Social Media Bosses Could Be Liable For Harmful Content, Leaked UK Plan Reveals (theguardian.com)

The United Kingdom is working on legislation that would hold social media executives liable for harmful content distributed on their platforms. The leaked white paper comes less than 24 hours after Australia passed sweeping legislation that threatens huge fines for social media companies and jail for their executives if they fail to rapidly remove "abhorrent violent material" from their platforms. From the report: Under plans expected to be published on Monday, the government will legislate for a new statutory duty of care, to be policed by an independent regulator and likely to be funded through a levy on media companies. The regulator -- likely initially to be Ofcom, but in the longer term a new body -- will have the power to impose substantial fines against companies that breach their duty of care and to hold individual executives personally liable.

The scope of the recommendations is broad. As well as social media platforms such as Facebook and search engines such as Google they take in online messaging services and file hosting sites. Other proposals in the online harm white paper include:

- Government powers to direct the regulator on specific issues such as terrorist activity or child sexual exploitation.
- Annual "transparency reports" from social media companies, disclosing the prevalence of harmful content on their platforms and what they are doing to combat it.
- Co-operation with police and other enforcement agencies on illegal harms, such as incitement of violence and the sale of illegal weapons. "Companies will be asked to comply with a code of practice, setting out what steps they are taking to ensure that they meet the duty of care -- including by designing products and platforms to make them safer, and pointing users who have suffered harm towards support," the report says. "The code of practice is also likely to include the steps companies will be expected to take to combat disinformation, including by using fact-checking services, particularly during election periods, and improving the transparency of political advertising. Regulated firms will be expected to comply with the code of practice -- or explain what other steps they are taking to meet the duty of care. However, many questions are left to the regulator to determine."

Comments

It's for your own good.

[alvinrod]

a new statutory duty of care, to be policed by an independent regulator and likely to be funded through a levy on media companies

Unfortunately the modern educational system couldn't completely strip you of your humanity and free thought, so it's come to this now.

Really, it's for your own good though. That's why we insist you pay for it.

Re:It's for your own good.

[msauve]

I think they have a great concept. Let's enforce similar on legislators - any harm done by anyone in their jurisdiction while they're in office, they should be held personally liable for.

Re:It's for your own good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Content policy should be up to the individual company, not the government.

Re:It's for your own good.

[fustakrakich]

For one thing, they are not monopolies. Content should not be regulated. The real issue is open internet service. That's where you bump into monopoly markets that need to be pried open.

Re:It's for your own good.

[fustakrakich]

Competitors to what? Name an instance where they don't have competition. What does Facebook offer that you can't find somewhere else?

Re:It's for your own good.

[fustakrakich]

So what? That's by user choice. The users make and break this stuff. You just gotta come up with another pretty face and a gimmick, and you're in business. Facebook didn't force anybody to abandon MySpace.

Re:It's for your own good.

[fustakrakich]

Am I to take it that you no longer dispute my original assertion that Facebook is a monopoly?

No, it is not. I implied nothing of the sort. User choice does not make a monopoly. Alternatives are still available.

Re:It's for your own good.

[fustakrakich]

And in case you haven't noticed, MySpace is still up and running. So you're really making no sense at all.

Re:It's for your own good.

[AmiMoJo]

We already have that law in the UK. If you can prove that, say, the Home Secretary authorized your torture you can sue him personally and the government for compensation. That's why they are so careful not to leave any direct, incriminating evidence.

Re:It's for your own good.

[fustakrakich]

Doesn't matter, and your concept of monopoly is way off base. Users have the right to pick and choose as they wish. MySpace is still up, and you can still use it. It's not facebook's fault if your friends decide to stay with them. If facebook could take MySpace down, you would have case. As it is, you don't. Facebook is not a monopoly over anything outside of facebook.com. That's the way it's supposed to be. The government needs to butt out and work on the ISP problem, where we have real monopolies over access to the entire internet.

Re:It's for your own good.

[fustakrakich]

All the power and dominance come from the users. It is by their choice. Don't confuse this with real monopolies, where the wire has become the new railroad.

