If you’ve ever travelled into the suburbs of Australia you’ve no doubt run into the cultural phenomena of increasingly younger kids trying to pass off the ‘don’t mess with me’ attitude.
Armed with nothing more then a mobile phone these kids like to hang out in groups of five or so down at your local suburban mall.
Their modus operandi?
Stand around all day and and hope that one pubic hair is enough to convince anyone that walks by not to mess with you. Assuming anyone in the world would have a reason to mess with you, you’d totally… well you and your mates would probably give it a fair crack but lets face it, eleven year olds are eleven year olds; you’d probably come off worse.
Enter Jessi Slaughter, poster child for rubbish parenting and why the ‘protecting our children’ argument falls flat on its face when it comes to internet filtering.
So the story goes Jessi got up one night around midnight and published a rant on Youtube that is terribly hard to watch.
…and rightly so.
I mean for starters you’re eleven. Nobody gives a shit about your haters and talking about glocks, brain slushies, sucking penis and AIDS is just laughable. Who else, with the exception of other brain dead eleven year olds are going to even shoe the slightest resemblance of caring.
In kind 4chan ran with the video and gave Jessi Slaughter hell. Reports of death threats, fake pizza deliveries and the publishing of Slaughter’s personal details all hit the net shortly after the original rant was published.
One guy even called up the Slaughter household pretending to be a police officer.
Although not one to routinely finding amusement in seeing children cry, this video had me beaming from ear to ear. If for nothing else then it proved the age old saying that behind every self obsessed posing terry tough cunt child there’s a woefully neglectful parent.
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When you’re eleven school and social networking is one thing, publishing expletive riddled Youtube rant videos at midnight is another. Presumably in the next room doing crack cocaine or god knows what, Slaughter’s parents seem woefully ignorant of their daughters online persona.
No it’s not Jessie’s fault for contributing to the internet garbagesphere, nor her parents fault for letting their daughter run riot online… this one’s apparently the fault of those non-existent nasty internet people who forced her to upload the initial video.
An interesting question to pose when presented with a situation like this is whether or not an internet filter might have prevented it. I mean we’ve got parents blowing their stack and an eleven year old in tears, surely this is what Conroy is going on about when he pulls out the ‘let’s protect our children’ routine.
Considering Youtube won’t be filtered under the Labor filter, the answer to whether or not an internet filter could have prevented this is a resounding no.
Idiot kids will be idiot kids with or without an internet filter and those with the technological means will still be able to track them down. Slaughter had active Facebook, Twitter and MySpace accounts which no doubt contributed to her details being so readily circulated.
There’s just nothing you can do to legislate against naive stupidity.
Despite being American, it’s almost guaranteed Australia has it’s own share of retarded kids publishing hard arse videos on Youtube and filtering the internet is going to squat.
Sure Labor’s internet filter isn’t a ‘silver bullet’ but let’s be realistic here, in the face of adolescent stupidity, the internet filter isn’t even a paper missile. As social networking grows and openly encourages people to publish anything and everything about themselves online, Australia and other countries are inevitably going to see an increase in morons taking to the internet and having it horribly backfire on them.
With the internet filter currently shelved until after the election, let’s hope this message gets across sooner rather then later.