Tuesday 2 February 2010

Northern Territory Government wanted to monitor Facebook comments

Plans by Darwin and Northern Territory MPs to monitor everything that was written on Facebook was dropped after the NT News exposed the scheme.

The conversation monitoring programme was hatched by Chief Minister Paul Henderson and Opposition Leader Terry Mills who had hoped to monitor "every word written about politicians on social networking sites" as part of a media monitoring program.

According to the NT News, the proposal planned to watch all social networking websites, such as Facebook and Myspace...
  • Opposition spokesman Cam Smith said the media monitoring arrangements were designed to "cut costs" for taxpayers.

    "Social networking is a new form of media that is growing in both its significance and use," he said.

    "Comments posted on sites like Facebook and Twitter are already up for public scrutiny. The new arrangements which are being discussed are not designed to and nor do we believe are capable of capturing private comments on social networking sites."

However it now seems the plan will not go ahead, now saying that the Government doesn't support the monitoring of social network sites."

1 comment:

Constance Lloyd said...

I think we would all be kidding ourselves if we thought that this, in some form, was not happenning already. Of course political parties are on the look out for subtle changes in peoples thinking and what better place to monitor?

I am also sure, and maybe BlogMeister Mike could confirm, that what we all say on CairnsBlog is also being monitored.