Government by morning show

On Saturday, the ABC reported on the apparent use of the infamous ‘Hannibal Directive’ — the IDF’s unofficial protocol to fire on enemy combatants holding Israeli soldiers hostage, even at risk to those soldiers’ lives — on October 7. It described Israeli attack helicopters and Zik attack drones emptying their payloads at vehicles making for Gaza without regard for whether Israeli hostages were inside, and tanks shelling homes in kibbutzes where Hamas soldiers were believed to be hiding with hostages.

The ABC article didn’t break any new ground. It recapped reporting by Haaretz in July, testimony from October 7 survivors published by Yedioth Ahronoth in December, a Haaretz interview with Israeli Air Force reserve colonel Nof Erez, an interview Israel’s Channel 13 conducted in March with Israeli tank captain Bar Zonshein, and the eyewitness account of Neomit Dekel-Chen, a survivor of the Hamas attack on Kibbutz Nir Oz, that was originally published on October 13.

What’s notable is that it was published at all. If you relied on Australia’s largest news outlets for information on what is objectively one of the biggest ongoing stories in the world, you’d probably assume that the genocide in Gaza ended months ago. You probably wouldn’t have much idea that the genocide is a genocide in the first place. (Presumably Chip Le Grand is preparing to ask the ABC journalists who wrote the piece if they consider themselves “October 7 deniers”.)

That makes yesterday’s news that the government intends to somehow ban kids and teenagers from social media all the more infuriating. Listing all the ways in which the “ban” is an offensively bad idea would take more time and energy than I have right now. Maybe this is a cunning ploy to trick the nation’s teens into STEM careers by giving them a janky government firewall to vault over, but based on Labor’s recent track record I doubt it.

Labor’s line that this is to “keep our kids safe” comes from the same government-by-morning-show dreck that had Jason Clare coming out in November to tell schoolkids to stop protesting Gaza and go back to class. The fact that today’s teenagers are the most politically and socially aware in human history, not least because of what they see on their phones every day, isn’t seen as a potential opportunity to push for bolder policies that might appeal to this emerging cohort.

It’s seen as a threat — an unwelcome disruptive element to be squashed — because it’s making convenient political fictions impossible to sustain. Young voters who see footage of people their age being blown to pieces on a near-daily basis are much less likely to believe Penny Wong when she says the government is “serious about keeping children safe” or subscribe to read takes about how protests against genocide are antisemitic.

It goes without saying that social media is a cesspit. Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a hell’s playground for white supremacists. Facebook is melting the minds of Boomer shut-ins with an avalanche of AI slop. Instagram is pushing misogyny at an algorithmic level. (I’m too scared of TikTok to get on there and see what the kids are doing.)

But it took nearly a year for Australia’s biggest and most trusted news outlet to report a story that has been covered exhaustively by Palestinian, Middle Eastern and Israeli press — a story that most people in Western countries would know almost nothing about if not for social media. An establishment press that routinely launders Israeli government lies about Hamas hiding in refugees’ tents and childrens’ hospitals is, somehow, a less reliable source of information about an ongoing genocide than a social media platform that’s so toxic its main advertisers are now things like this:

Kids are already well aware that their government and the country’s biggest media outlets are lying to them — constantly telling them to disregard what they see and ignore their own consciences. Now the government’s trying to stop kids from protesting a genocide by banning them from looking at it. Is it any wonder that, among voters under 35, Labor and the Coalition are going the way of the dinosaurs? 

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What I’m looking at

• ABC — Israeli forces accused of killing their own citizens under the 'Hannibal Directive' during October 7 chaos

• Al Jazeera — In Gaza, Israel aims to destroy civil order, but it is failing

• Mondoweiss — For The New York Times, not all Americans killed in Palestine are equal