John Key needs some cover for his being caught out lying / incompetent / omitting stuff (/ insert your interpretation), so today the government is making sure it is Doing Something.
More importantly Doing Something about Bad People.
In this case, cyber-bullies. Fair enough, there’s some nasty people out there on t’internet, and we need to do something about them, says Joe Public.
Yes, says the Government – we have a laws against inciting to suicide, and harassing people: but we need new ones!
The best answer is prison! We need to send more teenagers to criminal training school!
And look, it’s hard to define cyber-bullying, so we’ll make anything grossly offensive or knowingly false illegal. John Key may need an exception for his current predicament, but then he’ll claim he didn’t know it was false. As will everyone else.
Because who can prove what you know?
And who gets to decide what’s offensive? I find this current government offensive, can I get them locked up?
Is there an out for satire? Or is Scott about to be locked up for saying the Environment was?
All that’s before we get to the impracticalities of it – try enforcing all these requirements on overseas hosted websites for a start. But I’ll let Lynn go into more detail on that.
But in the meantime at least the Government is Doing Something about Bad People. So let’s all forget about this lying and omissions.
And as this post and every other one I’ve written will be offensive to the Government, I better get my coat – don’t want to be cold in that cell…
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