Oz judge Kirby in MySpace attack
p2pnet.net News:- MySpace has been used to smear the reputation of judge Michael Kirby who is, ironically, a well-known countryman of Australian MySpace owner Rupert Murdoch.
One of Murdoch’s claims to fame is: he’s one of the few corporate media owners with hands-on control, which means he calls the shots. All of them.
Created by Tom Anderson (president) and Chris DeWolfe (ceo), MySpace was acquired by Murdoch so he could use it as another advertising vehicle. Morality or fairness of content? Not Murdoch’s problem, unless it affects the bottom line.
MySpace is already infamous as a hunting ground for sexual predators and a great place for spam scammers which, if Trent Lapinski is to be believed, isn’t really surprising.
In September last year, “By now, everyone knows what MySpace is – or at least, they think they do,” he posted in ValleyWag, going on, “The generally held assumption is that MySpace is a social networking site: ‘a place for friends,’ as their slogan puts it. In reality, MySpace is the next generation of marketing, advertising and promotion, exquisitely disguised as social networking. Simply put, MySpace.com is Spam 2.0.”
Lapinski also wrote, “Most users believe that MySpace started as some kind of fluke – a happy accident that began in Anderson’s bedroom or garage,” continuing, “MySpace was actually created by executives whose backgrounds are anchored in spam and mass marketing, and who are tied to investment scandals.”
Now, “Did you see this about one of Australia’s BEST (cares about the Internet) High Court Judges and what they are calling identity theft on MySpace?” – emailed a friend from Australia.
“What kind of a rightwing facist would do something like this? It has to be either politically or homophobically (Kirby is gay) motivated and probably both …”
The email referred to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald and, “High Court judge Michael Kirby has been defamed by identity thieves using the internet site MySpace,” it says, going on, “A profile page, claiming to have been written by the Australian judge, also contains sordid and sexually charged material.”
The case, “underlines the flimsy or fraudulent nature of much of the internet’s so-called ‘citizen journalism’,” comments The Age which, like the SMH, is itself one of the big-name corporate news outlets which are coming under increasing pressure from blogs and bloggers, who’ve become serious, and unwanted, competiton to the mainstream media.
“MySpace had yet to take down the Justice Kirby profile page last night,” it went on, and it, “refused to help contact the real authors of the site,” says the SMH story, adding, “MySpace Australia general manager Rebekah Horne said this was the first time a profile had been fabricated to smear someone.”
Nor is the first attack on Kirby.
Australian Liberal senator Bill Heffernan, “has completed his fall from grace, giving an unqualified apology to Justice Michael Kirby for the attack he made on him in Parliament last week,” says a 2002 ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) story, continuing, “Senator Heffernan admitted he’d damaged Justice Kirby’s reputation in the speech, in which he accused the judge of using Commonwealth cars to trawl for male prostitutes.
“But in a humiliating backdown, the dumped parliamentary secretary to Cabinet accepts the document he relied on to make the allegation had been fabricated by others. Senator Heffernan has also apologised to the Senate, the Parliament, the Prime Minister and his Coalition colleagues, but was censured by the Senate for his abuse of parliamentary privilege.”
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
spam scammers – Psst. Want to buy London Bridge?, December 27, 2006
ValleyWag – MySpace: The Business of Spam 2.0 (Exhaustive Edition), September 9, 2006
Sydney Morning Herald – Judge a victim of MySpace fraud, January 7, 2007
The Age – High Court judge Kirby targeted by malicious internet fraud, January 7, 2007
ABC – Heffernan apologises to Kirby, March 19, 2002
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