Season 3 - Episode 3 - Media, Social Media and Cancel Culture

In episode three of Tensions Transplanted, Media, Social Media and Cancel Culture, Rob Kaldor and Isy Oderberg turn their attention to the creative spaces, news media, social media algorithms, misinformation, and the silencing effect of cancel culture. This episode features board member, creative and researcher Noe Harsel, academic Michelle Grossman AM, academic and journalist Margaret Simons, commentator and author Van Badham, Palestinian activist Hamza Howidy and Australian Human Rights Commission President Hugh de Kretser. The discussion moves from the responsibilities of journalists — including who gets to speak for a community, the difference between objectivity and false balance and the hard work of verification, to the corrosive role of social media, where outrage is rewarded and misinformation travels faster than fact. At its heart, this episode asks what kind of public sphere we are creating, who is being pushed out of it, and whether it is still possible to make room for complexity, empathy and truth in a moment defined by fear, grief and polarisation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Coming up on this episode of Tensions Transplanted.

SPEAKER_06 0:04

And then October 7 happened, and there is no there's no conversation. There's no viewpoint other than the so-called correct viewpoint, which is held by a certain group of people, and that group of people didn't include me.

SPEAKER_04 0:21

Objectivity is one of the most misunderstood words in newsrooms.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

That moderate Palestinians need support to make their message here, to push them into the media, to push them into the algorithm, not to sit and watch this algorithm being radicalizing people.

SPEAKER_03 0:37

It's a very perverse form of silence as a virtue, okay? Which is what cancel culture is.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Welcome to Tensions Transplanted, a podcast from the Jewish Independent. I'm Rob Caldor. In this series, we're asking a difficult question: where to now for Australian Jews? We explore the profound impact and ongoing consequences of both October 7 and December 14th. How those dates continue to shape Jewish life, identity, and community in Australia. Joining me throughout this series is journalist and author Izzy Oderberg. Hi, Izzy.

SPEAKER_07 1:13

Hi Rob, thanks for having me yet again.

SPEAKER_02 1:16

Izzy, tell us a bit what's in this third episode of the series.

SPEAKER_07 1:20

In this episode, we are talking about media, we're talking about cancel culture, we're talking about social media. We've got an absolutely stellar group of people to talk to us. We've talked to Noy Harsell about what it's like to operate in creative spaces and some of the research into anti-Semitism that she's been conducting at Monash. We go back to Michelle Grossman to talk about cancel culture. The bulk of our time is actually spent talking to Margaret Simons, who is probably one of Australia's foremost experts in journalism and media. I touch base with Van Batham to talk about how we can stop rewarding hate in the algorithm. And we also talk to Hamza Howardy about the algorithm itself and how it's polarising the conversation, and we finish up with Hugh De Kretzer, who's the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission on Social Media and Media Coverage. Busy episode, but it's been absolutely fascinating.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Full interviews of all those individual discussions we've had will be available at the end of the series. Let's get into episode three: Media Power, Social Media and Cancel Culture.

SPEAKER_07 2:36

Noe Harsell is a writer, a board member, and also works at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization at Monash University as a senior policy advisor. Her literary fiction and essays explore mixed race identity, belonging, and contemporary Australia, including her chapter Jewish Enough in Ruptured Jewish Women in Australia Reflect on Life post-October 7. She's the creator of the podcasts Why Write and Like Us on SBS and a board member of the Wheeler Centre. She's also a former board member and chair of Writers Victoria. We started our conversation talking about the research that she's been working on through the department at Monash University, entitled Monash Initiative for Rapid Research into Anti-Semitism.

SPEAKER_06 3:24

For the creative sector, one of the things that we've really found is that there was this sort of notion of what we've termed ambient anti-Semitism. Which I guess in another way you could sort of look at as a sort of like a mindset. Sort of looks like for people is like there are these, are you really not getting that grant because you're Jewish, even though you've always gotten that grant or you've always gotten that residency, but suddenly this year you're not getting it. And so it feels some of the stakeholders of Jewish uh creatives felt that there was this exclusion happening that was sudden and silent.

SPEAKER_07 4:01

Given that Noy and I actually reside in the creative left, I was really, really eager to ask Noy about why the inability of the sector to hold our truths or to understand where we were coming from in terms of our processing of this upsurge in anti-Semitism was so difficult and so traumatizing.

