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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
Yay, another politician looking to make a name for themselves by regulating something they have no understanding of. What could go wrong?
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
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.
The trade agreements protect the brand and its right to sell and be competitive. .
Not the staff who have to face their own gov demand for censorship, IP logs, CC numbers, their nations assistance to police.
US trade agreements are not full diplomatic immunity for all big brand workers.
Invest in another nation and face its theocracy with blasphemy laws.
Spain and its all about tracking anything to do with Catalonia.
China on Taiwan, Tiananmen square, Communist party history, bear cartoons and...
Germany and history, the protection of democracy.
The EU and a link tax, total censorship.
US freedom of speech and freedom after speech is looking great.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
"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.
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!
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
This.
These guys are taking away your rights*. And threatening jail time for anyone who doesn't support their pogrom. Sounds pretty extremist to me. ISPs need to band together and block these guys from the Internet. Better safe than sorry until someone actually comes up with a definitive list.
*Whatever these might actually be in Aus.
Have gnu, will travel.
.. that are stirring up hatred?
if anyone deserves jailtime, it's the asshats creating the environment of hate.
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.