Wild West of snakes and snake oil
what else to do about about racists and Islamophobes and white supremacists living in our towns, in our neighbourhoods, sitting at their screen, sharing their thoughts, nursing their malevolence.
How many? My estimate from following social media would not be modest, but maybe that’s reading the temperature of the room with a thermometer in the oven.
In the new Wild West, you unload yourself often and angrily. The prime minister wore a headscarf and observed the Muslim call to prayer. You might see that as compassionate respect, but there were people who were furious, called it bending the knee to a dangerous creed. That’s quite the mental leap to look right past the peaceful lives of the vast majority of Muslims who make up a quarter of the world’s population, to fixate on the deranged mayhem of fringe extremists and fanatics.
Like the old Wild West, this new one also has the medicine shows and the snake oil: speaking-circuit hucksters stirring up Islamophobia and making fallacious free-speech arguments were busy this week denouncing our PM and the gun reforms, slopping out swill for their mouth-breathing Twitter followers, courting controversy, hustling tickets. Brian Tamaki was in there, needless to say.
Meanwhile, out amongst real living humans, the PM was being embraced by appreciative people grateful for her warmth and compassion and her message of reassurance and its implicit promise of maintaining order.
When will order come to the new Wild West? Is it possible? Maybe don’t try to bite off anything bigger than your head. Maybe start by looking at Facebook. The capability to live-stream content is a feature they added not all that long ago, and it looks as though it’s inherently incapable of being adequately controlled. If they can’t control it, how about making them remove it?
They could rely on people reporting bad content, but they’d need an army of people policing it. They’re in it for the money, Facebook, and that militates against paying an army of the necessary size. And it’s probably not even possible to train machines to do it for them. YouTube has an atrocity detection algorithm but reportedly that wouldn’t be much use because mass shooting content is indistinguishable from video game content. And doesn’t that say so much?
For an example of an internet operation with an army of people watching all day and night and fixing things immediately, there’s Wikipedia. But that’s a not-for-profit outfit. And like any cowboy in the new Wild West will tell you, Facebook ain’t in this to make the world better.
When will order come to the new Wild West? Maybe start by looking at Facebook.