For the first time, the Happyfolk felt fearful

For they knew that soon the Monkey would stir from its deep sleep

Gorillaz feat. Dennis Hopper, Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head

On March 15, 2019, Breton Harrison Tarrant of New South Wales, Australia entered heavily armed into two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch where he opened fire killing 51 people and wounding 40 others. Minutes before the massacre, Tarrant shared a 74-page manifesto via email to more than 30 recipients, posted links on his Twitter account and on an 8chan forum, and then streamed the massacre live from his cell phone on Facebook. 

The Christchurch shootings are a clear evolution of the constellation of problems surrounding mediated voyeurism and freedom of expression that we examined in the previous chapter (9.14, 9.17, 10.11), but it is no longer about the media instigating the public to give information about a terrorist act—as in the case of KUSA-TV and the Columbine massacre—but about the perpetrator of a terrorist act broadcasting live on the Internet. We can say that what was once a threshold that pulled us in its direction has, in the last decade, ended up swallowing the world.

On the other hand, these shootings show in a particularly explicit manner the immense danger posed by the existence of unregulated online forums that become a focal point of hate speech, religious intransigence, political extremism and plain insensitivity for the suffering of others. That as far as 8chan is concerned. Regarding Facebook, rather than a failure on the part of the content moderators (10.18), this is about the implicit risks of giving the general population the opportunity to broadcast any kind of live content. It may be a good cause like coordinating for a protest, or a terrible idea like broadcasting a massacre, but come this point we must ask ourselves: is the immediacy of digital media really worth it, even if it means renouncing to a healthy measure of control, of sanity?

Even more problematic is the use that other, better-organized actors than a lone shooter, can make of social media. Starting in mid-2017, Facebook accounts in Myanmar began disseminating fake news about rapes of Buddhist women by men of the Rohingya ethnic group, a stateless Muslim minority—genuine homines sacri—which has been the target of persecution by Myanmar’s Buddhist majority for decades. In a country where Facebook is practically synonymous with the Internet on account of the Free Basics program (10.19), the spread of this “news” was quick and pervasive. Subsequently, the New York Times discovered that the accounts had been opened by military personnel who had spent years cultivating a large following and then proceeded to disseminate disinformation, fake news and anti-Muslim propaganda. The result: an upsurge in violence against the Rohingya minority, leading to a genocide (25,000+ dead by 2018) and a wave of over 700,000 refugees fleeing to Bangladesh, India, Thailand and Malaysia that prompted expansions to the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh, the largest to date on the entire planet (7.27, 7.30).

The dire consequences of Facebook’s presence in Myanmar are not only a result of the lack of truly efficient regulatory mechanisms on a global scale, but a direct consequence of the digital colonialism that has characterized Facebook’s Free Basics program, which was pulled from Myanmar in September, 2017. With the genocide of the Rohingya, the virtual paradeisos of the social networks intersects the refugee camp in a unique configuration.