Australia Censorship News

Australian media companies and Facebook are scrambling to come to terms with a landmark ruling by an Australian judge that found publishers are legally responsible for pre-moderating comments on Facebook.

On Monday in the New South Wales supreme court judge Stephen Rothman found that commercial entities, including media companies, could be regarded as the publishers of comments made on Facebook, and as such had a responsibility to ensure defamatory remarks were not posted in the first place.

News Corp Australia responded to the judgement in a statement:

This ruling shows how far out of step Australia's defamation laws are with other English-speaking democracies and highlights the urgent need for change. It defies belief that media organisations are held responsible for comments made by other people on social media pages.

It is ridiculous that the media company is held responsible while Facebook, which gives us no ability to turn off comments on its platform, bears no responsibility at all.

The ruling was made in a pre-trial hearing over a defamation case brought by Dylan Voller against a number of media outlets over comments made by readers on Facebook.

Paul Gordon, a social media lawyer at Wallmans lawyers in Adelaide explained the change to Guardian Australia:

Up until yesterday the general thread [was] if you knew or ought to have known a defamatory post was there, you had to take it down.

What the judge yesterday found was a bit different, because it wasn't alleged by Voller that the media companies had been negligent in failing to the take down the comments. Instead, the judge found the companies were responsible for putting them up in the first place.

That's really the key difference. You have a situation where now media companies are responsible not just for taking down comments when they see them, but for preventing them going up in the first place. It places a significantly bigger burden on media companies from what was previously in place.

News Corp Australia said it is reviewing the decision with a view to an appeal.

Perhaps the only way for companies to abide by this understanding of the law is for them to take down their Facebook pages totally.

The Nightingale is a 2018 Australia adventure thriller by Jennifer Kent.
Starring Sam Claflin, Damon Herriman and Aisling Franciosi.

Set in 1825, Clare, a young Irish convict woman, chases a British officer through the rugged Tasmanian wilderness, bent on revenge for a terrible act of violence he committed against her family. On the way she enlists the services of an Aboriginal tracker named Billy, who is also marked by trauma from his own violence-filled past.

The director of a brutal historical drama -- containing numerous visceral rape scenes that prompted cinemagoers to walk out of a Sydney screening on Sunday -- has defended her film, saying it's historically accurate.

Aussie film The Nightingale, directed by Jennifer Kent, was screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival to a sold-out audience of more than 1000 people.

Some audience members were so distressed by the on-screen violence, that they yelled out in protest and walked out.

However, Kent responded saying that the unflinching rape-revenge story, set in 1825, contains historically accurate depictions of colonial violence and racism towards our indigenous people:

We've made this film in collaboration with Tasmanian Aboriginal elders, and they feel it's an honest and necessary depiction of their history and a story that needs to be told, she said. I remain enormously proud of the film.

However, it was clear some in Sydney on Sunday didn't feel the level of sexual violence was warranted in telling the story of Clare, tweeting:

The Nightingale made me do something I thought I would never do. I walked out. There was a point when I just needed to take myself away from that brutal space. But I recognised that this is an important film so I walked back in and watched the rest of the movie.

Viewers also walked out during later scenes in the film that showed horrific levels of violence towards babies, children and mainly indigenous people -- with close-up shots of faces being mashed up, brutal stabbings and even more drawn-out rapes.

Despite the criticism, The Nightingale received a sustained round of applause as the credits rolled at the Ritz last night.

Rocketman is a 2019 UK / USA musical music biography by Dexter Fletcher.
Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Taron Egerton and Richard Madden.

A musical fantasy about the fantastical human story of Elton John's breakthrough years.

Rocketman follows in the footsteps of the similarly gay themed Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsod y. Perhaps with an eye on repeating the successful formula of the earlier sanitised and PG-13 rated biopic, Hollywood producers Paramount seemed to have been pushing for Rocketman to get a PG-13 rating.

Paramount demanded that Rocketman director Dexter Fletcher and producer Matthew Vaughn cut a 40-second scene that depicts Elton John and one-time lover and manager John Reid, writhing on a bed. Fully exposed white derrieres are on display, but the nude escapade is tastefully done.

However it seems that the film makers won the argument as the film ended up with an R rating that confirms the sexual content.

In the UK, the film was passed 15 uncut for drug misuse, sex, very strong language.

Update: Distributors win appeal for an M rating

24th May 2019. See article [pdf] from classification.gov.au

Australia's Review Board has overturned the Classification Board's MA15+ uncut for strong coarse language in favour of M for mature themes, drug use, sex scene and frequent coarse language'.

The Review Board explained that previous confusion about a cut version was down to information being embargoed at the request of the film distributor. Two version were submitted but one of these was an unfinished version rather than a censored versions. The Review Board has now supplied a more complete account of the decision process.

Initially the Classification Board passed the film MA15+ uncut for strong coarse language.

The issues requiring an MA15+ over an M rating were related to strong language rather than the gay themes, and in particular the a single use of the word 'cunt'.

The distributors appealed the MA15+ rating and won their case as the Review Board reduced the rating to M for mature themes, drug use, sex scene and frequent coarse language'. The Review Board explained its decision:

It is the view of the Classification Review Board that the dramatic biographical context does mitigate the impact of the language, and specifically, the one instance of the use of strong coarse language.

Films classified M are considered suitable for mature audiences. It is for the above reasons, that the Review Board has decided that the contextual singular use of a strong coarse word can be accommodated at the M classification on this occasion.

The other frequently used coarse words are routinely accommodated at the M classification level.