<nettime> Toby Manhire: Mark Zuckerberg, four days on, your silence on Christchurch is deafening

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/20/mark-zuckerberg-four-days-on-your-silence-on-christchurch-is-deafening


Mark Zuckerberg, four days on, your silence on Christchurch is deafening
by Toby Manhire, The Guardian, Opinion, Wed 20 Mar 2019


In New Zealand we’re waiting to see if the all-powerful Facebook boss 
means what he says about ‘moral responsibility’

More than four days have passed since the world’s weakest man launched 
an assault that took the lives of 50 people at prayer in Christchurch. 
He did it with a camera stuck to his head, live-streaming it on 
Facebook, the world’s most powerful media company. It was taken down 
after police sounded the alarm. But already it had spread through 
Twitter – where links to the video sit untroubled still despite repeated 
reports. Already it had spread across Google’s YouTube platform, where 
the most ghoulish appetites on the planet are daily sated for profit.

But it was Facebook that broadcast it live. And for all that the world’s 
first genuinely megalithic media company might protest that it worked 
hard to scrub out this tech-dystopian freak show, the video continues to 
be shared on the platform today.

More than four days on, then, the $64bn question (that’s how much Mr 
Zuckerberg is reportedly worth) is this: what do you have to say for 
yourself, Mark? Seems you’re busy, and instead have dispatched an 
underling to do the thoughts-and-prayers and “committed to countering 
hate speech and the threat of terrorism online”. Sitting here in New 
Zealand, that’s nowhere near good enough.

You’ve been silent, just as you were when you snubbed representatives of 
nine countries seeking answers on Facebook’s hazardous impact on 
democracy. They empty-chaired you. I hope, Mark, that you’re called to 
answer to the impending inquiry into what happened in Christchurch, to 
account for Facebook’s role as a propaganda conduit and distribution 
mechanism for terrorism in New Zealand. Will we have to empty-chair you, 
too?

Meanwhile the great Silicon Valley ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ scrolls on. Hey, come on, 
they say, we’re doing everything we can to tune the machines to cut out 
the evil stuff! The AI is nearly there! Keep the faith! Thanks all the 
same, but nah. Until you can sort out a system to forestall the 
livestreaming of mass murder, switch it off. Yes, any solution may 
involve employing a lot of actual human beings to make judgments. And 
that would be very expensive, it’s true. Also true: for the final three 
months of 2018 – that’s one quarter of a year – Facebook posted a profit 
of US $6.9bn.

Maybe it will take a real and present threat to those billions to get 
your full attention. It’s beginning, and it’s fired by a visceral anger. 
The bosses of New Zealand’s big telecoms companies have taken you and 
Twitter and Google to task today. Businesses across the country, and 
beyond, are pulling their advertising. A groundswell of users have begun 
closing their accounts in disgust. The world is watching. Something is 
happening.

For Facebook, Google, Twitter and the rest, the Ted-talk techbro 
“disruptive” bullshit looks every day more like cynical camouflage for 
lawlessness and avarice. Facebook is not some plucky upstart, but the 
most powerful publisher the world has ever known, wielding an 
unprecedented power and influence around the world. You might like to 
masquerade in a hoodie and jeans, but we know who you are: you’re 
stupidly powerful. You’re the chair and CEO of this giant. It’s absurd.

Your chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, has repeatedly gushed over 
our prime minister. Jacinda Ardern is a shining example to women, a 
“prodigy”. “She’s not just leading a country,” said Sandberg. “She’s 
changing the game.” There was little doubt about that then; Ardern’s 
response to the catastrophe that has befallen New Zealand’s Muslim 
community, the city of Christchurch, and New Zealand as a whole, has 
left no doubt. Up to and including Ardern’s remarks about the role of 
social media delivered in parliament on Tuesday – game-changing remarks 
which surely chilled the air, even at Facebook’s adolescently named 
address, 1 Hacker Way.

“There is no question that ideas and language of division and hate have 
existed for decades, but their form of distribution, the tools of 
organisation, they are new,” she said.

“We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist 
and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place 
where they are published. They are the publisher. Not just the postman. 
There cannot be a case of all-profit, no-responsibility.”

Something is definitely happening.

You’ve acknowledged before, Mark Zuckerberg, such as in your emotional 
letter to your newborn daughter, that you have a “moral responsibility”. 
Right now you’ve said nothing. Four days on and counting, in New Zealand 
we’re waiting to see if you have any meaningful sense of moral 
responsibility at all.


Opinion was first published in The Spinoff:
https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/19-03-2019/mark-zuckerberg-four-days-on-your-silence-on-christchurch-is-deafening/


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