Editorial
New Zealand First Member of Parliament Ron Mark has been at the receiving end of the stick since he asked Melissa Lee, a National MP to ‘Go back to Korea’ for her earlier remark relating to opening hours of some business houses.
We have run two stories in this – one each by long-time MP and potential Auckland Mayoral candidate Phil Goff and popular Barrister Gurbrinder Aulakh – without providing Mr Mark his Right of Reply. We have spoken to his Parliamentary colleague and hope to see him exercising his Rights.
Since those words were uttered in Parliament on November 3, there have been a series of comments all over the place, almost all of them going off the Mark (pardon the pun), calling the MP a ‘red neck,’ and all sorts of things.
We are not defending Mr Mark, but at the same time, we are not sure if anyone, including Ms Lee had paused to ponder what was said, when and why it was said.
Other racists comments
She did react in the beginning describing the comments as ‘totally, utterly, inappropriate’ but later tended to laugh it off. She would never have endorsed such expressions as ‘redneck MP’ and ‘shame on White Kiwis who forget that their forebears were also thieving migrants who stole from the original settlers.’ A new legal framework for worldwide application is expected to emerge from owners and operators of social media platforms.
As the Economist wrote, social media may have brought millions of people together, but it has torn many others apart.
Once, bullies taunted their victims in the playground; today they use smartphones to do so from afar. Media reports of “Facebook suicides” caused by cyberbullying are all too common.
Social evils
Character assassination on Twitter is rife, as are malicious Emails, texts and other forms of e-torment. A recent review of the academic literature on cyberbullying suggests, conservatively that at least a quarter of school-age children are involved as either victim or perpetrator.
“A new generation of smartphone apps is unlikely to help. With names like Whisper, Secret, Wut, Yik Yak, Confide and Sneeky, they enable users to send anonymous messages, images or both to “friends” who also use the apps. Some of the messages “self-destruct” after delivery; some live on. But at their heart is anonymity. If you are bullied via Facebook, Twitter or text, you can usually identify your attacker. As a victim of an anonymous messaging app you cannot: at best you can only guess which “friend” whispered to the online world that you might be pregnant. As the authors of the paper cited above point out, anonymity frees people “from traditionally constraining pressures of society, conscience, morality and ethics to behave in a normative manner.”
Unsurprisingly, none of this is deterring venture-capitalists. Whisper, which was launched last November, has raised more than $20m from blue-chip funds such as Sequoia Capital. Secret, at less than two months’ old, recently scored almost $9m from a group that includes Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and actor Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments.
Bullying Apps
Not every venture capitalist is as sanguine about investing in what have been dubbed “bullying apps”. In a 12-tweet diatribe, Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape and is now a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a hot Silicon Valley VC firm, took issue with both the apps and those investing in them.
“As designers, investors, commentators, we need to seriously ask ourselves whether some of these systems are legitimate and worthy,” he wrote; “… not from an investment return point of view, but from an ethical and moral point of view.”
Mark Suster, another well-known investor, took a similar stance on his blog: “It’s gossip. Slander. Hateful. Hurtful. It’s everything (Silicon) Valley claims to hate about LA but seemingly are falling over themselves at cocktail parties to check five times a night. We can do better.”
Facebook actions
Earlier this year, Facebook said that it would not allow the social network to be used to promote terrorism or hate speech.
It unveiled a wide-ranging update of its ‘community standards.’
The new guidelines give more clarity on acceptable posts relating to violence, hate speech, nudity and other contentious topics.
The new document said that Facebook will not allow a presence from groups advocating ‘terrorist activity, organised criminal activity or promoting hate.’
The move comes with Facebook and other social media struggling with defining acceptable content and freedom of expression, and with these networks increasingly linked to radical extremism and violence.
As European Union Commissioner for Justice said, “If freedom of expression is one of the building blocks of a democratic society, hate speech on the other hand is a blatant violation of that freedom. It must be severely punished.”
We would like to see some action in New Zealand.
This business of using Facebook to settle personal scores is getting far beyond decency.
