Social media muddle : You said what now?
The killing of Jack McAllister carries many a caution for social media users about how their words can be used against them.
Jack McAllister was murdered in the midst of a social media blizzard. Facebook messages and texts swirled among a host of young Southlanders before, during and after the night of June 7, 2017, when the 19-year-old whose sex-pest reputation was rightly or wrongly worsening was knifed to death.
For five dispiriting weeks a jury was time and again asked to determine what social media could rightly tell them about the dynamics of this murder.
But there’s another question, outside the scope of the trial.
What might this murder tell us about the dynamics of social media?
Some of the messages prior to the killing turn out to have been deadly literal in intent.
You might think there’s little point in tippytoeing around what Brayden Whiting-Roff was thinking when he posted, shortly before inflicting more than a dozen wounds endured by McAllister: ‘‘I’m gona f..k him up this time idgaf wht anyone says he is worth going to jail for. Pigs aren’t doing anything. i will catch you up Jack’’
But he wasn’t on trial. He was one of two who had earlier admitted murder charges.
The five defendants were charged as parties to the death, purely on the basis of their organisational or supportive roles.
Each asked for understanding that they had been part of some eddies of information but not others. And their horror at when they realised the extent of Whiting-Roff’s assault. And for their own recorded words – and actions – to be understood as intending, at worst, an intervention involving, okay, maybe some rough justice.
But all with corrective intent. Not a knifing. And certainly nothing as savage, as deadly, as the Crown contended was plainly expectable.
One defendant, David Wilson, told police: ‘‘But yeah, I’m pretty sure he did say he was gonna kill him but there had been a lot of people on Facebook saying they were gonna kill him as well . . . but I didn’t think anything of it . . . cos there is a lot of people in Invercargill that do talk like that and don’t do anything.
‘‘I thought he mean kill him as in, like, punch him.’’
And Whiting-Roff had pulled out a knife on McAllister previously.
‘‘But he didn’t use it. That’s the point I was going on about.’’
Police captured hundreds of cellphone communications, through Facebook and texting. Some were righteously violent and dripping menace. Some angry and aggrieved. Hurt. Some supportive, some cautionary.
Some romantic, would you believe? Because the authors were in their late teens or early 20s and though the trial was packed with intimations of troubled young lives, the malfunctioning support networks revealed in the messages weren’t, in all cases, solely platonic.
Hence the weird moment when one of Invercargill’s more hardass defence lawyers, Bill Dawkins, standing amid more than a dozen lawyers and court staff (who in their black robes looked like a murder of crows) found himself giving voice to a lengthy array of lovey-dovey emoticons.
It reached the stage where he interrupted his translations: ‘‘ . . . kiss, hug, kiss, hug . . . I can’t believe I’m saying this . . . ’’
Hearts and flowers among the bloodlust, with lots of ‘‘lols’’ that wouldn’t have anyone laughing out loud. All mixed up together, seemingly fired off with either a wrongheaded sense of privacy, or an indifference to any risk they would be become subject to stony judgment.
But once police rounded up the messages and texts as the law permits and
‘‘How many times have wives said of their husbands, ‘in that moment ‘I wanted to kill him’? To some extent that happens a lot online.’’ Netsafe chief executive Martin Coker
technology empowers, the horrid highlights were were displayed on large screen in the courtroom, the significance of so many words and phrases contested in excruciating detail.
Even if the defendants hadn’t appreciated that all this could happen, what should we make of the shockingly unguarded phone calls afterwards, from prison – even though the participants in each call were first cautioned in a formal recorded message that what they said would be taped and may be used as evidence?
In one of these, the name-suppressed 24-year-old woman had a conversation with her mum that made for harrowing listening. The daughter protesting her innocence, the mother telling her, over and over, that she had put herself in this position through her choice of friends. Daughter: I didn’t kill anyone. Mum: You went there. You went there. Daughter: Oh, so would you if you found out your mate was getting killed. Mum; What mate was getting killed? Daughter: Oh, it doesn’t matter. Mum: No, you shouldn’t be talking about this on the phone and you bloody well know it.
Knew it or not, the daughter said it all. But maybe people who aren’t great communicators still need to communicate. And now they live in an age with unprecedented capacity to live out loud.
