Need action on cyber-bullying
THE State Government’s attempt to put online abuse back in its box is as ambitious as it is principled. The Government is focused on stamping out cyber-bullying and online abuse in the wake of the report from its anticyber-bullying taskforce.
It has beseeched social and legacy media companies to introduce bullying warnings and detect hatefulness early, with automatic take-down mechanisms at the ready.
The intentions are noble, if not immediately practical, and any small victory will be shared because of a dreadful series of events that caused a perfect storm and forced action across the board.
Let us not conflate trolling that hurts with the kind that harms, and distinguish between human and corporate costs.
Precious human lives must always be treated with the greatest care.
AFL star Tayla Harris copped it big time this week after a stunning depiction of her athleticism was posted on a popular site. The comments that were posted in response were nasty, disgusting and even illegal.
The anguish the trolling caused Harris is plain, and her feelings of violation are understandable.
It seems eons ago that comments on threads were moderated by people before being posted on corporate sites. It is a practice that should be revived, for the casualties of leaving the gate unmanned have become too many.
Sadly, Carlton forward Harris — previously a Brisbane Lion — is far from being the only female athlete to be fixed in trolls’ crosshairs.
What makes this trolling incident remarkable is that Seven acknowledged its action had conveyed the wrong message, apologised and reposted the picture.
Harris was then encircled with praise and support, with her trolls’ conduct vehemently called out.
This vocal affirmation of good and expressed disgust for bad is something our society needs to calibrate where our lines of acceptability rest. This is different from the kind of trolling that targets the corporate world.
When Captain Marvel was launched with great box-office suc- cess this month, it was also deemed a victory over trolls.
Misogynistic keyboard warriors had been working hard to scupper the film’s success before its debut, being so persistent and numerous that YouTube was forced to change its search algorithm, and review site Rotten Tomatoes changed its processes to prevent people reviewing a film before its release.
Captain Marvel’s success shows that trolls such as these have been blunted by overdoing it, and because the playbook of crop dusting has been adopted by superfans as much as trolls in posting reviews before release and spreading fake stories.
But when people are the target, it is an entirely different story.
After New Zealand, we can’t write off hate such as that of white supremacists as just trolling. We can’t tell the human subjects of hatefulness just to ignore it.
The horror of the NZ massacre was the final push social media platforms needed to act on moral and ethical grounds, to work out ways to step in to prevent and reduce trolling and bullying, and take down that content in real time. Jane Fynes-Clinton is a Courier Mail columnist
THE HORROR OF THE NZ MASSACRE WAS THE FINAL PUSH SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS NEEDED TO ACT ON MORAL AND ETHICAL GROUNDS ...