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Australia Threatens Social Media Laws That Could Jail Tech Execs (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: Following the livestreamed New Zealand mosque shooting that left 50 dead in Christchurch, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is looking to crack down on extremist content on social media. Morrison will on Tuesday meet with Australian executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google to discuss extremist content legislation that would punish these companies' executives with jail time, the Australian Financial Review reports. Local internet service providers will also be present at the meeting.
Details of the proposed legislation aren't yet known. However, Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which applies to any company operating in the continent, showed that tech companies can change their global practices to appease local legislation. News of Morrison's meeting with tech executives comes on the same day that his government announced increased punishment for companies misusing user information. Maximum penalties for misuse of private data was raised from AU$2.1 million to AU$10 million -- or 10 percent of the company's domestic revenue, or three times the value gained from that misuse of data.
Details of the proposed legislation aren't yet known. However, Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which applies to any company operating in the continent, showed that tech companies can change their global practices to appease local legislation. News of Morrison's meeting with tech executives comes on the same day that his government announced increased punishment for companies misusing user information. Maximum penalties for misuse of private data was raised from AU$2.1 million to AU$10 million -- or 10 percent of the company's domestic revenue, or three times the value gained from that misuse of data.
tech will just take an ausexit then
Whilst GDPR shows that tech companies can change their global practices to appease local legislation - Australia is tiny compared to Europe, so I suggest the big tech companies show the Australian Government the finger, stop providing all services into Australia, and then wait for the inevitable citizen uprising which will force the Government to retract from their stupidity.
That was awesome. Too bad freedom of speech is dead now. Ah well, it had a good run.
This doesn't make any sense to me.
Being from the US it's tempting to make a "freedom of speech" argument, however since this is Australia I won't even go down that path. Looking at it from a purely logistical standpoint - how on Earth is a company supposed to suppress LIVESTREAMS of "extremist content". Even a human reviewer won't know what's going on until sometime specific happens.
The best they could ever hope for would be to just have a really good user reporting system but even with that you're not going to stop the first group of people from seeing it. All this will do is enforced is basically to make tech companies simply not allow livestreaming. And heck even outside of livestreaming for something like Youtube they can't possibly human review all uploaded content to know if it's against the rules.
To me, whether there's nefarious motive behind it or sincerely good intentions, this seems like a governmental push to get us back to the 1950's era of curated content only coming from official sources, rather than people actually sharing information among themselves.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
"That's hate speech!" and "Your speech is violence!" are the cries of a spoiled, infantile, unthinking, arrogant, sheltered BRAT who can't think logically.
Yay, another politician looking to make a name for themselves by regulating something they have no understanding of. What could go wrong?
Finally, there is someone willing to hold executives responsible for the actions of their companies. How many bankers went to prison over the 2008-2009 financial debacle?
Politicians should not be allowed to suggest any new laws and regulation until they have calmed down. Tragic as it is, clearly you need it, overreacting does not help.
L'Idiot
Alledged extremest whatever. Who is fit to be judge jury and executioner?
Australia has signed several US trade agreements which supercede and override Australian law. - with ISDS, with extradition. Annoyingly, the US constitution would mean no such alledged untastefulness can be sanctioned if it is legal in America. Try it and ISDS will have their hide.
So the morons planning knee-jerk laws don't understand our trade agreements or the international global aspect of the internet. Then data misuse. No mandatory fine. No direct compensation to the victims directly. No public notices outlining what went wrong - not just techical issue, often used to describe unfilled positions and unperformed duties.
As for domestic revenue, the multinationals book 99.9% of that via an overseas entity, so like no tax paid, no penalty there at all.
NZ was able to block access to sites and information outside of NZ and I'm not quite sure how successful they were making everyone backdoor their encryption. Say what you will about the US but this stuff is less likely to succeed here.
If this trend continues we'll be dealing with Chinese law in our corner of the internet. Its that or balkanization and the end of the global network. The corporations already have the "power" you fear, they could choose to pull their services and the government can choose to say "don't let the door hit you". Last I heard China never changed any laws for our social media companies.
Anything I disagree with is hate speech and must be removed.
Well to be fair, England only started sending convicts to Australia after America had gained its independence and could no longer be used as Blighty's dumping ground. Aussies, please don't try to hog all that glorious convict history. ;-)
Living in a country that is currently pretty oppressive in terms of speech (Russia) and observing the same tendencies all over the world, I'm starting to kind of like these developments. The larger the scale of censorship, the quicker people adopt the media and channel that simply cannot be censored, at least without a big collateral damage to national and international IT infrastructure.
