It's time to act on social media after Christchurch: Microsoft boss

The terror attack in New Zealand was a "wake up moment" where regulation of the tech industry should be considered, the president of Microsoft told a meeting of Canberra business and academic leaders on Wednesday.

Brad Smith was speaking after Prime Minister Scott Morrison threatened to toughen laws covering social media companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter if they failed to stop the spread of hateful material and images of violence like that of the alleged murderer in the Christchurch mosques who broadcast video of his carnage as he wreaked it.

Brad Smith, president of Microsoft and its chief legal officer.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

"We need to prevent social media platforms being weaponised with terror content," Mr Morrison said in a statement.

The Microsoft president said of Christchurch, "This is a learning moment for the world. It's a learning moment for New Zealand. It's a learning moment for Australia. It's a learning moment for everyone."

He added, "Government has an ever-growing role to play."

Mr Smith is one of the tech industry's big thinkers. He now detects the kind of change of attitude which happened in the United States when the Three Mile Island nuclear power station was a millimetre from catastrophic meltdown. It led to a change in attitude towards nuclear power so no new atomic power station was built there for decades.

Speaking of the tech industry, he said of the Christchurch social media explosion of foul material, "We didn't do enough."

He said the industry needed to make sure that the "standards of civilised life in the real world also needed to apply online".

He was vaguer, however, on how diminishing it might be achieved. The significance of the speech was more in the floating of the idea that regulation is up for consideration when it was once a dirty word in the industry.

But it would need to be international. Mr Smith drew a comparison with the growth of railways in the United States in the 1880s when individual US states realised that this revolutionary technology had far-reaching consequences, some for good and some for bad.

The states realised they couldn't act alone to minimise the downside so new law was enacted giving the federal institutions power over the whole industry.

Mr Smith said there were other real dangers from social media and the tech industry: cyberattacks, including those by countries, were capable of damaging economies; and privacy issues, particularly in the wake of the revelation that a company had harvested personal data massively to use for political purposes in the United States presidential election of 2016.

"We are living through a privacy earthquake," Mr Smith said.