SPEAKER_06 4:24

There was this question around this notion about anti-Zionism and this post-colonial discourse being conflated and confused, and this discomfort around meanings and ideas around that that was really difficult for them. And again, there was this big issue around philanthropy and Jewish philanthropists. And we're see we've seen that play out a number of times across the sector. And some of the Jewish philanthropists, for example, there's stories about either they're pulling their funding because they want to keep the organization safe, or the organ or the organization themselves are saying, I'm sorry, we just have to let the funding go. And these are heartbreaking stories about, you know, organizations that care deeply or philanthropists that care deeply. I think what's really interesting, and I don't want to speak for all Jewish creatives, but myself and my friends in the Jewish creative spell space, a lot of us didn't go, I'm Jewish and I'm an artist. It was more like I'm an artist and I'm I'm Jewish, it's just part of who I am in my creative milieu, and that's part of my identity, but it's it's just is, but I'm an artist, I'm a creative, I'm a writer, I'm a musician, whatever it is. And so your primary network of cohort of people that you lean on and places that you go was this creative space that prides itself on being passionately supportive and passionately open and not binary in the conversations, that they hold and support complicated viewpoints and conversations. And then October 7 happened, and there is no there's no conversation. There's no viewpoint other than the so-called correct viewpoint, which is held by a certain group of people, and that group of people didn't include me, it didn't include my Jewish creative friends, it didn't include you. What it included were people who held a particular viewpoint of a particular issue, and it didn't take into account the complexity or the diversity within that, and you were either on one side of that line or you were on the other side, and I'm sorry, I don't want to hear you. You are either just going to sign this and be part of this club, or you are out. We're not having the conversation. And it was such a shock because I think myself definitely and a number of my friends and colleagues, we leant towards our creative friends, hoping to be heard and held and understood in what was a horrific and complex and difficult time for us all, for everybody in the world. And rather than any kind of understanding or care or even awareness of the horrors that were being inflicted on women in a peaceful community or anywhere in any of that whatsoever, it was just being shut down and silenced. And I think that was the that was the most shocking part of this entire thing. That here we are in a society and a particular sector that prides itself on holding complicated, difficult conversations and puts itself forward in being able to discuss that where words matter, where actions are important, and yet here we are with all the words and all the actions closing off to the people who felt like, well, I suppose we felt like we we needed to be heard, and there was not there was nothing available for us.

SPEAKER_07 8:04

We also discussed a topic that we ended last episode on, which is the word Zionist and how that word is defined in those left-wing spaces.

SPEAKER_06 8:13

I think as someone who is intersectional, you I mean, and I think all of us, you know, who have multiple identities, and we all do, so I'm not taking away from any of that. But when you really dissect and really look into how many times, as women, for example, or myself, I'm an Asian Jew, I'm also American, so I'm a migrant. So the number of times I have personally been told I'm not enough, I'm not right, I'm not this, I'm not that, I don't have the right to speak. There have been different levels of that constantly. In this particular issue, what I found so different about it is how surprising it was from a group of people who I suppose we assume have a level of awareness, knowledge, and intellect immediately fell back into what we would call, what I would call anti-Semitic tropes. And by that I mean about power structures, about uh owning the world, about definitions, about unawareness about who is who in the zoo. Like it was, I was being accused of at this, for example, I was being accused that there were the organization was suspicious and concerned about a zine, the Zionist in the room. And I had been part of this particular organization for six years. Did they actually say that to you? Were they the words? They actually said that actually verbatim the words. And I and I was so perplexed, I think I was so caught off guard that I genuinely asked, Who are you talking about? And you know, you laugh because and they the person who said this to me, don't be ridiculous, you know what we mean. But the whole idea that we had about when people say Zionist to a Jew and they're not Jewish, what do they mean about that hadn't really entered our consciousness yet, like hadn't to the way that we're able to critique it now. Because what you're talking about is exactly what was going through my head. What are they talking about when they're calling me a Zion? What are they meaning? What I what we now all understand is that there's so much codified language or misunderstanding or levels of understanding and engagement when people use those words, to the point where are the words any more valuable to us when we're having these conversations? And in fact, let's get that over and done with first. When you call me a Zionist, what is it exactly that you think you're saying? Let's have that out first. And in fact, to take that question that you asked, how does it feel? How do you deal with it? When I'm having conversations with someone who wants to be oppositional, like that's their intention, when they say that because they're trying to get a rise, that's my first question. What is it that you mean when you say that to me? Let's talk about that. Because that's the conversation. And if you don't want to open your mind or listen, we have nothing further to converse about. Because not every Jew is the same, and not everyone's definition of defining themselves as a Zionist or what Zionism means is the same.

SPEAKER_02 11:37

I really related to a lot of what Noy said. I'm also part of the creative sector, and the way it's really hit that sector has really blown me away. How did you react to it?