I have added a very edifying link on the punishment of transportation:
http://vcp.e2bn.org/justice/page11405-background-and-reasons.html
Infidel beheadings, of course, will continue to be broadcast unimpeded ...
without the overhead and disadvantages that smaller companies have and this is what allows them to out-compete and kill the competition. If the same thing happened to a small business, it would be shunned in society and quickly driven to oblivion by public, if not by the legal process.
I understand the problem of moderating live content on such a large global platform is difficult, but technological limits should not be the argument for bending around legal boundaries and compliance expectations.
And live streaming of murders is not free speech. Everything has limits and should comply with social norms of what is acceptable and ethical behavior.
It is time that larger organizations were forced to deal with the issues that come with size and scale. If that levels the playing ground and allows for more competition then it will be a good thing to have.
Thankfully in America I am free to watch and share the livestream of NZ as much as I please. I should print some screen grabs for my local mosque.
... the EU and Australia.
Data whoring is getting out of hand.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Terrorism existed before the internet. If you take away a free internet, you will still have terrorism; you just won't have the freedoms essential for a functioning democracy anymore. You would, in essence, be handing a victory to the terrorists.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Just like the EU and their fines for "anti-competitiveness" when they come up a few hundred million short on their budgets.
"Maximum penalties for misuse of private data was raised from AU$2.1 million to AU$10 million -- or 10 percent of the company's domestic revenue,..."
That's where the Aussies are going wrong.
The EU is feared because they fine based on global revenues. It's not just a few dollars of Aussie revenue at stake, it's billions at stake for companies who do wrong in the EU.
This also stops games like claiming revenues are low in one country because the money paid by the consumer in that country are sent to a different country to "provide services".
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
...Australia would have jailed Abraham Zapruder for the Kennedy assassination.
Maybe we should go back to blaming the guys pulling the trigger, whether it's on the gun or the video camera.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Their EULA say that they own the content and they can re-sell it to whoever the feel like without giving you anything. So it makes sense that they are held responsible.
My opinion, if anyone is interested, is that there should be 2 cases. You're on the web for the money so you're responsible for all content displayed on your site, or you're NOT for profit and you're only responsible for your own content.
By not for profit I mean either you are registered as a non profit organization, or you make ZERO money from your site - yes that means no ads.
I wonder if this could stretch as far as the notion of putting a telecoms giant owner in prison because terrorists used said network to coordinate whatever attack at whichever time.. Maybe it could be me jumping the gun here but you know where stuff leads to these days.. More red tape and threats eh!
That's a bit rich coming from Scott Morrison, just him and Peter Dutton having a conversatrion is full of extremist content.
So, we have a tragedy in New Zealand. And the politicians are jumping all over it, with attempts to increase governmental power. It would be sad, if it weren't so damned stupid.
Guns are useful tools. Outlawing tools is not a solution. The internet is the greatest information-sharing tool ever invented. Censoring it is not a solution. A perfectly safe world is not a world anyone would want to live in: freedom would not exist, we would all be locked into individual rubber rooms. How else could mommy-government keep us safe?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Too bad they won't do that.
Corporatism != Free Market
If the government can define an algorithm with less than 0.001 percent false positives and 99 percent extremism detection rate that can be used to judge what content is extremist with no input other than the content after the moment the content first appears, go for it. I'm even OK if the algorithm can't be executed by an existing computer as long as the only criteria used are unchanging, concise, provably remove all subjectivity, and can be executed by someone of intelligence higher than about a standard deviation below average.
IOW, if you pick people randomly, train them, and have them fully independently follow the algorithm on 100,000 videos with no replay capability (they need to keep up with a live stream), there should not be more than one instance, (including those instances where there is an error in application of the algorithm) where a video's classification is improperly determined to be extremist. Even then, given the millions of daily livestreams, this algorithm would expose many people every day to the public humiliation of having a video improperly pulled for content that was not truly extremist. But, I guess that's the price of progress.
But our government knows nothing about IT as demonstrated by their new broadband network, their stupid encryption laws and the fact that government online services seem to be constantly off-line.
Oh, and of course they'll make sure they're exempt as per normal
.. that are stirring up hatred?
if anyone deserves jailtime, it's the asshats creating the environment of hate.
like, Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton?
I hope Scomo is aware that social networks already contract the work of content moderation out to other companies. These companies employ people in sweatshop conditions to make decisions based on nebulous 'community standards'. They already witness so many horrific things in the course of their work that they are mentally scarred, resort to aberrant behaviour themselves to cope, and lose all support whatsoever if they quit. Insistence that the social networks do more will not improve the situation for these people.
The content in question is not illegal. Get fucked.
- An Australian