Editorial: Jacinda Ardern's French mission into uncharted waters

French president Emmanuel Macron andNew Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern after their meeting at the Elysee Palace in 2018. Photo / Getty Images

Editorial

EDITORIAL

Prime Minister Jacinda's trip to Paris this week to co-chair the Christchurch Call summit with French President Emmanuel Macron will be, strangely enough, great social media fare.

The meeting in Paris on May 15 - piggybacking on an already planned meeting of digital ministers from the G7 countries - is expected to focus on initiatives to locate and remove violent terror content.

Expect the memes to flourish around the pair, and any proposals Macron and Ardern come up with to tackle the stinking mire of hateful content on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Some of these social posts will strike close to the heart of the issue - which ones are "hate speech", which are permissible parody, and who decides?

Two days before the Paris meeting, independent public policy think-tank The Helen Clark Foundation will release a report, outlining the case for New Zealand to establish a social media regulatory watchdog to crack down on just this sort of content.

Any initiative faces a big grey mass. The elephant in the room is freedom of expression - a principle esconced foremost in the French Republic's motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Once again - as with suffragettes and nuclear weapons - New Zealand could lead the way, this time in forcing the world to confront the impacts of violent content. This meeting has the potential for Ardern to again exert New Zealand's ability to punch far above its weight on a global issue.

We'll be watching Ardern's social media posts for the first word of it.