The Internet Should Not Be Censored

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The internet should not be censored.

Now what information could the government be hiding from us? This will be a question asked more often if the government's internet filter proposal goes through. The internet filter can hide information about controversial topics from existence in Australia. We citizens are to make our opinions and then vote for who we think has our best opinions. This is undemocratic, and is also against our human right of free speech. China is the best know example where internet filtering is involved, and what do we think of the Chinese government. Do we want the Australian government to become like the Chinese government? Internet censorship today is unproductive, with large amounts of false positives and other common online activities would have to be blocked. This is just a waste of money for what we are getting. Guess who decides what is on the internet filter? A government department, not someone who is trained in law. Finally the internet filter will slow our already snail slow internet speeds. An internet filter should not be implemented for all these crucial reasons.

It is ineffective and waste of money.

With all our advances with modern technology, internet filtering is still imperfect today. The internet is a dynamic environment, with new websites appearing every day, some of them inappropriate for children. The internet filters blacklist only has 2025 websites listed to this day. There is a huge amount of human labour required in order to add new websites to this list. The huge amount of labour required to maintain this filter is very prohibitive, it just makes this filter a waste of taxpayers money. Your hard earned money! Google has 8 billion web pages in its index. Would 3025 websites ...

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...for a service that restricts your free speech. The government chooses the websites that they don't want you to see. What would happen if the government blocked an opposition party website, because their views were different from theirs? The internet filter is capable of doing this. The internet in Australia is slow behind the world standards. Adding a filter will just make our internet more slower. The internet filter is just a waste of taxpayers money. The money should be spent on more effective educational campaigns, which should have been attempted in the first place. Parents do not put internet filters on their computer because of the lack of education and information about this. If they were educated, they would know how to put on one, and children can be taught about cyber safety in the curriculum as well. This is money well spent, unlike an internet filter.

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