SPEAKER_07 11:49

I think that the question that I asked Noy that that has stuck with me the most, or the response that she gave to the question rather than the question itself, I should say, is when I asked her about why it was so shocking, I uh the way that anti-Semitism had reared its head in creative spaces. Like, why was it so viscerally felt? Not just by the Jewish community, but I think there are a lot of other creatives that were quite shocked as well by the nature of the discourse that emerged in some of those spaces. Um, and she just gave one of the most eloquent and nuanced answers, and I really enjoyed hearing that, and I've and I've definitely kept it with me for the the weeks following the interview. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 12:35

So uh we're gonna move on from that because this is an area I know that you're very close to. We're gonna we'll get into Margaret Simons. Tell me who is Margaret Simons?

SPEAKER_07 12:47

Margaret Simons is a journalist, a writer, and an academic. She has written several books, mostly around politics, and her essay Fallen Angels won the Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism. She was one of the founders and heads of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne and is truly one of Australia's foremost, not just practising journalists, but journalistic thinkers and pioneers. She also sits on the board of the Scott Trust, which owns and funds the Guardian Media Group. The first question I wanted to talk to Margaret about was who gets to represent a community?

SPEAKER_04 13:30

There is a massive, and I do mean massive, academic literature on sourcing in journalism and on precisely this question, who gets to be a source. If I can try and summarise that massive literature in a couple of sentences, having been a source once means that you're more likely to be a source again. Journalists tend to go back to the same people again and again. They also tend to look for people who have already have some sort of institutional power. So, for example, if they're an office holder in an organization or something of that sort, or they've already been given the imprimatur of somebody or the other, and that means, of course, that a lot of people who might have direct experience of something sometimes don't get to be spokespeople because journalists don't see them in the same way. And certainly one of the ways I've taught journalism is to do your damnedest to overcome those sorts of biases. But representation, what does it actually mean? You know, is anybody representative of anybody? As you would know much better than me, I've done a fair bit of reporting in Aboriginal Australia, and there are many Aboriginal cultures in which the whole idea of somebody speaking for somebody else is foreign. Many of those communities, of course, because they have to become adept at working in two cultures, um, find ways of overcoming that. Um, but certainly when I was reporting on secret women's business among Aboriginal communities, there was a huge resistance to any one person being allowed to speak for even quite a small group. Um, and that's actually kind of the heart of the dispute. So if we move that to sort of Jewish Australia, as you would expect in any community, there is a huge diversity of views. Um, you know, we could span it from people who are very reluctant to criticise Israel in any way at all, or the Netanyahu government even, leaving aside Israel, but the particular current government of Israel, right through to people like Louise Adler and David Lesser, who see a problematic nature in the in the very nature of the Israeli state. Um, how is a journalist to represent those opinions? Obviously, nobody is going to represent that whole spectrum of opinion. I mean it's silly to expect them to. And one of the main faults, I think, is to go to a single body or a single point on that huge spectrum of opinion and report it as though this is Jewish opinion. I think Jewish people find that really offensive, and I can totally understand why. So I think the first obligation is to include as much breadth as you can, to do the best to portray the breadth of opinion. And that incorporates individuals and incorporates, as you know better than me, a number of different groups which have set themselves up as in some way representative. I don't think any of them claim to represent the whole community. Um, they would be very foolish if they did, because it's self-evidently not true. Um, but they would claim to represent bodies of opinion. Um and it's appropriate for journalists to contextualize as so far as they can to make it clear where the source comes from, where they sit within the debate, and to interrogate the credibility of the organisation. But just because the organisation doesn't represent everybody, or indeed is greeted with great hostility from other parts of the Jewish community, doesn't mean it doesn't have a legitimate point of view. And I mean we're kind of lost in this debate, and lost more broadly, I think, in terms of liberal democracy, if we start saying, well, because you don't speak for everyone or a large group of people, therefore I'm not going to listen to you at all or talk to you at all or platform you at all. I think that you know that way lies a horror, basically.

SPEAKER_07 17:21

So I I agree. I mean, I don't think anyone should be shut down, but I think clarifying, you know, clarifying okay, so let let's let's let's let's approach it a different way. I mean, I I agree with you. Let's approach it from this idea of false equivalency or or or false balance, right? So you know, journalists have always been taught to have balance. It's a it's a basic core tenet of journalism, of our ethical charter. You know, that's what we do. We are supposed to be balanced.

SPEAKER_04 17:52

Well, I disagree with you on that actually. Oh, okay. Tell me, tell me. So the standard is objectivity, um, is e and that is different from balance. Um, you know, objectivity is one of the most misunderstood words in newsrooms, and once again, you know, I'm trying to summon up sum up a lot of academic literature here, but no, no, you know, nobody in a good journalism school ever told journalists to be balanced. You're meant to meant to be objective.

