Editorial: Social media giants simply do not care

How callous would you have to be to ignore a plea for help from an experienced principal trying to protect the mental wellbeing of his young charges, writes the editor.

Social media giants routinely refuse to pull down deeply offensive material.

How callous would you have to be to ignore a plea for help from an experienced principal trying to protect the mental wellbeing of his young charges? The answer is you would have to be as callous as a social media company, apparently.

There is already lots of evidence to suggest those running the big social media platforms are blind to the concept of good corporate citizenship and behave as if the laws of the land – and basic human decency – do not apply to them.

They routinely refuse to pull down deeply offensive material – from young thugs boasting of their break-ins and car thefts, to terrorist-inspiring hate speech – and when taken to court by the authorities, they defend themselves by claiming to be free speech warriors, or moan about how hard it is to stay across everything that is being posted on their platforms.

This is pretty much bunkum. These are organisations that can alert advertisers to your every click within seconds and have the world-leading software and algorithms to instantly block a picture featuring, say, a stray nipple. Monitoring what you allow to be published – all of it, not just the occasional stray body part – should be an absolutely basic responsibility of any publisher.

What the social media giants are really up to is protecting a cynical business model built on keeping eyes glued to screens and fingers constantly scrolling and clicking – all valuable data to be sold to advertisers – no matter the cost to the community or the legitimacy of the content.

For proof, consider our reporting this week on the latest example of big-tech indifference to the damage and pain its practices can cause, particularly to impressionable youngsters.

On Tuesday last week, 14-year-old Isla Marschke, a passionate dancer and former student at Shalom Catholic College in Bundaberg, took her own life after years of online torment and mental health issues. Yesterday we reported on the intense frustration of Shalom College principal Dan McMahon and his “futile” requests to social media companies to remove posts harming students.

Mr McMahon explained: “Social media platforms make it very difficult to remove content. Asking TikTok to remove negative content seems to be completely futile.”

He said the school could work with individual posters if they could be identified – for “both reprimand and restoration” – but otherwise, the school relied on take-down requests to social media giants, which were often received with a “glacial response”.

“With social media companies, some respond positively if we can harness enough people to register an objection to a post, it might eventually get deleted,” Mr McMahon said.

“That is a lot of work and sometimes, not effective.”

Remember, this is an experienced educator with specific examples of objectionable and damaging material to report, not just someone angered by something they have read and disagreed with. But even then – and with the hard facts in front of them – the social media companies do not want to act.

The result, as Mr McMahon put it, was: “We are often left to deal with young people who are damaged by the words and actions of others – who may be local or they may be acting from thousands of miles away.”

This inaction of social media giants to do something about this problem of their own making is inexcusable. According to Mr McMahon: “We work enormously hard to create a culture here where students arrive at school every day and can have an expectation that they will be treated respectfully – by everyone.”

The cynical indifference of big tech makes that goal much harder to achieve than it should be.

ALBO’S POOR TIMING

No one would deny that anyone who works as hard as a prime minister of Australia deserves an occasional holiday with their family.

Similarly, it is hard to argue that someone who has devoted decades to public life should not be able to make investments to set themselves up for a comfortable retirement.

But then, or course, politics is about perception, and that is why a well-earned family holiday to Hawaii for Scott Morrison became a millstone around his neck, and a savvy real estate purchase by Anthony Albanese may prove to be the same.

Mr Morrison, or course, took his holiday as fire ravaged much of Australia’s east coast in 2019.

He didn’t help matters by justifying what some saw as a desertion with the infamous words “I don’t hold a hose”.

Mr Albanese has also been accused of terrible timing, splashing out $4.3m on a clifftop house on the NSW Central Coast while millions of Australians are struggling to pay the rent or the mortgage. He explained the purchase, saying his fiancee Jodie Haydon is “a proud Coastie”.

And while he may be entirely justified to plan for a life after politics, he has certainly given his opponents ammunition and dealt his “housing commission kid” persona a self-inflicted wound from which it may never recover.

Responsibility for election comment is taken by Chris Jones, corner of Mayne Rd & Campbell St, Bowen Hills, Qld 4006. Printed and published by NEWSQUEENSLAND (ACN 009 661 778). Contact details here

Originally published as Editorial: Social media giants simply do not care