Social media executives risk jail for failing to take down violent extremist content quickly under a controversial law passed yesterday in Australia — a “world first” in the wake of the mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zeland..
Lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of the law, which holds firms like Facebook and Alphabet’s Google — and their executives — responsible for removing “abhorrent material” quickly.
The companies face fines approaching billions of dollars — or 10 percent of global annual turnover — for failing to enact the “expeditious removal” of footage of terrorism, murder and other serious crimes, while executives could face up to three years in jail.
Photo: Reuters / Mick Tsikas/ AAP
Technology companies, policy experts and lawyers pilloried the legislation — which was jammed through parliament in two days and faces an uncertain future beyond elections expected to be held next month.
“Big social media companies have a responsibility to take every possible action to ensure their technology products are not exploited by murderous terrorists,” said Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who is facing a difficult re-election battle.
Australian Attorney General Christian Porter said the legislation was “most likely a world first.”
The opposition Labor Party expressed serious misgivings, but voted in favor of the legislation — in a step that echoed the bipartisan passage of a similarly controversial law forcing technology firms to weaken encryption.
With those two reforms, Australia has put itself at the forefront of global efforts to regulate social media giants more closely, but both measures have been roundly condemned by industry experts as “knee-jerk” and ill-conceived.
It would be up to a jury to decide whether the platforms acted with good speed to take down offending content, raising questions about how the law would be implemented.
“No one wants abhorrent content on their Web sites and DIGI members work to take this down as quickly as possible,” said Sunita Bose, managing director of the Digital Industry Group, which represents Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon.com and other companies. “But with the vast volumes of content uploaded to the Internet every second, this is a highly complex problem that requires discussion with the technology industry, legal experts, the media and civil society to get the solution right — that didn’t happen this week.”
She also said that the law would encourage companies to “proactively surveil” users and criticized parliament’s “pass it now, change it later” approach.
“This is not how legislation should be made in a democracy like Australia,” Bose said.
Technology companies now face the task of developing fail-safe moderation tools capable of quickly detecting offensive material.
In the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch shootings, Facebook alone said it had taken down 1.5 million videos of the attack.
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