SPEAKER_07 18:20

And if I can explain, I actually I don't disagree with you. I guess I just and and I'm not an academic, so I definitely do not approach my journalism practice as an academic, um, whereas you have the benefit of both practicing journalism, a practicing journalist and an academic background. I guess I see balance as essential.

SPEAKER_04 18:43

Can I explain the terms a little bit? Because I do think it's I do think it's really, really important, and we're not just talking about some sort of professional the reason why objectivity is important is because it's about public trust. If you're not an objective journalist, then you don't have public trust, and in my view that makes you pretty useless, frankly. Um so to be a useful journalist, and I'm using useful in a very high sense, um, you need to do your damnedest to be objective. Sometimes that means balanced. Sometimes it means you go to person A and then person B with opposing points of view, you report what they both say roughly equally and let the reader decide. But in fact, very little journalism is actually like that. The harder thing to do and the more important thing to do is the journalism of verification. What is actually going on out there, what is actually the truth, how can I get as close as possible to the truth? And that may result in a piece of journalism, so let's say a written article, just for simplicity, which is actually not balanced at all, but it is factual. It is your best attempt to display the truth of what is going on. Um so a journalist is not doing their job if they report two people, each giving a different account of what went on, for example, the bombing of a hospital. Um, it may be perfectly balanced, both sides have got a perfectly balanced point of view, but it's a pretty shoddy piece of journalism if you haven't gone further than that and actually done everything you can to try and verify what went on.

SPEAKER_07 20:21

But I also asked Meg about the simplicity of some of the activism and simplicity without some of the narratives that we f that we find, especially on social media, around the nature of the conflict and the involvement of the Jewish community in Australia.

SPEAKER_04 20:36

The degree to which the uh history is part of reporting the current conflict is something which is also contested, both within the communities that are concerned with this, in the region, and among journalists as well. Um, so all of that makes it incredibly complicated and difficult, and almost any journalist who is reporting on this area knows that because almost no act of journalism goes uncontested in the communities that they're reporting on. Um every journalist I know is reporting on this gets accused of bias. And then add to that that sometimes you get it wrong. And that might be obviously journalists are human, they make mistakes, but sometimes you get it wrong because you relied too much on one source of information or too uncritically. And we've seen that. I mean, in the very early days of the conflict, there was the whole thing about who did or didn't bomb the hospital, you know. Um something which I still think is not absolutely resolved. Um, you know, the world's best media organisations reported, backtracked from that reporting, tried to correct, tried to contextualise, and got criticized for doing every step of that, for getting it wrong in the first place. And yet, what else can you do in that situation? I mean, I think the preparedness to admit error or um or maybe just false information that you put out there or contested information, you know, that is very important. It's very important. That you do open yourself up to that sort of scrutiny. Hard to do when you're being attacked, and not just in moderate terms, but viciously, by all sides, you know, including being accused of being complicit in genocide and all that sort of thing, which, you know, is all of that makes it extraordinarily difficult. And then, you know, if I take the context even wider than that, and you know, this is something which which many of my Jewish friends point out, um, is the selectivity of some of the reporting. Now, this is part of a much bigger problem with Western media. The figures on all sides are a bit blurry and uncertain, but you know, reputable human rights agencies would say that there'd be more people killed in Sudan, in Dafoe, particularly, than have been in Gaza. We hear so much less about that. We don't have much as in the streets about that. Now there's a whole load of reasons why that's the case. Um I don't think anti-Semitism is the main one. I'm not saying it's not there at all, but I can certainly understand why pro-Israel Jewish people look at the selectivity in the media outrage and see anti-Semitism. I can see why they would think that. Um, I actually don't think it's the main reason I just said that, but um it's not hard to see why they may disagree with me on that.

SPEAKER_07 23:21

I guess the difference for the community is the number of people who actually have no skin in the game, who've never previously taken much of an interest, who are now experts and lecturing those of us who actually do have skin in the game and have watched this conflict our whole lives. And I don't know that there's the same level of what I would probably call white-splaining or however you want to describe it, um, in conflicts like Pakistan and India, but I do think that's a really good example.

SPEAKER_04 23:51

I think of you know, students that I teach at Melbourne Uni, some of them very young, you know, coming just coming to political awareness, and there's this huge conflict, people are dying, it's awful, and it's like they discover the issue for the first time and almost get their history lessons, one hopes, in the processes they're activists rather than their activism coming from the history lessons. And so you get these, you know, these very simplistic and one-sided versions of the history. Now, you know, I know what it's like to be young, I know what it's like to see injustice and feel I must do something. Um you know, it's all very well for me at the rough old age of nearly 66 to say, okay, here we are in Melbourne, Australia, what can I usefully do? Um, and you know, but that's you know, it's it's it's not realistic to expect a 17 or an 18-year-old to have that sort of perspective. They see injustice, they want to do something.

