The papers today were full of stories about how the world needs to crack down on social media's spread of information about violence and jihad like the latest incident on London Bridge. It reminds me of the early days of public television news broadcasts which were seen as something more than just raw news. In some parts of the world it hasn't changed much. When you are overseas and see news that carries pictures of dead children lying in the street, you can get the idea that the Western news is probably right in being politically correct on some things. It took a long time to get to a point that the public broadcasting networks decided to police their own rather than face government legislation that was coming down the road. A wise choice at the time.
The first set of stories out today mentions that the U.S Congress is starting to talk about getting a handle on social media, something I'm sure the social media industry already knew and was starting to try to diffuse by doubling its efforts to review its live features that show suicides and rapes of total strangers. This is not something we want our children looking at. The other question about terrorism and jihad of radical Muslims is a little harder to define.
It is clear enough when a social media outlet says get cars and knives and attack non-Muslims during the month of Ramadan, which some of these ISIS sites have done. There is no doubt that this kind of message needs to get off social media, but the fact that it has been going on for years with nobody doing anything is a clear representation of how difficult a problem that is. Some of the sites that inhabit the Internet are slightly more subtle than that. Encouraging fidelity to one's faith is permissible almost anywhere. Encouraging the killing of people who are not of that faith is forbidden almost everywhere because we all know where that leads. It is a definable problem but the solution may not make you happy.
Years ago, Willis Ware said you could stop computer crime by putting an informant in every data center (which would have worked in those days) but it might not be worth the result. Yes, we can stop this kind of thing from being posted on the Internet but the way chosen by Russia, China and a third of the world's countries is censorship. The Federal government decides what is allowed and what is not - then every social media company and every service provider monitors part of that to ensure the prohibition of banned material. People who violate the rules can be arrested. That is what will be proposed by some.
Free speech advocates have gone too far in the direction of allowing all speech, when they know there are limits that have to be imposed. That 37-year old man who sends texts to my neighbors daughter who is 15 does not have a free speech right. That Jihaadist does not have a right to propose killing anyone of another faith. But, it would take an army of censors to find even a small amount of this stuff. China has hundreds of thousands of these kinds of people, and if you don't mind what goes with it, you will be better off with having it.
The knifes in London last week are only a small part of a larger problem that we had better think about before we start drafting legislation or adding to the social media oversight of media companies. The media companies are partly to blame for not regulating themselves, but I'm not sure we want to go off into the mandated censorship realm too quickly. That may be where we are going right now.
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