Talking Twitter’s business on ABC Radio’s The World Today

ABC logoOn Friday I was interviewed about Twitter’s latest quarterly results by ABC Radio’s lunchtime national current affairs program, The World Today — and in particular the potential future impact of bullying and trolling. And here’s the result.

“Twitter CEO admits cyber bullying poses threat to revenue growth,” was the story’s headline, and this is how presenter Peter Lloyd introduced it:

“The social media giant Twitter is being been forced to confront a serious threat to its profitability – cyber bullying. In internal emails leaked to a news website, the Twitter’s CEO says he ashamed of his company’s handling of bullies. Dick Costolo says harassed users are abandoning the service and as part of the quarterly financial results announcement overnight, Twitter reported disappointing user growth in the final three months of last year.”

The reporter was Pat McGrath.

The audio is ©2015 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The audio is being served directly from the ABC website, where you can also read a transcript.

Talking internet bullying (again) on Balls Radio, FM 99.3

The online bullying of TV presenter Charlotte Dawson and the subsequent calls for an end to online anonymity was the topic for my spot on Phil Dobbie’s Balls Radio last night.

And as usual, the conversation wandered to other matters as well.

Here’s the audio of my segment. If you’d like more, Mr Dobbie has posted the full episode.

You can of course hear us talk live every Tuesday night from 7pm AEST on Sydney’s FM 99.3 Northside Radio.

I’m fairly sure that copyright remains with Mr Dobbie rather than being transferred to Northside Radio, but I’ll figure that out later.

Talking bullying and Twitter laws on Balls Radio, FM 99.3

On 7 August 2012, in my regular spot on Phil Dobbie’s Balls Radio, I vented some thoughts about so-called cyber-bullying and the inevitable call for yet more silly ad hoc laws.

The conversation bounced off the topics I’d discussed in the previous day’s Patch Monday podcast, namely the reaction to the trolling of an Olympic athlete, but also covered a little bit of the future of Twitter itself.

Here’s the audio of my segment. If you’d like more, Mr Dobbie has posted the full episode.

You can of course hear us talk live every Tuesday night from 7pm AEST on Sydney’s FM 99.3 Northside Radio.

I’m fairly sure that copyright remains with Mr Dobbie rather than being transferred to Northside Radio, but I’ll figure that out later.

Talking digital downtime on Sydney radio 2UE

So Radio 2UE must’ve been happy with the spot I did a fortnight ago, because they asked me back again today to talk about cyberbullying and trolling.

Well, that was the plan. But time constraints limited our conversation to just one topic: Rose Smith’s suggestion that children should be made to surrender their mobile phones at night in a bid to stop the “devastating effects” of bullying.

Smith has run a free anti-bullying camp on Sydney’s northern beaches for the past 15 years, and reckons children needed to learn to “disconnect”. She believes that parents should take their children’s phones when they went to bed and return them in the morning in order to give them some time off.

So presenter Tim Webster and regular guest Trevor Long got to hear my well-informed opinion.

The audio is ©2012 Radio 2UE Sydney Pty Ltd, of course, but as usual I’m posting it here in case they don’t post it at their own website.

Patch Monday: Parents don’t act on cyber-safety fears

ZDNet Australia logo: click for Patch Monday episode 35

Most Australian parents are concerned about the safety of their children online. But new research shows that parents don’t back up their concerns with meaningful actions, and that in any event they might well be concerned about the wrong risks.

Last week Microsoft Australia released their “For Safety’s Sake” research [PDF] which, while giving them a chance to pimp the parental controls in Windows 7, also produced some interesting figures.

While 64% of parents were concerned about cyber-safety, 65% don’t use any parental control software and 62% allow their kids to access the internet unsupervised.

Parents perceive their kids to be more at risk accessing the internet from friends’ homes than their own, and rate the risk from online predators as being more dangerous than exposure to pornography. In turn that’s seen as more dangerous than bullying, which is seen as more dangerous than identity theft.

In this week’s Patch Monday podcast I speak with Microsoft’s chief security advisor in Australia, Stuart Strathdee, as well as with child protection expert Karen Flanagan from Save the Children Australia. The risks are not what they seem.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think — especially if you’re a parent. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

What now for Senator Conroy and the Magic Filter?

Photograph of Senator Stephen Conroy

After Senator Stephen Conroy’s disastrous week last week — the ACMA blacklist of banned Internet content leaked and shown to be rubbish, the Classification Board’s website hacked and his damagingly poor performance on Q&A — what next? And what’s Conroy’s exit strategy?

Last month, Greens Senator Scott Ludlam wondered how we can move beyond criticism of the highly-flawed Internet filtering plan:

We’re all in vociferous agreement about what won’t work. But what will? Can this enormously empowered campaign speak with one cogent voice about what we’re for?

How do we empower parents to make the best choices for their families, and law enforcement agencies to prosecute the creators and distributors of the worst material trafficked over the internet?

Is there a way to adequately prepare children to understand other threats such as cyber-bullying, without asphyxiating the greatest information sharing tool in history?

Can we directly challenge the epidemic of sexualised violence against women and children in this country and place the online tip of the iceberg into its proper context?

All very good questions. And as Warwick Rendell points out, this isn’t just an abstract debate.

Continue reading “What now for Senator Conroy and the Magic Filter?”