SPEAKER_07 24:49

So when we look at when we look at the voice debate, for instance, we know that the vast majority of uh Aboriginal Australians supported the voice or supported the yes vote in the referendum. Um, and yet media often presented Aboriginal no proponents in environments where they didn't clarify that polling and and all indications had shown that the vast majority of Aboriginal uh communities did support a yes vote. How much of a role does the journalist have in pointing out that while there might be a voice that is representing the community, that that that proportion is smaller, it is verifiably smaller. Um and how much does that come into, should it come into journalistic practice? Of course, it's part of the truth.

SPEAKER_04 25:43

Um in terms of the verifiable proportions of the Aboriginal community, um, you know, we know that for sure post-referendum, it was less clear pre-referendum, but I think it was still clearly the case that most Aboriginal organisations and spokespeople supported a yes vote. And of course, there's the whole Uluru process, which has been a very long process, which has been all about bringing people who didn't necessarily agree right away around a single agenda. So, but I would I would disagree that the media totally failed on this. There were certainly outlets which leapt, you know, with ill-concealed delight on um Lydia Thorpe or or Jacinta Namajera Price and gave them a great deal of prominence. But I think if you looked along the span of media, and and I would like to think The Guardian, but uh also I would say the ABC and and most of the nine newspapers, you also found, you know, those other voices represented.

SPEAKER_07 26:43

Meg did identify one area that she felt was a failing in the media reporting the past couple of years, specifically in relation to the community in Australia.

SPEAKER_04 26:56

I think after October the 7th, when many of my Jewish friends were feeling very frightened and in some cases excluded from friendships and professional groups that they'd been part of before, um, there was a level of denial that there was anti-Semitism at any level in Australia. Well, that was clearly bullshit. Um, and I'm I don't have to tell you this, I won't insult you by telling you this. Um, you know, I think the the fear, the distress, the exclusion was very real and extraordinarily destructive and unfair, not to mention incredibly painful and damaging to individuals. Um at the same time, of course, you had Israel responding to October the 7th in a way which many saw as disproportionate. And so it was very hard, I think, for some of my Jewish friends to be able to say anything at all about that at a time when they were also being gaslit, basically, around the fact that they were themselves suffering from unjustified anti-Semitism when let's face it, no Australian Jew is responsible for what the Netanyahu government is doing. And it's the essence of racism to assume they are just because they're Jewish. Um very difficult. So you see a number of um Jewish writers and commentators, I'm thinking here of Michael Gwenda, actually, who's written extensively on the impact of anti-Semitism, but has been in most of his writings reluctant to get into what's happening in Gaza at all. Now, I might say, why should he have to? You know, just because he's Jewish doesn't mean he has to have an opinion. You know, I mean it's racist in a sense to say that. Um, but I think it's meant that the debate has been a bit impoverished, where you've got a bunch of people who are feeling justifiably victimised and at risk and unsafe. And also this sort of elephant in the room of what about what the Netanyahu government is doing in Gaza, is it necessary, is it proportional? And then, as I referred earlier on, underneath that you've got the involvement of Iran and its proxies.

SPEAKER_07 29:14

Um it's not easy and it's not simple. There are lots of things that it is, and it's none of those things.

SPEAKER_04 29:21

But yeah, so you know, in terms of a distorted reality, I think there was certainly a while, and I can think of, you know, conversations I've had at T-Partys and social gatherings and so on, in which people were just saying, well, it's not true, there isn't an uprising anti-Semitism, or even there isn't anti-Semitism at all. Now, as I referenced earlier, there's always anti-Semitism. I I, in a very tiny way, have seen it in relation to myself. It's always there, it's always a light sleeper, and it's certainly currently awake.

SPEAKER_07 29:52

I asked Margaret about her views on social media and whether she's still active on social media platforms.