Just adds another chapter to Censorhip in the UK

[ffkom]

Go and amend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - it's got a long tradition.

I could not care less if it imploded tomorrow

[rmdingler]

Social Media is simply not a part of my existence, unless you broadly include Slashdot... though I suspect that might qualify as antisocial media.

But. Asking the social media sites to duplicate the work the police are already doing on the internet interdicting terrorism, child exploitation, violence, and illegal weapons trafficking is absurd. The internet, and in particular social media, is the greatest thing to happen to law enforcement in a generation... the idiots catch themselves.

Re:I could not care less if it imploded tomorrow

[MightyMartian]

This flows out of the social media companies' own requests that governments start regulating them. Yes, it's going to be silly in some cases, some Neo-Nazi planning on blowing up a synagogue and bragging about it on Facebook, then they're online equivalent of the moron with the face tattoos that robs a liquor store. At the same time, it's clear that the social media giants have been incapable or unwilling to police their own users to demonstrate at least some minimal of diligence.

Re:I could not care less if it imploded tomorrow

[rmdingler]

The governors' pattern for passing rights-restricting legislation all too typically begins with seemingly reasonable restrictions on the more agreeably vile infractions.

It's for the children! or Some of them are rapists!

Even: But they're supporting terrorism...Just like the Colonies' sympathizers in America's revolutionary war with the English.

Short of doing away with free speech on the internet, policing posts on Unlilliputian social platforms capable of real-time streaming is a task awaiting true Artificial Intelligence... whose gossamer arrival seems as fleeting as human intelligence, or, the arrival of the Great Pumpkin.

Re:I could not care less if it imploded tomorrow

[MightyMartian]

I fail to see how this would be any different than Ofcom's or the FCC's effective censorship of regular television for "decency" purposes. I'm not necessarily say I support it, but if Facebook, Twitter, et al. are thrown in the same basket as, say, broadcast television and radio, then there's a consistency here. If you can't show programs encouraging child abuse or acts of terrorism on Sky or CBS, then the logic goes, nor should social media.

It of course leaves the question open when you're talking about two-bit operations like Stormfront, but since those are pretty much small scale subscriber portals with a pretty predictable membership, as opposed to Facebook, which is a platform of mass dissemination and sharing, I guess you can square that circle to some degree.

Regulation was going to happen sooner or later. The social media giants have astonishing reach at national and international levels, and have already shown themselves very vulnerable to sharing of this kind of content. Guys like Zuckerberg knew this was coming, and I suspect would rather at this point have governments set up regulatory frameworks than the self-regulation they did in the past, if for no other reason than it levels the playing field.

Hard core libertarians are never going to like this, but then again they don't like any government regulation. I suspect they hate the decency rules the FCC imposes on network television, and yet those have been the rules since the 1950s. The Supreme Court has upheld decency standards in the past, so I see little likelihood of a meaningful court challenge, and really, since these are private companies, unless they want to mount the challenge themselves, I doubt any user whose content is removed or has their account deleted is going to have a leg to stand on.

And further, this particular story is about the UK. The extent of free speech guaranteed in the US Constitution is not guaranteed in the UK, and indeed in most other liberal democracies. Hate laws in Europe are quite a bit stronger than anything that could pass muster in the US.

Re: I could not care less if it imploded tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference, of course, is that with OTA broadcast, your using government spectrum to broadcast, which implies government support. That's very different then owned spectrum for satellite broadcast or cell phone.

Re:I could not care less if it imploded tomorrow

[rtb61]

There are two kinds of social media, real name and real identity social media and avatar based social media, pseudonyms with imagined identities. They are inherently different, one claims to present facts and truths and the other an imaginary social interaction game. They simply need to be treated different, they one that claims to present the truth, needs to be held accountable for sponsoring false content for profit, criminally and civilly, fully liable. The other, the fantasy version where right of the get go, the names are imaginary, so are the identities and there is absolutely no pretence at presenting the truth. It is basically non-fiction social media versus based upon fiction social media, the liability for content difference is real straight forward. Some social media pretends to be true and factual to sell advertising and to mine people's private data, they should be held liable for that, quite clear cut.

