CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
As the Government prepares to introduce minimum age limits to keep children off social media, there have been calls to also legislate a maximum age limit as well.
This comes as millions of Australians find themselves confronting the fact that they have older family members who spend their days reading complete bullshit online, and have been conditioned to think they are the only people getting the TRUTH.
This scenario is playing out right across Australia every day, but especially in the lead up to political elections, when sinister campaign operators do their best work disseminating misinformation into social media feeds, which then gets mainlined by gullible boomers.
In one middle class Betoota Heights household this afternoon, local woman Kelly Sharma (29) has had no option but to pull up her dad on the wild conspiracy he has just regurgitated to her in the living room.
After a lifetime working as fishmonger, Kelly’s dad Bruce was always able to rely on Triple M or ABC Radio National to provide him with the news updates he needed. But as his semi-retirement collides with a rapidly changing media landscape, he no longer has any avenues to read real news.
Today, the 74-year-old Bruce has boldly declared that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is a transgender Israelite who is also quite friendly with the Freemasons. On top of that, the Australian head of state frequently visits the Caribbean to engage in orgies with Jeffrey Epstein – who is still alive.
Of course it’s not entirely Bruce’s fault that he frequently falls down these rabbit holes – as Australia’s once trusted media brands have outright refused to innovate.
It seems the millionaire media tycoons that think it is perfectly fine for aspiring journalists and producers to work 14 hour days for a salary that is easily outperformed by a job in a fast food kitchen, with absolutely no job security or career pathways, also seem to think that it was perfectly fine to keep ploughing ahead with a business model that is completely based on the manipulated free-to-air ratings paper surveys.
While the audiences switched to social media and streaming, the ancient 1990s high-rollers at Ten, Nine, Foxtel and Seven burying their heads into the sand – praying that it was all a fad.
In other words, their rapidly degrading standard of news isn’t getting in front of anyone. And are being easily outperformed by conspiracists presenting fake news on dodgy websites.
With no plan from the government or the nihilistic media companies to combat this crisis of misinformation, it now rests on people like Kelly to try and educate their loved ones on basic media literacy. And gently explain that anything they read online needs to be taken with a grain of salt, especially if they come from websites with Russian and Macedonian URLs and the Eye of Providence in their logos.