SPEAKER_04 29:58

When social media was a new thing starting, you know, about 2006-2007, I was an enthusiastic early adopter and broadly speaking an optimist about its impact on the public sphere and public debate. These days I don't really use social media at all. I do look, I lurk. And when I lurk on social media, I see exactly what you're saying. People who leap straight to extreme views, uh, sometimes ill-informed, sometimes, you know, informed with a mixture of, you know, slanted facts or partial facts or sometimes outright misinformation. What I think the current times and the you know the retreat of optimism about social media shows us is the importance of mainstream media. And I know it's really boring, and people might say, Oh, she would say that, wouldn't she? But the large and reputable media organisations, with all their faults, generally speaking, do their best to verify facts and to contextualise. Of course, they don't always get it right, but we can see just how important that is. I I spoke recently at a public forum on misinformation, and and people were saying, Well, how do we know what's true? Well, in a sense, it's actually not that complicated. You go to those outlets which you know do their best to verify, and when they get it wrong, they admit it. And they're still there. We might almost say they're no longer the mainstream, because the mainstream is this toxic sewer of social media, and we're sort of, you know, we in the what used to be called the mainstream media are now sort of standing on the banks almost trying to um police and explain it. But God, what a vital role. So I I agree with what you say, but I also think there is an antidote to it, and being part of that antidote is actually a responsibility of good citizenship. So I have very little time for the debate on social media these days. I know it's still important, in many ways it is the mainstream, but I choose not to participate in it for most of the time. I'm aware of it, I watch it, it's part of the world in which I report, but um I don't think it's by and large very useful anymore. And I it really saddens me to say that. In terms of mainstream media, by which I mean, you know, legacy media, as some would call it, the huge divide these days in media is not about left or right, it's about caring about facts or not caring about facts. And there are media that lean left, most people would see The Guardian as leading left that care about facts, and there's uh organisations such as the Australian, which I have many arguments with quite often, but for the most part in their news reporting they do actually care about facts. You know, that is the big divide. Do you actually care about the facts or not? Are you going to exercise yourself in finding them out and are you going to report them? That is what distinguishes the media which we can have some hope in from that which we can't. And the left-right divide is really about who you talk to and what subjects you intend to report on, and is a different question. So I think we need to value those organisations, all of them, that commit to doing their best job with the facts. Um, in terms of how we rebuild trust in mainstream media, first off, it needs to do a better job, and I can witter on endlessly about the many ways in which it needs to improve. We need to find a way of fixing the business model, which is broken, has been broken for some time now, remains broken, and I have some ideas on that. And of course, our current government in Australia is currently looking at the news media initiative, which may be a partial answer to that. I've been involved in some of those discussions. And I sadly think that we need to find ways of regulating social media, the large social media companies, which are now sort of blurring into the large AI companies. Now, I'm a free speech girl, I'm very, very reluctant to introduce restrictions on freedom of speech. I do have, you know, like most of us, I do have lines on that where I would, but generally speaking, I'm very reluctant to limit freedom of speech. But I think it's appropriate for there to be more transparency around the algorithms, which are the things that send people down these awful rabbit holes of conspiracy thinking. Um I would like a system of international regulation which involves some transparency about how those algorithms work and what they're doing to you, so you can at least know what you're signing up to. Um, and of course, um education, media education in schools and elsewhere and throughout society. None of these things are easy, and of course it's made harder by the fact that we've let this behavio get away from us, really, and um those of us who are optimistic about it are perhaps partly to blame for that. Um now we're trying to regulate and haul it back in retrospect, which is very difficult. In terms of the broken business model, um we now have something like 8,000 journalists in Australia, I think, altogether. About 75% of them are employed by the big three, which is um the ABC News Corp. Channel 9. We used to have two or three times that many. And that was when we were a smaller nation and arguably a less complex nation. That's a devastating democratic deficit right there. And it's all to do with the business model. It's all to do with the fact that the classified advertising initially disappeared to online forums, and then the display ads went to the Googles and Metas of the World, and now AI is cutting our lunch once again. So there's been rolling, successive rolling crises in the business model that has funded most journalism, and we have to find different ways and new ways of funding it.

SPEAKER_07 35:43

I think we need to go back to uh Michelle Grossman, who we spoke to previously, and ask her about a few of some of the issues that have come up in this episode. So I did just that, and we talked about cancel culture, dehumanization, but the place that we started our conversation was around whether it's better to have some of the extremist views where we can see them or hiding in the darkness.

