Staying safe in the new Wild West, the internet

OPINION: One week on from the atrocity, I keep thinking about the people sitting at their screens watching as it happened. 

You'd hope a person's first thought would be to alert someone, anyone, that something catastrophic was happening. At least one watcher maintains they reported it immediately to Facebook, but what about the remaining 200, or was it 2000? Where were their minds as they tapped out their thoughts and went right on watching? How can a person do that?

'The Wild West', they call the internet, whenever something happens that's so depraved, so despicable, we can scarcely believe it. The most you're likely to get is a shrug.

"I'm sure there's more that can be done in terms of learning from it" and "we all feel terrible about it", said someone from Facebook, whose job title is VP public policy, about the murder of 50 people broadcast live on their platform.

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The original Wild West no longer exists. In its place came telegraph wires and railway lines and law enforcement and rules and regulations and freeways and burger chains. Most people crave order. 

But not everyone. Some people enjoy chaos and misery and untrammelled hostility, at least from the comfort of a computer desk.

How much hate is festering in the new Wild West? How many white supremacists do we have amongst us? How many of them have murderous intent? Was there just the one? There could be some cold comfort to take from that, but you wouldn't want to assume it. Best we press on doing what Australia did and make it a hell of a lot more difficult for a mass murderer to get their hands on the necessary weapons of death. Then we work out what else to do about about racists and Islamophobes and white supremacists living in our towns, in our neighbourhoods, sitting at their screen, sharing their thoughts, nursing their malevolence.

How many? My estimate from following social media would not be modest, but maybe that's reading the temperature of the room with a thermometer in the oven.

In the new Wild West, you unload yourself often and angrily. The Prime Minister wore a headscarf and observed the Muslim call to prayer. You might see that as compassionate respect, but there were people who were furious, called it bending the knee to a dangerous creed. That's quite the mental leap to look right past the peaceful lives of the vast majority of Muslims who make up a quarter of the world's population, to fixate on the deranged mayhem of fringe extremists and fanatics.

Like the old Wild West, this new one also has the medicine shows and the snake oil: speaking-circuit hucksters stirring up Islamophobia and making fallacious free speech arguments were busy this week denouncing our PM and the gun reforms, slopping out swill for  their mouth-breathing Twitter followers, courting controversy, hustling tickets. Brian Tamaki was in there grabbing the mic as well, needless to say.

Meanwhile, out amongst real living humans, the PM was being embraced by appreciative people grateful for her warmth and compassion and her message of reassurance and its implicit promise of maintaining order.

When will order come to the new Wild West? Is it possible? Maybe don't try to bite off anything  bigger than your head. Maybe start by looking at Facebook. The capability to live-stream content is a feature they added not all that long ago, and it looks as though it's inherently incapable of being adequately controlled. If they can't control it, how about making them remove it?

They could rely on people reporting bad content, but they'd need an army of people policing it. They're in it for the  money, Facebook, and that militates against paying an army of the necessary size. And it's probably not even possible to train machines to do it for them.  YouTube has an atrocity detection algorithm but reportedly that wouldn't be much use because mass shooting content is indistinguishable from video game content. And doesn't that say so much?

For an example of an internet operation with an army of people watching all day and night and fixing things immediately, there's Wikipedia. But that's a not-for-profit outfit. And like any cowboy in the new Wild West will tell you, Facebook ain't in this to make the world better.