internet story time how easy it is to get taken out of context

This is a post that I think is very timely to write as I write this in Australia several court cases are going on around the internet and how people were either exposed or taken out of context, and as a person with a disability or if you are a person with a disability this can be easily done and can really harm the person. 

The internet has fundamentally changed the way that we communicate and even earn money or classify money, when I was a teen it was the “weird” and nerdy kids that had well of parents that had a computer and the internet and crypto weren’t even mainstream, I do admit I do miss those days because we had much more real-life connection and if you made a mistake you could change schools and or move jobs and people would be much more understanding.

Yet now we face that the internet is permanent and we see that in Australia we have something very unique in our laws that came out of a very heart-breaking situation, a law that is called dolly’s law and it basically means that if someone commits an act of self-harm over cyberbullying that person can be charged.

Dolly’s Law puts safety and wellbeing of children first | NSW Government

 However what we don’t see is protection for people with a disability or education around what is acceptable for them on the internet, so we see that people can end up not understanding the internet when they clearly should have supervision around it. I am not saying that all people with disabilities don’t understand the internet but I have seen people being given smartphones and then having very inappropriate pictures sent to them. However, from what I understand it wasn’t reported and I am a very firm believer that this type of behaviour regardless of the person level of understanding needs to have consequences. 

We as people with lived experience of disability need to accept that people with disabilities that do the wrong thing need to have consequences for their actions, they need to be taught right from wrong. As I have seen, many people excuse bad behaviour and when the person goes to work or study. This is when the consequences hit but we see that people really need to understand being disabled isn’t an excuse for bad behaviour it doesn’t excuse doing the wrong thing and using it as a cop-out.

We see that this lack of education and accountability is what potentially can get people with a disability into trouble with the law and this isn’t great for them because they need to be able to help themselves and understand what is happening to them and to be able to keep out of trouble.

We also see that in regional towns we see that people need to be aware of the lack of free and low-cost things to do as well as the lack of accessibility to things that would widen the scope of people with disabilities and lessen their need for negative attention and make sure that they had some more positive attention.  We see that a lot of councils have a disability board but this mainly focuses on internal issues and not external issues and this is where the problem of who’s responsible comes into play as we see that people do need to be able to do something but when there is a lack of public transport, affordable things to do and a lack of support through the NDIS as it takes a lot of time, money and energy to fight to for the package you get rather than what you need as I have conditions that are getting worse but I don’t have the funding to get me out of the house more than twice a week, I am not socially isolated but it then creates the issue of who comes to the rescue when I can’t function by myself due to fatigue or medication making me groggy.

So I ask if the person has access to the internet who is monitoring and what limits there need to be to ensure that the person doesn’t get scammed or worse in trouble with the police.  I know that there is a lot talked about in the digital divide but there is not a lot talked about in regards to digital safety and access to the internet as a lot of people do spend a lot of time on it and not all of them are going to be good people. We need to be aware of this and spend time on education on the dangers of the internet as well as its benefits.

 

   When I started the blog didn’t realise how easy it was to get taken out of context and how much time it would take to establish myself and we see that this is a very real issue as it’s not the first time it has happened and we now have the issues of deep fakes as well as very complex scams that people need to be aware of to make sure that they are protected from people so how do we protect our most vulnerable people in society from the harm that the internet can bring without depriving them of the communities that do help them to not be socially isolated.