The internet is full of beauty and ugliness. Most of the time, we prefer to focus on the positive here–the ways that people, using interactive communications technologies, are empowering themselves to open up politics, and the ways that organizations and institutions are also transforming how they work to be more open, participatory and accountable. But the net is also enhancing the power of humanity’s dark side–terrorists, mafioso, phishers, spammers and haters are also benefiting from interactive communications networking. Let’s not kid ourselves, the internet is a mirror of real life, or rather, it’s now inseparable from real life. Like other media, it reflects and amplifies what it going on, but with one huge difference: it makes everything much more discoverable.
Take the topic of hate speech. Right now, the American news media is all-a-twitter over the news that some idiot created a poll on Facebook asking about assassinating President Obama. The poll reportedly asked respondents “Should Obama be killed?” The choices: No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care. About 700 people had responded before Facebook, alerted by government authorities, took the poll down for violating its terms of service (no advocating violence). The Secret Service is now investigating.
As of now, Google News is showing 581 stories about this topic. I’ve gotten several breathless emails from news editors asking for comment. The cable news shows are all mentioning the Facebook poll.
But is this really such big news? On a social networking platform with 300 million users, the fact that less than one-ten-thousandth of one percent of its users took the poll, and then supposedly a tiny fraction of those answered “yes”–does that deserve such a swarm of news coverage?
The fact that the Secret Service is investigating this Facebook poll is interesting, but if it’s true that President Obama gets something like 30 death threats a day, four times as many of President Bush, as Ronald Kessler argues in his new book on the Secret Service, the real news isn’t in the usage of Facebook, it’s in the apparent rise of hate speech directed at the president.
The press ought to be focusing more on whether the Secret Service is getting stretched thin by this increasing burden, not on the “shiny newness” of these threats being expressed on a hot internet property like Facebook. “We have half the number of agents we need, but requests for more agents have fallen on deaf ears at headquarters,” a Secret Service agent told Kessler. Last May, reports suggested that the agency faced a critical shortfall of funding for vital technology upgrades. As my colleague Nancy Scola noted the other day in her post about the ACORN-BigGovernment.com YouTube videos, the media doesn’t seem to have any filter for understanding scale or importance when it comes to internet-driven news these days.
Personally, I’m hoping that the Secret Service is paying more attention to the fact that Google searches on the word combination “Obama kill” are highest in the states of Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama, than on the appearance of this poll on Facebook.
BONUS link: For a smart discussion of the internet as mirror of real life, see Jose Vargas’s commentary on the Facebook story over on the Huffington Post Technology blog.
September 29, 2009