Editorial: Social media seemingly is a friend to terrorism

photo by: Journal-World Photo Illustration

Lawrence Journal-World Editorial

In America today, a teenager still has some difficulty gaining admittance to an R-rated movie in a theater. In the same America, that same teenager has little difficulty watching a real life mass killing of people on Facebook or YouTube.

No one ever said the Information Revolution was going to be bloodless — or sensical.

That is where America and the rest of the world find themselves. For the last several years, we’ve all been a part of an information revolution that has had two hallmarks: Everybody can be a publisher, and nobody really knows where all of their information is coming from. In other words, anonymous publishing has become easier and perhaps more accepted.

Last week, some of the casualties of that revolution began to stack up. As an avowed neo-Nazi shot more than 50 people in two mosques in New Zealand, faithful followers of Facebook could watch the executions in real time. If you missed the live stream, there were plenty of opportunities to review the replay on YouTube.

An executive with YouTube told The Washington Post that the online video service struggled to identify and remove “tens of thousands” of videos that used original footage from the mosque slayings. The same article reported such videos were “appearing as quickly as one per second in the hours after the shooting.”

Apparently, terrorism has a great friend in social media.

Last week’s events are a reminder that not all revolutions have a positive outcome. But you can’t just cancel a revolution. Social media and the idea of every man and woman being a publisher are here to stay. Social media has made modest improvements in how people can stay connected. More importantly, it has an appeal to people who have felt ignored or unheard.

Perhaps, though, the events of the last week can spark meaningful change. Even before this latest incident, governments were speaking more seriously of regulating the social media companies. It will not be an easy task. It would involve regulating a network that has no geographic boundaries and very few limitations on how large it can become.

To complicate matters, the social media companies have adopted a strategy with a fundamental flaw. They’ve created a platform where everyone is a publisher but no one is an editor. Facebook and YouTube belatedly have tried to add editors, or content monitors, who can remove objectionable material. It has been a half-hearted effort. Editing runs counter to the companies’ ethos and business models. Even if they were to get more serious, the size of the networks make it virtually impossible to hire enough editors to adequately do the job. As artificial intelligence advances, it perhaps could play the role of editor, but that likely will create a whole new set of problems.

The free market could help. If users of the social media platforms were required to pay a monthly fee to post material, there would be less content to manage. While it likely wouldn’t have prevented the shooter from posting his video, there wouldn’t have been one video per second being posted either. Sadly, we have a culture where millions will kill time watching the killing of people. But if you make them get a few dollars out of their pocket, they’ll kill time elsewhere. Those that continue to post such filth at least would leave a money trial that might allow them to be tracked.

It is doubtful government can force social media companies to adopt a pricing strategy and unlikely the companies will do so on their own. Perhaps more realistic is that the social media companies can adopt technology that truly requires posters to identify themselves. That likely will create concerns from privacy advocates.

Every revolution, though, requires sacrifices. Privacy may be one of them. In the meantime, keep your head down and try to limit your time at the front lines. Social media sites are becoming more dangerous by the day.

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