Slashdot is between the two, quite simply the exchange and challenging of ideas, and most of Slashdot pondering occurs away from slashdot, just a forum of ideas. 4Chan and 8Chan are different again, pretty much, straight up trolls trolling trolls, challenging challenging ideas, pursuing the bounds of ideas, seek the truth there and you'll twist your brain up like a pretzel.

Facebook et al purports to represent the truth, to datamine it and sell advertising, they should be held liable for that content because by the nature of that social media site they claim to present the truth. The difference between fictional social media, factual social media and ideas social media, all need to be treated differently by their users and by legislation.

Re:I could not care less if it imploded tomorrow

[currently_awake]

If the Social Media companies object to this then they will move their servers out of ( insert country of bad laws here ). There is always a less regulated country.

Freedom of speech vs the UK and US media

[AHuxley]

Freedom after speech.
The freedom of the press.
To publish and comment.
Is a movie review about an actors skills abhorrent material? The political nature of the low quality SJW script?
Is abhorrent for Catalonia to be mentioned in a way Spain finds not legal?
Would Argentina like to correct the history of the Falkland Islands?
Germany like to filter all history, art and political news about Germany? No commenting on the results illegal immigration into Germany?
Do French political leaders not like funny cartoons? No funny political memes about France?
Would a faith find blasphemy to be abhorrent material?
A cult would see their protected teachings online line for free as abhorrent?
Undercover filming/photography of US farms is an abhorrent act in some US states? UK to remove that US news too?
Talking about DRM removal?
Talking about junk and weak crypto math passed for consumer use by the intelligence services?
Comments on UK whistleblower material?
The role of the SAS, MI5/6 in Ireland and the UK?

So much people/mil/gov/lawyers/faiths/cults/NGO's/think tanks/NATO would find abhorrent material.

Knife Control.

[Zorro]

Only criminals eat food that requires a knife.

This helps the big social media companies.

[ron_ivi]

Facebook can afford the team go implement their Censorship Rules, and Google already has a team to work with China's. /. can't afford similar.

Re:This helps the big social media companies.

[rmdingler]

Facebook can afford the team go implement their Censorship Rules, and Google already has a team to work with China's. /. can't afford similar.

Pardon me sir, but you're way out of line. The Slashdot budget for for policing and censorship is several tens of dollars, which the editors have been known to repurpose as delivery food.

Downside is you have to let the "GNAA" & "MooMoo I'm a cow" posters soil the thread. Upside is you get a lot of truthy, insightful observations.

Re:This helps the big social media companies.

[Highdude702]

I mean, who really cares about slashdot. Its a bunch of nerds that society rarely realizes exists, unless their electronics aren't working right. Who's with me here? Oh wait, uhh... Shit.

The west is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

After spending trillions from our coffers and millions of lives to fight tyranny in the 20th century, we have become our own worst enemy. We don't support our best institutions, we betray our heritage, we don't have children and expect migrants to do our dirty work for us.

End of an era. You will miss it when it's gone. The future belongs to those who show up for it. The power struggles of the next century will be awful and may surpass the 20th century in death toll.

Captcha: phosgene. How appropriate.

Re: The west is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. The meek will not inherit the earth, those who take it will. This lesson was learned long ago, but forgotten. This is the future many asked for. No returns.

Re:The west is dying

[Kjella]

The west is dying (...) After spending trillions from our coffers and millions of lives to fight tyranny in the 20th century, we have become our own worst enemy.

Uhh... the west both started and ended WW1 and WW2. The suffragettes and civil rights movement fought harder, but they also had a lot more to fight against. It's possible that we've become soft and complacent, but it's because most the heavy battles were won. Obama was POTUS. I doubt it'd make much fuss if Hillary became president as a woman or Sanders as a Jew. Even in anti-immigration parties race theories are mostly dead. I'm not going to sugarcoat it and say everything's perfect, but most of us in the west live as individuals and treat others as individuals. We'd like to decompose cultural identity into values that we think are universal and the rest is simply individual preference, like nobody cares if you eat sushi and listen to k-pop instead of "our" food and music.