Important point. The Crown didn’t rely solely on the recorded communications for its case. Far from it. The prosecution wove this through a great deal of other contexts, including physical meetings including one at Ettrick St where one, two, maybe three knives came out, though only one was used. Then there was extensive CCTV footage from half a dozen different locations, and police interviews the following morning.
And here, says Netsafe chief executive Martin Coker, is something the rest of us would well to bear in mind
‘‘Social media exchanges between friends don’t happen in a vacuum.’’
Nobody lives only on social media. We might talk over the same matters with the same people in online exchanges, phone calls and pub chat. Online material can be pretty readily retrieved, phone calls may be more difficult, and exactly what was said in pub talk can prove almost impossible to capture with great confidence afterwards.
‘‘The critical thing is that social media leaves the most recoverable trace.
‘‘We need to recognise that these social media and digital communications spaces are not as private as we assume – or not as permanently private.’’
Sometimes messages fired off in haste may wind up being scrutinised through a lens applied in the investigation of a crime or tragedy.
People who message and text need to understand the legitimacy of this, Cocker says, and we all need to acknowledge that the investigations present interpretive hazards among the obvious insights.
ometimes or words mean exactly what they look like they mean. But several of the accused said they just didn’t believe some of the more extravagant messages, texts and inperson comments were meant literally.
Cocker doesn’t want anyone to think he’s commenting on the specifics of this case, but ask yourself this, he suggests: ‘‘How many times have wives said of their husbands, ‘in that moment ‘I wanted to kill him’? To some extent that happens a lot online.’’
One of the things the Netsafe team grapples with is how much of that sort of language should be interpreted as actual threats and danger to a person ‘‘and how much to interpret as meaning . . . something else. I don’t want to say harmless ranting, but less dangerous ranting’’.
Of course they try to play it safe. Netsafe sets the bar fairly low when it comes to deciding what’s a credible threat that needs to be referred to police, he says, but in truth he does wonder about the demands that would be placed on police resources if everyone reported everything that could be potentially be perceived that way.
‘‘Police would be run off their feet to the point where it would become a total distraction from their primary function.’’
Might he feel even more risk-averse if the threats were against him?
They have been. He’s an often-quoted guy and has been known to get backs up. ‘‘I don’t think we’ve considered them to be credible threats. If, later one, something happened you could look back from that and say there was clear evidence. But what about the other 300 threats that you got on the same day?’’
Here’s news that might clenched the colons of a lot of foaming online commentators out there after McAllister’s death became news.
It didn’t arise in court and police are not commenting on this, or any other matter, until after sentencing. But after the arrests – and with written authorities from the defendants – they not only took their phones but kept the communication channels open, maintaining a close watch on the subsequent messages.
They didn’t make any posts pretending to be the accused, but they were in a position to observe, closely, what happened once news of the killing spread.
Which was heaps. A great deal of agitated messaging ensued. Some supportive, some reproachful, some threatening to the extent that, after representations from defence lawyers, the posts were taken down.
This is dangerous ground, Cocker grants, because people believed they were communicating with the accused
But subject to rules figured out and applied by the investigators, prosecutors and courts, he doesn’t rise from his seat to protest the practice.
Think more widely, he says. Who would criticise police efforts to break into child pornography rings by assuming and maintaining the online identities of those they’ve already nabbed?
‘‘That’s an amazingly effective law enforcement technique and you’d never want to take it away from them.’’
However, Netsafe does try to dissuade family members for taking this kind of DIY detection on behalf of their own loved ones.
‘‘Your most likely outcome is that it’s going to harm future law enforcement activity by corrupting evidence.
‘‘So police need to do this with guidelines. And the average person needs not to do this.’’
Another caution. Sometimes people with bad intent can have taken control of the phone or computer. Just because you know the rightful owner, and are well used to communicating this way, doesn’t mean that it’s guaranteed they are still the person at the other end.
Human history has been replete with mob activity, and of hotheadedness. Not only from young people, either. It’s been going on since long before the emergency of social media as we now know it.
But Cocker acknowledges modern communication can amplify matters.
People who are angry about something can have a sense of righteous vengeance stoked and sustained, though Cocker is quick to add that such amplifications can also apply to positive, praiseworthy sentiments.
