Editorial: Big platforms must stop performance crime

Editorial

EDITORIAL:

We are constantly in awe of the capacity of the internet to sift information, catalogue it and satisfy our curiosity, feed our interests and anticipate our consumer desires. Why then, cannot those who use it to do all these things edit the messages they transmit?

Now that they have unwittingly livestreamed mass murder in a Christchurch mosque, social media hosts are facing demands from some advertisers that the clean up their act. As former Prime Minister Helen Clark has observed, if these companies put as much effort into developing algorithms for preventing the spread of hate material as they put into targeted advertising, they could easily solve the problem.

Well, maybe not easily. Hate speech does not always include readily identifiable words or phrases and images on video will be even harder for a robotic intelligence to identify as an act so dangerous it should not be seen.

But a human intelligence has no trouble recognising detestable material when it sees it. If the sheer volume of material sent to the internet defies prior scrutiny by somebody in the companies with the scale, wealth and global reach of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like, they surely have the wit to devise other solutions.

Maybe they could channel all posts through a worldwide pool of moderators and an algorithms could ensure the sender and moderator were not on each other's social network. The companies could afford to pay a million moderators a modest amount for each quick assessment. All blocked material could be further checked and unreasonable moderators dropped from the pool. The company would soon have a resource of sound judgment. And it would have some material it should refer to police.

Something such as that could be done. But nothing is likely to be done until it is the companies' financial interest to do it. The advertisers' boycott of media that carried the Christchurch murderer's footage is the sort of pain commerce understands.

The boycott needs to be sustained until the social media hosts devise an effective filter of some sort. Until then, advertisers on Facebook or Google's YouTube run the risk of their brands appearing on some similar, even copycat, outrage.

Deprived of an audience for his carnage, would the cowardly killer in Christchurch have gone into a mosque to shoot people in the back? Possibly - not many mass murderers have felt the need to film their moment. But this one clearly did and it is possible an internet filter would have discouraged him.

If it would not discourage him, it would at least reduce the risk that equally sick minds around the world could be excited by seeing it, and plan their own performance.

Social media are doing a great deal of good as well as evil. The large attendance at vigils planned at short notice for the victims in Christchurch attests to the power and reach of intersecting personal networks.

But those who design and maintain these platforms need to realise they are media with public responsibilities. Better they regulate themselves than let the clumsy hand of government decide what everybody may say.