British PM Candidate Promises Social Media Crackdown (politico.eu)

Theresa May's party "is expected to win a majority at the June 8 election," reports Reuters -- and she's promising they'll pass new social media laws. An anonymous reader quotes Politico: They want to introduce a new measure that could fine or punish internet firms which fail to adequately flag and take down content harmful to minors or "direct users unintentionally to hate speech, pornography or other sources of harm," according to a press release. "The internet has brought a wealth of opportunity but also significant new risks which have evolved faster than society's response to them," May said. "We want social media companies to do more to help redress the balance and will take action to make sure they do"... The Conservative digital platform also promises to better protect Brits' personal information, compelling social media companies to trash user records from before the age of 18. The party plans to encourage the development of digital by default government and business services, as well.

Comments

"direct users unintentionally to"

[HalAtWork]

"direct users unintentionally to"

So if it's unintentional that means a bug or error has been found in software designed to define the content

Are we going to punish companies for bugs? Perhaps the measure should at least allow the companies to address it in a timely manner, or to prove that they were at least attempting to be stringent? A punishment for something unintentional seems a little extreme.

Law of Unintended Consequences

[hyades1]

This could go a long way toward persuading average Brits they should protect their privacy...and make it considerably more difficult for law enforcement to sort out the really bad stuff from relatively harmless things.

For example, if I were an ISP, I'd probably start offering discounts to customers based on the level of internet security they were willing to employ. If a customer was willing to make it impossible or incredibly difficult and expensive for me to determine what sites they were visiting, I'd be willing to knock quite a bit off their monthly internet bill.

Re:Freedom, States and Irish passports

[ShanghaiBill]

National citizenship rules should be changed. Instead of getting automatic citizenship based on where you are born, you should instead get provisional citizenship until your 21st birthday, and then you pick permanent citizenship in the country that best fits your political and economic views.

Re:Not surprising

[AmiMoJo]

No, this goes way beyond the GDPR. The EU rules are mainly about retaining control over your data, and clarifying existing rules on the right to be forgotten (which isn't what you think it is).

The Tories are proposing mandatory porn filtering, with fines if the filters don't work. The proposal is vague, probably because they don't have any real idea how it would actually work or the burden it would place on ISPs, so it is hard to evaluate the precise level of stupidity involved.

Most likely it's just an election promise that will be quietly forgotten after a consultation where ISPs tell them it's moronic. They have proposed similar things before, but the cost usually ends up putting them off, and they already have to help pay for the new data retention and surveillance powers.