Before our lives were quite this easily connected, groups that would get themselves het-up when they got together would naturally tend to part for what might prove to be cooling-down, settling down periods.
Now, Cocker agrees, those breaks from the babble aren’t necessarily as frequent.
‘‘We see this as a general challenge around cyber-bullying versus traditional bullying.
‘‘It used to be that people had places where they were bullied and places where they were safe. With cyber bullying they don’t.
‘‘They’re constantly accessible. ‘‘That constant connection does affect the rate at which things are taken up and can be sustained.’’
In the McAllister case, social media was also a potent organisational tool, another example of which would be the ability of the boy racer – sorry, car enthusiast – community to make and change plans with the reactivity of reef fish.
It’s one thing to gather great tracts of youthful communication, but no small thing to interpret and communicate them clearly to jurors. Some of it might be called coded. Nothing sinister, just the time-honoured tendency for each generation to develop its own slang to – we’re told – strengthen their sense of unity and exclude older authoritarian types around them. It’s been that way since before the jazz age hepcats, daddy-o.
And come on, typing messages invites abbreviations for speed and ease of use. Some of this might require translations which can be pretty easy – it’s kind of jolly to watch black-robed lawyers explaining to jurors what exactly people aren’t giving when they write ‘‘idgaf’’ .
But some of this might get into more nuanced territory.
One small example. What was Christopher Brown really communicating when he posted under Whiting-Roff’s brutal warning to McAllister: ‘‘Hard my g’’?
I wish you well in your homicidal endeavours and let me know if I can help? Or that’s harsh buddy.
Or I get it, you’re rightly angry. Absolutely the Crown case was founded on how this meshed with his actions, but the language here does speak to his frame of mind, provided the rest of us interpret it right.
Cocker isn’t being facetious when he wonders whether there might be a role for specialist translators, such as you’d find for different languages or sign language needs.
The captured communications didn’t always work against the five defendants. Sometimes it helped them. Laura Scheepers, was named among McAllister’s victims and set up the fateful encounter by enticing him to Surrey Park on a mendacious promise of sex (‘‘I’m keen to get over my ex . . . I want no strings attached okay . . . but I don’t want to take advantage of you . . . ’’)
Nice. But how her own lawyer’s heart must have sang to have seen it recorded, just as unassailably, that she had sent a message to her peers beforehand: ‘‘I don’t wanna be envolved if you’re planning on him not coming out of hospital’’.
(It’s a minor acknowledgement, this but in a trial where hundreds of wonky spellings emerged, and the defendants were several times portrayed as, shall we say, an unsophisticated bunch, we might put on record that she did promptly send a followup message correcting the spelling of ‘‘involved’’.)
Sometimes it’s not-so-funny how things turn out. Go to Brayden Whiting-Roff’s Facebook page, and you can find a 2015 meme he posted that says:
‘‘My Doctor told me to start killing people. Well not in those exact words. He said I had to reduce the stress in my life. SAME THING REALLY!’’
And underneath this someone posted ‘‘Haha . . . good solution to your stress’’.
His guilty plea means the significance of this wasn’t a matter for court consideration but maybe the rest of us take it as a reminder that posting or sharing posts might be scrutinised, even years later, in a harsh, unforgiving light?
Cocker’s palpable scorn for this sort of over-reaching is at least politely expressed.
‘‘People generally should read very little into the posting of memes. They shouldn’t be able to be used as an indication of someone’s state of mind or motivation.’’
Okay, it would be different if someone was creating a series of them about, say, arson or shooting people, which could indicate a fixation.
But it would be ‘‘pretty weak popscience’’ to read much into a meme otherwise.
Cocker says police have a responsibility to explore all the avenues to which evidence points them and social media and digital communications open lots of these. So be aware of that.
Many people might say if you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear, he says, but even if you wind up being found not guilty that doesn’t mean it’s all worked out okay in the end.
You might have been through a trial: ‘‘A harrowing experience for anybody.’’
Bottom line: we might feel free to communicate through Facebook messages and texts really openly with a person, or amid a community, that we feel we trust, or at least know.
But the prospect for a painful degree of accountability, maybe sometimes misinterpretation, to result from every blessed word is considerable.
Which is worrying for the careless communicator or the bluffing blowhard who’s just piling on.