Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack has hit out at social media giant Twitter for banning outgoing US President Donald Trump.
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Twitter announced on Friday that Mr Trump's account had been permanently suspended "due to the risk of further incitement of violence," after a riot at the US Capitol left several people dead.
Asked yesterday if Mr Trump helped incite the riot, Mr McCormack said the president's social media comments leading up to the event and his refusal to accept the outcome of the US election were unfortunate.
However, he said big tech companies should not be able to decide whose voices were heard.
"I don't believe in that sort of censorship," he told ABC radio on Monday.
"There's been a lot of people who have said and done a lot of things on Twitter previously that haven't received that sort of condemnation or indeed censorship."
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Dr Waseem Afzal from the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University said censorship was a "tricky question" in a liberal democratic society, with companies needing to strike a balance when censoring extreme views on either side of the political spectrum.
Dr Afzal said while it was worth platforms developing codes of conduct, it could be difficult to enforce them.
"Some sort of guidelines around good practices should be there, which we should all adhere to as civilised citizens of liberal democracies," he said.
"These media platforms can do that but what if another platform may emerge?"
He said governments placing codes of conduct on social media companies would also prove difficult with opponents of the political party in power unlikely to respect its ruling.
Dr Afzal said civility and reducing misinformation on social media would largely come down to personal responsibility.
"We individually are having an exaggerated sense of ourselves in the social media space ... we have that sense of entitlement to say whatever we like and we can have whatever we want," he said.
"We need to educate our youth in the coming generations that words carry meanings."
He said while Mr Trump had repeatedly shown a lack of care in his tweets in the leadup to his ban, it was important also to become more forgiving when someone makes a mistake on social media with many suffering real-world consequences for single posts taken out of context.