Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, armed with a lettuce leaf, took on the social media giants recently.
They were arrogant, he admonished. And out of touch. They’d even shown contempt to parents, worried about their children.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was a touch tougher. Any government he led would ban children, aged under 16, from social media.
Good on him for taking that stance, but it’s unclear how that might happen and Dutton, like every other father on the planet, knows teens excel in breaching bans and breaking the rules.
Meanwhile those same social media giants, who are the target of their soft criticism, are flouting every possible decency marker imaginable.
Crime fighters know this.
Young lonely and vulnerable teens were being “bewitched online by a cauldron of extremist poison,’’ AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw told the National Press Club a few weeks ago. And that poison was spraying across the globe in nanoseconds, he said.
And, according to police, into the homes of children as young as 12 in Australia.
As young as 12 years old! That’s the age of some children now on terror watch lists, here in Australia.
Although the AFP will not disclose how many........