This clashes with many other cultures where collective ideas of family, clan/tribe/caste, ethnicity and religion still dominate their mindset. Values that often come before those we consider universal, like arranged marriages or honor killings because you've brought shame on the family. Many gangs are ethnically centered, us against them. Religious shaming and policing of those who try to break away. It's like cultural or institutional problems don't exist, just a preponderance of individual problems even though they're happy to talk about toxic subcultures everywhere except in minorities. There's lots of racism, sexism, hostility against alternative sexual orientations and a lot of it is culturally accepted. You have entire countries where it's law, not just some shady little district of a backwards village.

But the thing is, I don't want to resurrect our collectivism and fight fire with fire, Christians against Muslims. Nationalism against globalism. I don't want my nation to be a mono-culture where we all fit the same mold and accuse everyone else trying to take part of cultural appropriation. Culture is organic and it changes, both in taking new impulses from the world and giving those impulses to others. It's just that there's a difference between organic change and what's essentially a cultural transplant. I don't want a piece of the Middle East transported here, many of them reject us and establish parallel cultures. And no, I don't want to engage in cultural appeasement to people who pack their women away in tents and think ours are sluts and whores.

Re:The west is dying

[AmiMoJo]

On the contrary, we live in a golden age of peace. There was a huge migrant crisis in Europe and we managed to deal with it peacefully, without going to war, and without completely losing sight of our values. Europe rose to the challenge, and although it was hard we got through it.

The future is the future we are building, welcoming diverse groups of people in to our union and spreading our values as we do so. Democracy, human rights, equality. Those are our strengths and our heritage and our future.

Re:The west is dying

[mjwx]

After spending trillions from our coffers and millions of lives to fight tyranny in the 20th century, we have become our own worst enemy. We don't support our best institutions, we betray our heritage, we don't have children and expect migrants to do our dirty work for us.

Had me up until here.

Western nations are definitely having children, less of them as there are becoming more expensive to raise and there is no need to rely on your children to support you in old age. That's the big difference in the west, kids aren't the retirement plan.

We keep importing immigrants because we want an underclass of cheap labour with few rights to do the jobs we are too lazy to do ourselves. Australia doesn't do this, hence when I lived in Perth I washed my own car, cleaned my own house and ignored the fecking garden hoping the heat and neglect would kill everything because I just couldn't be arsed.

Re:The west is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'm going to be sick. You haven't seen the problems in France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Hungary, Poland and so forth? Like most EU fanatics you either don't talk about them or completely ignore them, mostly both. EU immigration policy has been a disaster but a very profitable one for people-smuggling gangs who were helped by big multinational NGOs providing a Med taxi service for them.

In case you hadn't noticed, the fault-lines in Europe aren't really between East and West, they're more North/South, something you open borders loons would do well to remember.

Tony Blair's people rule every aspect of the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

When Tony Blair finally became PM he did two things first. 1) killed the house cat. 2) Invited Thatcher to be his first visitor at no.10 (and NO, she was not his predecessor- that was the ex-circus performer that replaced Thatcher as head of the Conservative party.)

The voters had thought they had empowered the exact opposite of the Tories- but Blair proudly demonstrated to the nation that as bad as the authoratarian Conservatives had been, he would be a million times worse.

Blair tore the power structure of Britain to shreds, and placed his loyalists into every aspect of power- way beyond party politics. But Blairites would rise to power and take control of the THREE major political parties, Conservatives, Liberals and labour of course. In power, Blair began the Orwellian remodelling of Britain.

Today Blair operates at a planetry level, where his loyalists have taken power in most major nations (which is why you had so much Trump hate when Blair's appointed horror, Clinton, failed to win- the Democrat and Republican parties are 100% controlled by Blairites). In the UK his proxies head essentially everything. There is a lasting public hatred of Blair in the UK, so Blair only has to put his name in public to the OPPOSITE of what he desires there (like Blair saying he is against 'brexit'), so anti-Blair sentiment gets the sheeple behind what he wants in the first place.

