Are you ready for a hanging, because the pond's in virtual lynch mob mode, and Christine Satchell and Tory Maguire are ripe for the hanging ...

(Above: a salivating tabloid's dream).

For a moment there, the pond thought that Dr Christine Satchell, from the University of Melbourne, had been trolled.

After all, the Daily Terror has form as a troll, and a headline like How 'the nanny state' turned Aussies into hooligans is exactly the sort of thing you'd find up one of their darker and sillier alley ways, with baseball bats at the ready.

But no, there it is, the justification for the header in this quote:

“We live in nanny state where everything is controlled and you can't do anything without getting in trouble,” Dr Christine Satchell, a senior research fellow in computing and information systems at the University of Melbourne, said.

“So it's hard for us as Australians to be in a space with no rules.”

The quote doesn't reach quite the same conclusion as the header - reading it, you could think hapless Australians might roam the wild west of the intertubes just aimlessly getting themselves into trouble - but it shows the folly of academics talking to tabloids, and expecting anything sensible as an outcome.

There isn't a credible shred of evidence in the article which backs up the notion that the nanny state has turned Australians into online hooligans. And there's nothing but assertions that backs up this contention by Satchell:

People tend towards “hooliganism” when they’re allowed unmoderated and unfettered access to a publishing system, a senior IT researcher says.

And Australians tend to behave worse than most because we are not used to having so much freedom.

It simply doesn't make sense.

Satchell needs to get out more. Does she have any evidence that nanny-state Australians are any worse than wild-eyed American libertarians fiercely opposed to a nanny state ... when it comes to dropping fetid comments and outrageous aggressive remarks on a site like YouTube?

You don't have to look far to get an answer. YouTube is remarkably unmoderated, both in the content uploaded to it, and the comments made on the content. Partly it's just the logistics involved in monitoring what's now a vast site, full of nooks and crannies, and that's why copyright and naughty product keeps turning up like a bad penny.

If it's taken down, it just pops up somewhere else, and the comments just keep growing like mushrooms in cow manure.

Race and religion are two guaranteed ways to set off a bout of virtual hatred and abuse.

If you can stand a dip in a cesspool, take a look at the comments on a typical video labelled Racist Americans which is already heading to 250k in hits. The comments come from all over the place, of course, but you won't notice the hooligan nanny staters doing any better at the art form than "born to spill bile" United States rednecks.

And if you want to make yourself mentally ill, why not take a tour of the white pride neo-Nazi site Stormfront, proudly based in the United States (with handy outreach forums for ratbags in Australia).

The pond's not going to relay here the abuse of blacks, Jews, Muslims, other non-whites, or the Hitler love that saturates the site - be careful when you handle toxic waste - but can Satchell explain how her thesis explains the way the nanny state turns citizens of the United States into mad as march hare hooligan neo-Nazis?

Satchell gets herself listed in the Find an Expert pages of the University of Melbourne, but what the pond wants to know is whether she's done a statistical breakdown of the hooligans to be found on 4chan (take care, you've been warned) and their countries of origin.

We can argue about many aspects of a site like 4chan, but what we can't dispute is that it started in the bedroom of a 15 year old New York student (in honour of the artwork of that nanny state Japan). You can wiki about it here, and you'll see the site has been in all sorts of trouble over the years, but please remember it's as virtual American as a slice of virtual apple-pie.

No doubt a few Democrats will be pleased that Satchell has determined the United States is a nanny state and that explains 4chan, but that cuts no ice with the pond.

What Satchell was probably heading towards saying was this:

Dr Satchell said users should be encouraged to moderate themselves rather than relying on police and real world laws...
"... users are savvy and capable of defining what is acceptable and what is unacceptable,” Dr Satchell said.
“At the end of the day it's about building a culture about what is acceptable and unacceptable. While Twitter is largely unpoliced, it's not as bas as it's made out to be, I'm impressed by how well the unpoliced Twitter world behaves."

Who's to argue? It's the business of sites to moderate content and users, and users who provide self-regulation make the best communities. There are some pirate sites that are inordinately polite, though occasionally there'll be a flame war if someone fails to fulfil basic technical standards.

It's like any system. Self-regulation is best (unless it happens to be the pond confronted by a bar of dark chocolate), and it's best to keep the cops at arms length at all times (the pond likes to think of this as the four "p's" - police, psychiatrists, priests and prison wardens are best avoided).

And yes the current policing proposals by the federal Labor government are an outrageous over-reach, and likely to be ineffectual, not to say Orwellian in appalling ways. And yes life would generally be better if we didn't have virtual NSW and Victorian coppers tromping through the virtual world with virtual tasers.

