- Finding the right balance (Photomontage: Ken Welsh/Alamy)
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DOES technology create spaces that are beyond the law? The issue of who should take responsibility for stamping out online abuse might make it seem so.
This year has been marked by mounting concern about online hate speech, from Islamist to misogynist. But who should decide when a post goes too far? Last week Peter Fahy, chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, said he and his colleagues in the security establishment should not be left to judge when unpopular opinions become actionable abuse. That, he warned, risked "a drift to a police state". He might have added that the sheer volume of such cases defies conventional policing.
Unconventional policing, then? It is tempting to ask the tech companies behind the social media boom to build tools that can automatically spot abuse and address it. But even a spotting system orders of magnitude better than anything available today would generate huge numbers of false positives when dealing with, say, Facebook traffic.
Many such companies have been reluctant to engage with this issue, citing a generally admirable commitment to freedom of speech. And they are loath to act as anything other than a carrier of messages, although that stance is growing hard to square with their desire to store and analyse every last scrap of our personal data.
But just because there is no easy balance doesn't mean we should give up. And indeed, hands-off attitudes are giving way to more active governance (see "The fight back against rape and death threats online"). Ultimately, the state, the tech giants and their users will have to work in concert to make online spaces more civil. That's as it should be: the best policing is by consent, not diktat (see "Why are US police so prone to violence?").
For that, the state must eschew the temptation to overreach, even with the best of intentions. Tech giants must stop posturing as cocky upstarts and live up to their responsibilities as corporate citizens. And individuals will have to start thinking harder before they hit "send". It's time we lived up to our responsibilities, too.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Finding the right balance"