OK Google – are you my moral compass?

With the recent Christchurch terror attack I have been pondering on our responsibility as educators. After having some challenging conversations as a parent with my own son about watching the gunman’s video (it popped up in his Instagram feed as a ‘recommended link’….), I’m wondering if all our students here have had similar conversations at home. There are two main issues for me – the lack of tolerance and build up of hate that motivated the attacks, and the sharing of the livestreamed video on social media. Let’s look at the social media aspect first.

Some of the big Internet companies have come under scrutiny about the role their services play in the distribution of harmful material such as the shooters video. In fact NZ’s Privacy Commissioner stated in the aftermath that

“What we haven’t seen and what is of real disappointment to me, is any kind of acceptance of Facebook’s role, any sort of critical self reflection, any contrition, or response.”

While Facebook responded with a typical “We did the best we could” approach, the fact remains that their platform, along with others such as Instagram and Youtube help spread harmful material.

Facebook’s story of how quickly the video was spread is enlightening. From an estimated 200 users watching the live stream, to 4000 views before it was removed by Facebook, to over 1.5 million attempted uploads to Facebook within the first 24 hours (of which 1.3 million were blocked).

The video and associate manifesto is now classified as ‘Objectionable’ an as such now has a number of legal implications for sharing. There have been published accounts of individuals being charged with breaking this law but this seems more like example discipline with the proverbial cat already being let out of the bag.

So what responsibilities to the big Internet companies have. Do we rely on them to point our moral compass in the right direction? From this recent incident we can see that even if the big companies try to censor or remove hateful posts, the immediacy of sharing which is the foundation of social media can’t put the genie back in the bottle. So education, and particularly values education, becomes so much more important in this media rich age. And schools can play and important part.

In terms of the hate that apparently motivated this attack, I was particularly proud of how our country responded. Our Prime Minister has been lauded internationally for how she demonstrated her leadership (and even talk of a Nobel Peace Prize?!)

But it was not only our country’s politicians. On a very local level, the student leaders at my school organised a memorial with 50 empty chairs on our outdoor stage. Students had a chance to write a message on a post it and place it on one of the chairs.

The Tauranga Boys’ College memorial

I think schools still do have a responsibility to help point our young people’s moral compass in the right direction. While most schools, like my own, have a scheme of work somewhere that delivers digital citizenship lessons (in our school it is the PE department delivering an eight lesson unit to all the Y9s), I think we are all teachers of values. I found in my own practice that this event was is one of those teachable moments we should take advantage of. Even just have a chat with a few kids in your class, rather than some fully blown articulated lesson might make a difference. I found that students did want to talk about what happened, particularly the spread of the video.

Here are some links/resources that might be useful if you want to have some similar discussions with your students.