SPEAKER_03 36:11

I think that we are now living um in a in a cultural moment where it's a very perverse form of um silence as a virtue, okay? Uh, which is what cancel culture is. Yeah, that's what cancel culture is. Cancel culture is if it's if it's not what I want to hear, shut up, right? Um, shut up and get out of the road, and you're not allowed to say that, and you're not allowed to say that. Now, what the the the impact that that has um is twofold. So you might start with uh um a misunderstanding or a problematic view, say, of one community towards another community. When you don't allow those things to actually be said, explored, challenged, countermanded, debated, out in the open, when you suppress those dialogues, you then create another layer of problem. So you've got the problem sentiment, but then you've got another problem on top of that, which is the resentment that people feel, uh, that they're not able actually able to talk about what they feel or what they think. What then happens is that they bond with each other more intensively because there's only a little bit of safe space for them to say the things that they actually think and feel. And that's actually, one could argue, um, uh a key site at which radicalization processes might start. Because you are what you're doing is you are cutting off and foreclosing any opportunity for them to have to um um engage with other views, to have their own views scrutinized and challenged. If you push people through cancellation, through censoring, uh uh both censure and censoring, if you push them into the echo chambers that we're all that we all like to say are causing all the problems, you're gonna create more problems. So I am a big advocate of saying right out in the light, you know, we need light. We do not need things uh lingering and festering and lurking in the darkness where nobody can see them or indeed keep track of them and see where they're going and how they're traveling.

SPEAKER_07 38:25

You know, you talked about that there was a surge of anti-Semitism, that it became post-October 7, and that it was more visible and it was um more socially acceptable to say things that wouldn't have been.

SPEAKER_03 38:36

I just need to clarify though what I mean. Um what I mean by uh that surge in anti-Semitism. So one of the one of the reasons that there was a surge, in my view, revolved around the failure to distinguish between Jews as people, and indeed uh, you know, Jews as an identity category, shall we say, and Israel as a state. There was um, you know, a really an almost unforgivable, unforgivably easy uh allision between the state of Israel and Jewish people. Jews were Israel, Israel were Jews, and all Jews uh were in the same basket. So it was one of the most, for me as a as a diversity scholar, amongst uh, you know, amongst other things, for me it was one of the most depressing moments to see, but but also not surprising. This is this is the bit I wasn't surprised by, to see how easy it is to take an ethno-cultural identity category and lump everybody together in it. So, in exactly the same way that people did with Muslims after 9-11, right? So it was this is the same dynamic and it is the same phenomenon where people said Islam and Muslims, uh, you know, no, there's no difference, there's not different.

SPEAKER_07 40:01

Without ever identifying that Islam is a broad church full of lots of different people, it's not homogenous, it's not, you know, different and and that's kind of what happened in a way with Jews, but also with Zionists, because their Zionism, again, is a hugely broad church, and there are people who who have many different interpretations of it. So let me let me ask you this, right? So within this pattern that you've identified of of an increase in anti-Semitism, but also I would describe it as a dehumanization of Jews and a a kind of a creation of a monolith, if you like, in terms of not seeing them as people, but seeing it all as one the state, the people, the whether you're religious, whether you're not, whether you identify as Zionist, whether you're not, which is there was a problem with Jews. When you saw this increase in anti-Semitism, was it coming from the left or the right, or both? How did they differ?

SPEAKER_03 40:56

So I'm still struggling a little with your idea that this was a a form of dehumanization. Um we tend to mostly talk about dehumanization when we see people being rendered in some way as subhuman, okay? Less than so dehumanization tends to mean, you know, we we see group X uh uh, you know, or people Y as subhuman, less than human, or in some way an inferior variety of human. I would say that this has actually been the reverse phenomenon. So I don't see it as dehumanization. This has been the ascription, um, you know, the failure to do that. This has been the ascription not just to the state of Israel, which is after all, it was the state that was responsible uh, you know, for its actions in Gaza. This has been the ascription to Jewish people, the Jewish people, uh uh undifferentiated as a whole, of some kind of enormous, mysterious, unseen power. Okay, that to me, so not less lesser, greater than, yeah. That to me is not dehumanization, it's demonization, okay? Um, the idea of the monster that's larger than life, right? And larger than the human scale.

SPEAKER_07 42:16

Van Batham has operated in online spaces and and worked in this area. She's, you know, she wrote a book about QAnon called QAnon and On. I went to Van and asked her, how can we stop rewarding hate on online platforms?

SPEAKER_05 42:36

Well, I think some changes we need to make. One, um, I'm really uncomfortable with the idea that um you get paid per click. Like full disclosure, um, Facebook has given me money for clicks and views on my Facebook platform. And I've got to say that that is I'm really disquieted by that, because the idea that you might make yourself like I'm not economically dependent on Facebook. Like if you are if you are in an economic situation where your brand viability or your you know economic survival is dependent on uh that content relationship, like that's and there's no oversight. Like I could, you know, publish I don't know, pictures of my feet or whatever, and there would be the way the Facebook mechanism works or the X mechanism or whatever, like a lot of those content creators, and that's very clear in the Manosphere documentary, they're trapped in cycles of economic dependency, like they have staff members and you know, these houses and things that are all sort of necessary and renting cars, luxury cars and stuff for their businesses, and um and they're obviously economically dependent on cliques. Like, there's got to be a conversation around what that looks like, how that's regulated, what the quality controls on those products are. Like you Write for a newspaper and you get paid, there are quality controls on that product, but that doesn't happen online, and that's a discussion that we have to have about what quality controls look like, so products are not dangerous. Um, we absolutely so that's about not rewarding pay because there's an incentivization. I mean, you can see it with influencers who sort of I think recently, um, and we could name them, but I'm not going to. There are influencers in Australia, and they are just influencers, they're not journalists, they're not reporters, they're not academics, they're not scholars, you know, they're not policy advocates. That's not who they are. And that's the influencer content.

