Facebook’s intolerable insult to NZ
Last week’s column explored the downside of Facebook’s new strategy to focus on private messaging services boasting endto-end encryption – a standard of secrecy that used to be available only to armies and spies.
Moving out of the noisy ‘‘town square’’ of the Facebook public feed and into the ‘‘living room’’ of private messaging was a risk because of the social media company’s biggest problem: ‘‘its potential as a force for evil by assisting the secret activities of, for example, child pornographers, people traffickers, drug cartels, terrorists and fake news’’.
That evil potential was a somewhat abstract notion for me when writing last Wednesday.
Last Friday, both Facebook’s town square and private living room functions played vital roles in allowing a mass murderer to plan his activity, communicate privately with like-minded individuals, livestream his attacks, and amplify the terror he sought to create.
In the process, every New Zealander like me – who regarded white supremacists as a small and embarrassing collection of menacing but ultimately laughable misfits – has been forced to take them seriously.
Any networks or succour they are getting anywhere must be dismantled quickly and as fully as possible. Access to the sophisticated weaponry that can cause so much death so quickly must be restricted without delay.
Yet, even as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was making her first comments on gun reform last Saturday morning, people travelling to the Womad music festival in New Plymouth were confronted by a bridge in the city festooned not only with anti-1080 signs, but also with placards carrying web addresses for the alt-Right QAnon movement.
This is the far-Right rumour mill that peddles a claim that Hillary Clinton was part of a global paedophile ring, that philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish, is part of a plot with Barack Obama to stage a coup against United States President Donald Trump, and that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un is a CIA plant.
In QAnon’s world, special counsel Robert Mueller is secretly investigating all this on Trump’s behalf. The Rothschilds are in on it too, according to this common-or-garden variety antiSemitic nincompoopery.
QAnon, which has had no presence in New Zealand but has traction as a pro-Trump vehicle in the US, dismisses attacks such as last Friday’s as ‘‘false-flag’’ incidents organised by the Clinton/Soros/Obama cabal.
Its adherents communicate on the least regulated parts of the internet and harbour a range of extremist, including white supremacist, views.
That the anti-1080 movement – with its deep connections to the gun lobby, its disregard for reason or truth, and radically anti-establishment leadership – is declaring a link to QAnon at all should be an early flag for security services seeking to prevent another Christchurchstyle massacre.
Meanwhile, if any good is to come of last Friday’s slaughter, it may be that an attack of this kind in New Zealand resonates globally in ways that yet another gun rampage in the US no longer does.
That could help shift the dial on the global response required to force social media companies to acknowledge that they are not just neutral, blameless ‘‘platforms’’, but are publishers in their own right.
A prime minister already gaining global recognition as a kind of ‘‘anti-Trump’’ has been given an unwelcome leg-up that last Friday’s shooter surely did not intend.
No matter how poorly the emaciated mainstream media may be regarded by the general public, publishers have ethical and legal obligations and a culture of editorial judgment that dwarf anything required of a social media or search engine platform.
Not having those obligations also frees the tech platforms of costs faced by publishers. They are free to concentrate on mining their users’ online profiles as efficiently as possible to potential advertisers, using increasingly sophisticated algorithms and artificial intelligence that should also be able to detect and shut down evil.
Perhaps governments everywhere in the developed world will lose patience just a little more quickly with the tiny amounts of tax these companies pay where they operate.
Facebook in New Zealand has filed no financial returns to the Companies Office since August 2015, despite foreign-owned companies normally being required to do so. The accounts for the year to December 2014 – the last on record – show it declared total revenue here of just $1.2 million and managed to record a loss of $31,198.
Before last Friday, that was no more than the generally outrageous shenanigans we’ve come to expect from borderless tech firms.
Today, such an absence of respect and engagement from a company whose tools were fundamental parts of a plan to inflict such pain and savagery in this country are an intolerable insult. – BusinessDesk