Some of the kids and idiots that are being obscenely disgusting online aren’t clever enough to use different technologies, different platforms, or really come up with new terms. Ban all the terms. Delete and lock out any account found to be using any phrases. Other platforms don’t exist for some of the people they are racially abusing. No wonder we’re in trouble when there’s almost an apologist response to what we can do to stamp it out
It's worse than that. If they're picked up on a statement that is discriminatory they genuinely believe they're the victim. The victim isn't the person or group of people being abused, made to feel inferior and unwelcome, it's them because you've picked them up on what they said. This is usually a male trait. I encountered it recently with an utterly bizarre rant claiming character assassination (ironically littered with such comments) from someone who had chosen to draw everyone's attention to a mistake from someone whose crime, it turned out, was simply being a woman.
Not an apology for it at all, don't be stupid. By all means delete, ban and prosecute, but when symbols of white supremacy now include a cartoon frog and the okay hand gesture saying "ban all the terms" is asinine.
For each conviction, removal of their most favoured typing digit? Bit extreme? Maybe we should just try it and see how it goes for a month or two.
That last comment was a general assessment of some of the replies in this thread. Making out we're doing enough, or if we do more they'll just find a way around it, or there isn't anything we can do. Let's at least force them to find a way around it rather than doing nothing and assuming reporting and blocking is enough.
I don’t believe censorship is always the best policy, it leaves the idiots thinking they’re victims because they can’t say whatever they want. In my day we didn’t cancel racists we shone a spotlight on them. Putting the BNP on Question Time achieved more than banning the EDL from Facebook did. But by the same token the media need to understand their power in this, we need to get rid of this ridiculous idea of ‘balance’, to challenge lies and treat liars and charlatans with the contempt they deserve. Not to give too much oxygen to people who might have some ‘entertainment value’ but aren’t fit for office.
Social media, in my opinion, isn’t just another form of communication. I think it’s the greatest rupture in the history of civilisation. That's because throughout the history of mankind, the ability to communicate, via words and images, to a mass audience has been held in the hands of a very, very few people. This holds true, from the old scribes, printing press, books, newspapers, advertising, radio right up to TV. And that ability to communicate messages is a huge responsibility. That’s why you have to be trained, and what you communicate is subject to codes of conduct and laws. Social media now gives every individual the power to communicate with the whole world almost instantly. The phone in your hand lets you create words and images and disseminate them instantly to a worldwide audience. You are your own advertising agency, newsroom, TV producer but… You need no training. There is no effective law or restraint on what you do. You are invisible. You have the power but no responsibility. You can react instantly and that usually means emotionally. The more extreme your views, the more you’ll get noticed. Everyone is now at the same level – politicians, journalists, advertisers you, me, the racist, the liar, weirdo, conspiracy theorist. We’re all reacting emotionally to someone’s else’s reaction to someone else’s reaction, trying to be heard, in a never-ending torrent of extremism. And most of the time we don’t know who those other people really are. We were seduced by the idea of social media being some utopian worldwide community. What’s coming at us is a dystopia of hate and division. Or look at it like this. Imagine you’re walking down a beach in Thailand. Everyone’s on the sun loungers getting the beers in. Then you notice the tide rushing out. Weird, but you carry on. A while later someone notices a wave. It looks big, very big. When social media was created a few years ago it was the unseen earthquake. Now we’re facing a tidal wave that will take out everything in its path. I think there are ways to arrest this but if someone’s making billions out of hatred and division, they won’t be interested. Even worse, given what they’ve created even they might not know the way out. Best find a palm tree to cling to.
My thing with this abuse of people online, how can you be arsed? Where do people get the energy from to do this. The world is **** enough without ******* idiots abusing people online. I’m not just talking racism here, either. The Leeds Karen Carney thing is a perfect example. Why do they give a ****? And that’s before you bring the sexism into it.
Personally I think it a greater danger for the ability to communicate with a mass audience to only be in the hands of the elite.
The way it would work is that it would flag up a potentially offensive post which would then be reviewed by a human. Depending which way the review went the algorithm would be modified accordingly. It would look for particular words in isolation so anything with the "n" world would be flagged and it would also look for combinations of words so any containing the word "black" would only be flagged in combination with certain other words, and so on. Not rocket science.
Yes that has always been dangerous. The elite will exploit any new form of communication (Hitler's use of the radio.) And the elite are exploiting and encouraging the divisions created by social media. Which makes it even more worrying.