Social control is a key plank in the demonic Blair's greater plan. Blair's 'Academy' schools indoctrinate millions of UK kids. Censorship and total surveillance are Blair's go-to methods.

Social media giants were always part of the Blair plan. Hook the vast majority of users in centralised services and then bring down governmental regulation of said services. Today anything outside of the giants are backwaters with handfulls of users. Even Dissenter shows insanely tiny numbers of forum users on its busiest forums compared to even obscure forums on Reddit.

Today there is no need for Blair's people to worry about 'alternative' Internet sites when so few people use them. The giants have vacuumed the majority of online Humanity into easily controlled and regulated arenas. But Blair's team had to wait for the true giants to arise and addict the numbers they have done. And this needed the ole 'bait and switch'- a nursery slope 'wild west' to entice the sheeple before the Orwellian regulation hit.

Better again were the fools who wanted to speak to wide audiences, but used the infrastrucure of the giants rather that building their own. Now these people are 'deplatformed' for 'wrongthink', and if they all too late try to form their own platforms, almost no-one follows them.

Sites like Slashdot inform the sheeple that they MUST trust the mass media outlets that all spread Tony Blair's lies about WMD in Iraq. Because after all it is only 'logical' to trust sources scientifically proven to be the world's most co-ordinated liars.

Freedom of speech- dead.
Freedom of assembly- dead
Freedom of conscience- dead (in the UK, kids from 'muslim' families are taught at school they must remain 'muslims' because only racist extremists believe in freedom of conscience)

These freedoms have been very rare in Human History, so for Blair to wipe them out once again is actually true to how this planet usually operates. Which is why Blair gets so little resistance, and certainly none from outlets like Slashdot.

If you think it is bad now, think about how awful it will be in a few decades time when things like Blair's plan to BAN private car ownership are implemented. When Blair's total surveillance society has been brainwashed into every sheeple from birth.

The power of the computer allows a thing that was before only theoretical, no matter how desirable to earlier demons in our History. All Blair had to ensure was that ordinary people lost their say about the oppressive use of this tech- exactly as envisaged in Orwell's 1984. Today's young Brits 'think' only in ways their Academy schools have commanded them

Re:Tony Blair's people rule every aspect of the UK

[AmiMoJo]

Interesting conspiracy but you give Blair too much credit. Modern UK politics has been about the centre ground since the 80s. If you want to get into power, you need to occupy the centre. Blair did that, that's all. No evil scheme to oppress people, he was just the right kind of centre-right politician at the right time.

The fact that you have to assume Blair always wants the exact opposite of what he says he wants doesn't exactly make a strong argument.

Blair fucked up in three major ways. First he went along with the US into Iraq, which was very unpopular in the UK. Then he didn't do enough to manage migration from newly joining EU member states, and allowed newspapers and the far right to demonize the Polish and blame them for everything. Finally he did little to prevent the financial crash from happening, because he continued Thatcherite policies.

Just imagine

[Livius]

...how much harm a politician would suffer from the truth.

Re: Just adds another chapter to Censorhip in the

[Anonymous Coward]

You misspelled "Catholic."

Re:Jew push for hiding their malice/subversion/lie

[elrous0]

But in the UK, there's never been the level of free speech that would make you invulnerable from being prosecuted for, say, blaming the Jews for everything.

No, but there was certainly a time when the idea of *criminally prosecuting* someone for making a joke video of himself teaching his GF's dog to do a Nazi salute would have been laughable. And there was most certainly a time when no police officer worth his uniform would have even *considered* just turning his back on evidence of a large group of men raping underage girls out of fear of being called a racist if he were to act on that horrible evidence.

The UK has never enjoyed the robust free speech protections of the U.S., it's true. But there was at least a time when they weren't FUCKING BATSHIT INSANE.

Re:Good Work UK!!!