Satchell uses the generally polite and regulated Slashdot as an example - they've spent a fair amount of time thinking through a system of peer moderation - but in the process she's committed a basic faux pas and offered a tabloid the sort of nonsensical headline they love.

Snort. Nanny state turns Aussies into hooligans. Snort and guffaw.

There seems to be some sort of libertarian disease doing the rounds at the moment, because Tory Maguire has also produced a bizarre headline, namely The online world doesn't need real-world police.

Her solution?

That's a merely rhetorical or delusional or comical answer, or or all three, and so way too trinitarian for the pond.

Maguire is agitated that the Pom cops (no need to moderate calling a Pom a Pom) busted a teenager for taunting a sports star via social media.

Now undoubtedly this is tough turf for freedom-loving News Ltd journos, since in the past it's been Pom journos busted for cracking mobile phones to dig up the dirt on sporting stars.

And where's the harm in that sort of vigorous law-breaking journalism? People want to know all the filth, and it's the journos that need to give it to 'em, and who needs real world cops standing in the way?

Like Satchell, Maguire is into moderation in a big way:

There are two options for dealing with a Twitter bully. Block and forget, or call them out and set your fans on them. Daley executed the second manoeuvre with a double pike.

Actually there are several other ways, and some involve the laws of defamation. There's no reason that anyone on Twitter should think they can defame, or otherwise break real-world laws simply because they have a magic social media shield in their sweaty texting, twittering paw.

And if you're a teenager suffering from suicide-inducing cyber-bullying, call on someone sympathetic, in authority and with power to do something about it.

For that matter, no one should think they can escape real-world laws relating to child pornography (and don't lead with that Tasmanian nonsense about how adult porn sets you on the slippery slope to child porn - you can't go to adult sites and get child porn, you have to hunt it out in its underground haunts, and often pay for the pleasure, and if the cops use your credit card details to bust you, good luck to them)

Anyhoo, it ends up with Maguire quoting this blood-curdling quote approvingly:

Then the more sophisticated elements of the Internet hate machine went into overdrive—smelling blood, the ambulance-chasers of the meme world and the snarkistas had a new victim. Now @Rileyy_69 was the meme. Videos of him were mashed up and set to music, (here and here), his stupider utterances were Photoshopped onto his more gormless photos, and the tweets of abuse just kept on coming: from other teenagers looking for a fights (digital and real), from lovesick teen girls who felt their beau had been attacked, and from plenty of responsible adults.

There must be something in the kool-aid they drink at News Ltd which makes them think that an Internet Hate Machine Going Into Overdrive is somehow a Most Excellent Thing.

As opposed to mindless vile bullying of the kind displayed in the original attack on the athlete in question. And as opposed to the viral bullying some hapless teenagers (and adults) suffer.

Maguire's right into it:

See, the internet has its own lynch mobs to kick down virtual doors in the middle of the night - it doesn’t need Bobbies to do its work for it.

Dear sweet absent lord, lynch mobs kicking down virtual doors in the middle of the night is the way forward in the virtual world?

What's the odds Maguire thought Kristallnacht showed the way forward for Germany?

The pond immediately felt the need to run the lyrics to Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, with a twist of lemon:

News Corp blogs bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Lynch mobs are good?

Says it all about News Corp's culture really. The baying hounds that frequent blogs like Blair's and Bolt's are trained to turn and wheel on virtual enemies like trained sparrows (how's that for a viral mixing of metaphors), and the tabloids routinely indulge in feral attacks on the hate figure of the day (woe betide a Victorian police commissioner who gets in their sights), and the paranoid Australian daily lashes out and attacks everyone and everything outside the castle (as monitored and determined by the in-house thought police).

The whole company is a kind of lynch mob in action, virtual and real ...

Who'd have thought that News Ltd could make the pond sound truly conservative?

A virtual lynching can be just as ugly as a real one - because in some cases it can lead to the same sort of ugly result, death by suicide or by assault. The intertubes is already littered with stories of tragic virtual misbehaviour and the consequences.

The pond's as attracted to intellectual property abuse as much as the next person, and the empowering capacity for abuse that anonymity allows, but really, you can push things too far.

And indulging and celebrating virtual lynch mobs in action is that step too far ... because it's likely to produce a strange and bitter crop.

So there you have it. The pond as typical bleeding heart liberal.

Be nice ... or else we'll send you over to News Ltd for a bloody grand lynching. Or maybe Aunty Jack can rip your bloody arms orff, reared and trained as she was by the nanny state and the cardigan wearers at the ABC ...

(Below: okay done South Park, may as well do The Simpsons).