Australia Passes Law To Punish Social Media Companies For Violent Posts (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Australia passed sweeping legislation Thursday that threatens huge fines for social media companies and jail for their executives (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source) if they fail to rapidly remove "abhorrent violent material" from their platforms. The law -- strongly opposed by the tech industry -- puts Australia at the forefront of a global movement to hold companies like Facebook and YouTube accountable for the content they host. It comes less than a month after a gunman, believed to be an Australian white nationalist, distributed a hate-filled manifesto online before using Facebook to live-stream the massacre of 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Written quickly and without much input from technology companies or experts, the measure goes as far as any other democracy's attempt to punish multinational tech platforms for the behavior of their users. "The legislation criminalizes 'abhorrent violent material,' which it defines as videos that show terrorist attacks, murders, rape or kidnapping. Social media companies that fail to remove such content 'expeditiously' could face fines of up to 10 percent of their annual profit, and employees could be sentenced to up to three years in prison," the report adds. "Companies must also inform the police when illegal material is found."

"This law, which was conceived and passed in five days without any meaningful consultation, does nothing to address hate speech, which was the fundamental motivation for the tragic Christchurch terrorist attacks," said Sunita Bose, the managing director of the Digital Industry Group, an advocacy group representing Facebook, Google and other companies. "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."

Comments

Mass censorship incoming

[danbuter]

The internet was a lot of fun, guys. Sadly, it's been taken over and you will only be allowed to view government-approved content in the future.

Re:Prove that youtube videos cause violence?

[alvinrod]

I get the sentiment behind the remark, but the truth is that it takes surprisingly little to get a good (or perhaps just regular) person to do evil. Milgram showed that all you needed was someone in authority telling you that it was okay, and although it wasn't a methodologically sound study, the Stanford prison experiment suggests that people might be willing to assume that mantel of authority all by themselves and act out the evil they believe is expected of them.

I look at religion not as cosmic truth, but as early human attempts to keep people from evil. It's certainly as susceptible to corruption as much as any institution, and definitely a tool for controlling a population, but humans are downright savage. If we appear nice and moral today, it's thanks to progress and an abundance of resources. Remove that and we'd be at each other's throats in short order.

Re:Prove that youtube videos cause violence?

[stealth_finger]

Saying religion is the root of all evil when it is actually just "humans" being evil just shows that you have a nasty bias that creates a serious deficit of intellectual honesty in your logic!

Yeah but it's a lot easier when you can say 'This is gods plan' or 'god told me to do it' or 'its in the fucking bible' and move responsibility rather than take it yourself. Being a dick to others it literally codified in the books. Yes, people are dicks, but religious people are generally bigger ones.

Re: Prove that youtube videos cause violence?

[drinkypoo]

I refuse to hate an entire nation or religion because of some wrongdoing in the past. But I won't forget it either...

It's ridiculous not to abhor all religion based on what it's done in the past, given that it's not materially different today and can do all the same stuff again.

Religion teaches some people to feel superior to other people because they believe something stupid. As such, it is all harmful.

Religions which promote theocracy are especially bad, which is why Islam is particularly bad. It explicitly teaches that any laws not of god are inferior to those which are of god, and sets itself up as the voice of god. Theocracy always leads to abuse. ALWAYS.

Any religion can used for the basis of theocracy, so that's another bad thing about all religions. But religions which are deliberately theocratic are especially awful.