Is it weaker than the US? We cultivate this crap and then export it everywhere. Look at what we did to poor innocent Canada. People idiots actually fly American Confederate flags there.
We have a few big advantages over you guys. Compulsory voting means any campaign has to be focused on actually getting people to vote for you, instead of just dissuading (or worse—actively using the law to prevent) people who would vote for your opponent to simply not vote.
Preferential voting for our House of Representatives and proportionalish voting for our Senate means we don’t have the spoiler effect so people can vote for their absolute favourite candidate without hurting their “lesser of two evils” preference between major parties.
These have huge moderating impacts on our overall political discourse. But honestly, if it weren’t for these factors, I don’t think we’d be too far off you. Our Liberal Party (originally a broad church including classical liberals and conservatives) has been taking over by the most extreme conservatives/reactionaries among them, and the Labor Party is milquetoast centrist at best, with more friendly policies in areas like education and healthcare, but lockstep with the Liberals on “national security” and erosions of civil liberties and privacy. They also don’t have the guts to enact policies you know they believe in when it comes to a progressive tax system—probably most famously, they’re supporting the former Liberal government’s “stage 3 tax cuts”, cutting income tax rates on the highest income brackets. So we’ve got rightward shifts of both our largest parties.
This is aided in no small part to Australia’s media landscape being so strongly defined by a certain infamous American media mogul. Far more even than his influence on the American market. In my home state of Queensland, every published physical newspaper is Murdoch, and the most popular newspapers in other states are his as well. And of course he has strong ties to the Liberal Party. The only significant competition is what used to be called Fairfax media, which is also Liberal-linked.
But again, our systems help protect us from the worst of this. At the last federal election we saw a huge surge for the leftist Greens party (going from 1 MP to 4), and the so-called “teal” independents (so-named because they would traditionally have been members of the blue-coloured Liberals, but have left the Liberals behind when it comes to caring for the environment as well as some other issues like women’s rights and corruption) multiplied from 2 incumbents to a total of 8 MPs. Ironically, this may have made the Liberal Party even worse, because the seats won by independents and Greens were previously held by some of the more moderate wing of the Liberal Party. But it does mean our Parliament ends up looking a lot more moderate than otherwise, and it rationalises our political debate somewhat.
These are not contradictory at all.
People have to vote, and its easier to convince someone to NOT vote for the hated enemy, which implicitly gets them to vote for you.
You, being aware that there are more choices that Labor vs Liberal, are more educated than the vast majority of my family (and dare I say the community at large), who believe that voting for anyone else is “throwing their vote away”.
The fact is in the 2022 US election, voter turn out was as low as 40% in some states and never anywhere even remotely in the same vicinity as Australian elections (which are well over 90% and a lot of the people who didn’t vote had an acceptable reason, such as living in another country without being a citizen there).
When you have elections being won by very slim margins, which has been the case lately in both countries, that makes a huge difference.
This changes the effect of negative campaigning (people still show up in Aus vs the US), but the idea is to dissuade people from voting for someone, rather than encourage them to vote for you. This might have a positive effect on votes for the party doing the negative campaigning, but I think it’s a poor definition of convincing someone to vote for you.
“Self regulation” by tech megacorps is a myth and they’ll do anything that increases their revenue in the short term, whether it’s moral or not. This is just Facebook and Google trying to increase their market dominance by kicking twitter off the internet.
As shit as twitter nowadays is, I’d rather have the (as little as it might be) competition that Twitter provides for the corporatised internet, than have Google and Facebook being the only ones to be operating social media platforms.
So just please stop believing in all the shit tech megacorps say about morals.
Musk is a cunt, thanks for reminding us, but this is about X failing to adhere to its own disinformation policy and being subsequently kicked from DIGI.
Digital megacorps do not get a free pass because we don’t want them to fall out of the oligopoly.
Free pass from “regulation” that the competitors are applying on them. The issue here is what DIGI is.
If it was a governmental body or something I’d take this seriously but this is Google and Facebook “regulating” twitter, both companies with a financial interest in killing twitter off.
As shit as twitter nowadays is, I’d rather have the (as little as it might be) competition that Twitter provides for the corporatised internet, than have Google and Facebook being the only ones to be operating social media platforms.
You’re implying X/Google/Facebook are the only companies with a social media presence - when that’s clearly not the case. Have you forgotten that Lemmy and Mastodon exist? We already have wonderful alternatives to “corporatised” social networks. We don’t need X.
Also - last I checked Google has shut down every social network they’ve ever tried to create, unless you classify gmail and youtube as social networks (I wouldn’t).
Facebook and Instagram are now the only large social networks operated by a public company. And even that company has launched Threads which will soon be on the fediverse taking away a lot of their ability control things. If Threads does anything users don’t like, it’ll be really easy for users to jump ship to another instance.
DIGI, the network this article is about, is not a “social network” focused group. It’s a general internet focused group and, among other things, it includes a commitment to have some kind of public policy document which is actually followed. X has a policy document - but they’re not following their own policies which is why they were kicked out.
Yes, the fediverse exists, but I would think the majority of non tech nerds leaving twitter would either leave social media entirely or move to another corporatised platform. Killing twitter is a net loss.
Also, how is Youtube not a social media platform? It has community posts, shorts, long form video and comments on those videos, all where people interact with each other. I’d even say it’s probably the biggest social media, people spend a lot of time on it.
Sure, facebook is trying to join the fediverse with (the currently failing) Threads, but anything on their server is in their control, and the fediverse isn’t doing anything to protect Threads users. Migrating from Threads will also give the users a subpar experience (because of the lacking integration into Facebook’s services) and make them feel like the fediverse is just a worse less polished platform.
Maybe DIGI does have a commitment to something, but I personally cannot trust Facebook and Google at all to enforce it fairly.
If is difficult to evangelise the Fediverse to the mainstream internet users, but not impossible.
Slip your Mastodon address into your corporate-owned social media profile, link to news articles via Lemmy when your friends might be interested.
Every little bit of mindshare helps and these little tricks are relatively un-intrusive, especially when the corporate-owned platforms are trying to keep all their users insular and siloed.
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