Facebook 'must pay to police internet' or face fines: UK parliament
Facebook 'must pay to police internet' or face fines: UK
parliament
By Kate McCann MAY 1 2017 - 6:19AM
Social media firms may be forced to pay for the cost of
policing digital crimes and should be fined if they do not quickly censor
illegal posts, under plans published by a parliamentary committee on Monday.
The home affairs select committee, says that the
behaviour of Facebook, Twitter and Google has been "completely
irresponsible and indefensible" and that they should now be presented with
the bill for investigating crimes committed over their networks.
It is "shockingly easy" to find terrorist
material online and companies should face multi-million pound fines and sanctions
unless they begin taking robust action.
Similar "policing" charges are levied on
football clubs and late-night drinking establishments which are blamed for
fuelling certain types of crime.
Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, welcomed the report and
said its recommendations were being studied "carefully" while police
chiefs also said that action was now necessary.
Half of all crimes reported to police now involve some
element of social media involvement, with terrorist offences, hate crimes and
threats of violence all being committed online.
Ministers have had to introduce specific offences to
cover crimes committed over social media such as grooming and stalking - and
there are growing fears over violent incidents now being live-streamed on
Facebook and other sites.
Internet firms have faced repeated accusations that they
are failing to address concerns over the material being published on their
platforms.
Ms Rudd said that social media firms had to prove that
they were serious about tackling criminal activity online.
She said: "We have made it very clear that we will
not tolerate the internet being used as a place for terrorists to promote their
vile views, or use social media platforms to weaponise the most vulnerable
people in our communities.
"We will continue to push the internet companies to
make sure they deliver on their commitments to further develop technical tools
to identify and remove terrorist propaganda and to help smaller companies to
build their capabilities. I will expect to see early and effective
action."
A spokesman for the National Police Chiefs Council said:
"Hate and extremist material online is a serious problem with potentially
very dangerous consequences. This is an interesting idea.
"The detail would need to be considered but we are
supportive of looking at a range of ways to speed up removing this content
wherever it is being shared."
The home affairs committee, headed by Yvette Cooper, the
former Labour Cabinet minister, calls on Theresa May to punish social media
companies that fail to remove criminal content after its investigation found
they were "shamefully far" from tackling terrorist and criminal
postings properly.
Ms Cooper said: "Social media companies' failure to
deal with illegal and dangerous material online is a disgrace.
"They have been asked repeatedly to come up with
better systems to remove illegal material such as terrorist recruitment or
online child abuse."
The committee adds it is "completely irresponsible
and indefensible" that online companies do not take down banned material
as soon as it is posted and warned that sanctions and multi-million pound fines
should be introduced to force them to take it seriously.
Earlier this month Twitter was heavily criticised for
refusing to share crucial anti-terrorism information with the Government.
The MPs say it was "shockingly easy" to find
hate speech and terrorist propaganda online, particularly on YouTube.
In one example: "Twitter refused to remove a cartoon
that we reported depicting a group of male, ethnic minority migrants tying up
and abusing a semi-naked white woman, while stabbing her baby to death. It
refused to take action on the grounds that it was not in breach of [Twitter's]
hateful conduct policy."
The NSPCC welcomed the report and called on politicians
to protect children online by doing more to tackle the problem of illegal
material.
The report states: "Social media companies rely on
their users to report extremist and hateful content for review by moderators.
They are, in effect, outsourcing the vast bulk of their safeguarding
responsibilities at zero expense.
"In the UK, the Metropolitan Police's Counter
Terrorism Internet Referral Unit monitors social media companies for terrorist
material. That means that multi-billion pound companies like Google, Facebook
and Twitter are expecting the taxpayer to bear the costs of keeping their
platforms and brand reputations clean of extremism."
People who use multiple social media accounts only meet
friends once a fortnight, a survey has found.
By contrast, those with one social media account, such as
Facebook or Twitter, rarely goes over three days without seeing a friend, a
survey for the app LooseEnds found.
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