about the tweet and the troll so that you can hunt them down. But not kill them, that's still illegal.
- Report trolls. Tell Twitter to remove the tweet. They're usually pretty responsive. And if the tweet is menacing or threatening (and not a joke) then tell the Police.
- And finally a lesson hopefully learned by Farah himself.
If you are going to make a complaint to the Police and appeal to the Government to impose tougher laws, remember that your own tweets will be scrutinised.
Even if you delete tweets that you have regrettably posted in the past, there are ways for them to be retrieved and accessed.
As it turns out, Farah tweeted a while back that the Prime Minister should be given "a noose" for her 50 th birthday. Maybe it was a typo.
We do not disclaim anything about this article. We're quite proud of it really.
