EDITORIAL:
We are constantly in awe of the capacity of the internet to sift information, catalogue it and satisfy our curiosity, feed our interests and anticipate our consumer desires. Why then, cannot those who use it to do all these things edit the messages they transmit?
Now that they have unwittingly livestreamed mass murder in a Christchurch mosque, social media hosts are facing demands from some advertisers that the clean up their act. As former Prime Minister Helen Clark has observed, if these companies put as much effort into developing algorithms for preventing the spread of hate material as they put into targeted advertising, they could easily solve the problem.
Well, maybe not easily. Hate speech does not always include readily identifiable words or phrases and images on video will be even harder for a robotic intelligence to identify as an act so dangerous it should not be seen.
But a human intelligence has no trouble recognising detestable material when it sees it. If the sheer volume of material sent to the internet defies prior scrutiny by somebody in the companies with the scale, wealth and global reach of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like, they surely have the wit to devise other solutions.