SPEAKER_07 44:38

This polarization of views is something I wanted to talk about with Hamza Howdy, who we met in earlier episodes, who is a Palestinian man living as a refugee in Berlin, and he talked to me about the algorithm and the likes of the Piers Morgans of the world and false binaries and the way that everyone needs to fit into a yes-no continuum.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

It's very much. I mean, we are all, I think, being radicalized by the the algorithm right now, because neither me or you are living in Palestine or Israel, but nevertheless we get radical because of what we see. Go to to shows like Piers Morgan, for example, who always brings the worst people on earth and interviews them and makes a fight on TV which radicalizes people, go to TikTok three minutes and you will be a Hamas member. So it's the the algorithm is extremely bad and it should be fought. This is why I also said that moderate Palestinians need support to make their message here, to push them into the media, to push them into the algorithm, not to sit and watch this algorithm being radicalizing people, and then a crime happens in Sydney or in Gaza or the Israel and then oh yeah, we are shocked. Why we did we have this? Uh because you you allowed it in a way or another. So we have to start working against it. We lost money. We lost in Sydney, we lost in the US with the two uh beautiful people who were, I think, ambassadors or diplomats. But we lost in Gaza, in Israel. So it's uh we we really lost enough, and we we should start uh start fighting back against this because uh those who unfortunately are uh doing these bad things and radicalizing the narrative has tremendous support. I don't know if that's good for your podcast, but we don't have the the the money of the Qataris or uh the push of Turkey or or Iran. So, yes, we do need support to make our message hit.

SPEAKER_07 46:29

I also spoke to Hugh de Kretza, the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, about his thoughts on how the media and the media coverage has uh been rolled out over the past two and a half years.

SPEAKER_01 46:41

I mean, there's incredible media being written about this. So it's it's our source of information, and um there's good things and bad things about it, but the as you well know better than I do, the the mainstream media model for the profit-driven model is one that requires on eyeballs on content and conflict and division is what draws attention and that draws advertising dollars. And so there's a an incentive for mainstream media organizations to uh write about events in a way that um increases conflict and division um while within, hopefully within journalistic ethical guidelines around you know, uh truth and facts and sources and all of that. And then you've got main you've got social media, which is um without those sort of guidelines around journalistic integrity and um the institutional, hopefully an institutional commitment to it, and you've got uh you know uh sewers of division and hatred and uh algorithmically targeted towards people who uh might share those views, and um so uh yeah, the the how we address online hatred, um, there's very uh common commitment to that from the special envoy on um anti-Semitism US, the um Islamophobia Envoy, and it's really hard from a policy position. There's some by the way, there's some things that are easy that should be done, and there's other things that are hard because how do you regulate content online when the company is um you know uh offshore, um when uh many of these comments are made anonymously, um, and yeah, these are some of the there was a bill before the last parliament that did go ahead about trying to address miss and disinformation, and um we think aspects of that bill should be brought back and advanced.

SPEAKER_07 48:46

In this episode, we spoke to Noy Hassell, Michelle Grossman, Van Batham, Margaret Simons, Hamza Howedy, and Hugh De Kretzer.

SPEAKER_02 48:56

Our next episode is starting to get to the real tuckless, I think, which is essentially all this extremism, where does it come from and where do the threats actually lie?

SPEAKER_07 49:08

So we're looking at extremism, we're looking at the rise of one nation, we're looking at the horseshoe theory, this idea that if you go far enough to the left you end up on the right, or far enough to the right, you end up on the left.

SPEAKER_02 49:20

If you're enjoying this podcast, why don't you let us know? Tt at the Jewishindependent.com.au. Let your family know, let your friends know, let people you think it would be important for them to hear us. You can find us on all the Jewish Independent social sites. And if you haven't had your fill of political podcasts, why not try Politica? It's another new podcast by the Jewish Independent that breaks down Israeli politics for the diaspora audience in the run up to the Israeli election. I'm Rob Kaldor.

SPEAKER_07 49:51

I'm Izzy Oderberg. Keep listening.