[Jarwulf]

Just look at all the mentally stable people internet censorship and control has given us so far!

Killing the internet

[spongman]

One has to wonder, if such regulations were in place in the 90â(TM)s, would to world-wide-web ever have been born?

Re:Tell me again...

[AHuxley]

Re "they start using the policy "

The UK has GCHQ to find the comments.
A nice police interview to suggest a change of topic online. To understand why the comments got published.
A list of words that are no longer legal to use in a friendly illustrated booklet.
Words that now have to be used in the UK. Further police contact is then not needed if a change in the persons social media use is detected.

Should that not alter the persons views than further action will start.
A longer police interview at work? Police interviews with everyone connected with the person who published the comments.
Who used the wrong words after getting the illustrated word booklet from the police.
Still publishing comments, views and links online?
Found a new VPN service and using a UK bank and UK CC for that VPN service?

The MI5/6 and the SAS to take further action to prevent any further use of social media.

This Is How It Begins

[mentil]

Let no tragedy go to waste.

Social Media needs to decide what it is

[steveha]

The social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook say that they are platforms, and therefore they should not be held liable for awful things that people say on their platforms. They aren't curated information streams like a newspaper, where nothing is published without editorial oversight.

However, they have been indulging in quite a bit of curation. And it hasn't been even-handed. If they like you, you can literally get away with inciting violence; if they don't like you, they will strike you down or shadow-ban you for any reason or no reason.

There are numerous cases of conservatives being suspended or banned from social media over relatively mild stuff (for example, telling a journalist to "Learn to code") while liberals can make jokes about the President being assassinated, wish for conservative people's children to be raped, etc. The post "#MAGAkids go screaming, hats first, into the woodchipper" did not result in any punishment from Twitter. This tweet was accompanied with a cartoon picture of a man feeding a body into a woodchipper and bloody snow. By "#MAGAkids" he meant some high school students who were in the news at the time.

https://www.rt.com/usa/449368-disney-producer-threatens-maga-kids/

Keith Olbermann wrote on Twitter these words: "we should do our best to make sure the rest of his life is a living hell." Who was the target of his wrath? A man who had a permit to hunt turkeys who shot a turkey. Olbermann has a million followers and some of them went on to harass the hunter. Twitter did not punish Olbermann in any way. (Faced by a backlash of bad publicity, Olbermann made a follow-up tweet saying that his words were not intended as an actual threat.)

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/03/27/keith-olbermann-urges-followers-make-hunters-life-living-hell-killing-rare-turkey/

I found an article that claims that a statistical analysis shows that this isn't just a few anecdotes, it's a trend.

https://quillette.com/2019/02/12/it-isnt-your-imagination-twitter-treats-conservatives-more-harshly-than-liberals/

I tried to use Facebook Messenger to send a link to a satirical essay. It would not allow me to send it, and it gave a totally nonsense reason. I just tried it again just now and the same thing happened; here's the error:

It looks like you were misusing this feature by going too fast. You've been blocked from using it.

Learn more about blocks in the Help Center.
If you think this doesn't go against our Community Standards let us know.

I was "going too fast"? After not using Messenger for over 24 hours, I attempted to send a single URL, so that message is clearly nonsense. Obviously I was merely guilty of wrongthink. The essay makes the point that the USA is spending so much money that it's not possible to "soak the rich" to pay for it all, using a sort of reducto ad absurdium. Clearly someone who works for Facebook doesn't like this essay or doesn't like "Iowahawk". If you want to read this forbidden essay, here you go:

Iowahawk: Feed Your Family on 10 Billion a Day

Then there is the current controversy over Twitter apparently shadowbanning the movie Unplanned. So far Twitter has adamantly maintained that everything that looked like shadowbanning was just buggy code, but this seems really egregious. The Unplanned Twitter account at one point had more followers than Planned Parenthood, and then suddenly it had zero followers. Peopl

Tech Company hubris

[Munich Munchkin]

I have little sympathy. If you are a tech company who thinks the UK and Australia is full of little people who don't matter then maybe this sort of response is to be expected.