Is Social Media out of control? Australia PM calls for social media crackdown

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Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called for global restrictions on social media following the Christchurch mosque attacks.

Facebook and other firms have been criticised for failing to block a live-stream of the attack.

In a letter to Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who chairs the G20, Mr Morrison asked for leaders to discuss the issue at the upcoming G20 meeting.

On Friday, twin shootings at mosques in Christchurch killed 50 people.

The gunman filmed the attack and the live-stream on Facebook lasted for 17 minutes.

Despite the original video being taken down, it was quickly replicated and shared widely on other platforms, including YouTube and Twitter.

In a statement on Monday, Facebook said the video was viewed fewer than 200 times during the live broadcast, and about 4,000 times in total before it was removed.

It said the first user report on the original video came in 12 minutes after the live broadcast ended. Before it was alerted to the video, a user had posted a link to a copy of the video on a file-sharing site.

Facebook said it deleted more than 1.5 million copies of the video in the first day after the incident. It said 1.2 million of those copies were blocked while being uploaded.

UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid also called on social media firms to take action to stop extremism on their channels.

In a copy of the letter posted on Twitter, Mr Morrison expressed concern over the "unrestricted role" of internet technologies in terrorist attacks.

"It is unacceptable to treat the internet as an ungoverned space," he wrote.

Mr Morrison said the aim was to "agree on co-ordinated action to afford greater protection from terrorist violence".

"It is imperative that the global community works together to ensure that technology firms meet their moral obligation to protect the communities which they serve and from which they profit."

Advertisers react
In the wake of the mosque shootings, Westpac NZ said it had suspended all advertising on social media networks including Facebook "until further notice".

"We will be engaging with social media companies about the publishing of harmful content," the bank said in a statement on Twitter.

On Monday, a spokesperson for Lotto NZ told the BBC it had removed advertising from social media at this time "as the tone didn't feel right in the aftermath of these events".

It comes after industry groups representing advertisers issued a statement asking their members if they wanted to be "associated" with platforms that did not take responsibility for the content being shared.

The groups said: "The events in Christchurch raise the question, if the site owners can target consumers with advertising in microseconds, why can't the same technology be applied to prevent this kind of content being streamed live?"

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47620519

 

[MenInG]

Hong Kong (CNN Business)Horrific video of the mosque massacre in Christchurch was viewed live fewer than 200 times on Facebook but that was enough to unleash it across the internet.

Now New Zealand, other governments and business leaders are calling for Facebook, Google and Twitter to do much more to rid their platforms of extremist content.

Vodafone (VOD) and two other telecommunications operators, which provide internet access for most New Zealanders, said on Tuesday they want Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter (TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey and Google (GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai to take part in an "urgent discussion" on how to keep harmful content off their platforms.

The three US tech companies have faced heavy criticism after they failed to identify and stop the spread of a video of Friday's attack in which 50 people at two mosques were killed.

The CEOs of Vodafone New Zealand, Spark and 2degrees said they had taken the unprecedented step of jointly identifying and suspending access to sites that were hosting video footage taken by the attacker. They called on authorities to require tech companies to take down terrorist-linked content within a specific period of time and fine them if they fail to do so.

"Although we recognize the speed with which social network companies sought to remove Friday's video once they were made aware of it, this was still a response to material that was rapidly spreading globally and should never have been made available online," they said in an open letter published on their company websites.

Germany introduced a law in 2018 that gives authorities the power to fine social media platforms if they fail to quickly remove hate speech. And the European Commission is considering rules that would require platforms to remove terror content within an hour of it being flagged by authorities or risk fines up to 4% of global revenue.


'Publisher not postman'

More world leaders are demanding that the tech companies step up their game.

New Zealand Prime Minster Jacinda Ardern said Tuesday that her government will investigate the role social media played in the deadly attack.

"We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published," Ardern said in a speech to parliament.

"They are the publisher. Not just the postman," she said. "There cannot be a case of all profit no responsibility."

He wanted notoriety. But it is New Zealand's stoic leader who has become the face of a tragedy

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Tuesday criticized the "continuing and unrestricted role" played by internet technology in the New Zealand shooting and other terrorist attacks. He laid out his concerns in an open letter to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who this year holds the presidency of the G20, an organization that brings together the world's biggest economies.

"It is unacceptable to treat the internet as an ungoverned space," Morrison said in the letter, calling for the issue to be discussed at the G20 summit in Osaka in June. Governments around the world need to ensure that tech firms filter out and remove content linked to terrorism, and are transparent about how they do so, he said.

The tech companies are still scrambling to take down footage of the attack.

YouTube said Monday that it removed tens of thousands of videos and terminated hundreds of accounts "created to promote or glorify the shooter."

The volume of related videos was "unprecedented both in scale and speed," the Google-owned platform said in a statement.

YouTube said it took a number of steps including automatically rejecting footage of the violence and temporarily suspending the ability to filter searches by upload date.

Facebook said in a blog post Monday that the first user report of the violent livestream came 29 minutes after it had started, about 12 minutes after the live broadcast had ended. The video was viewed fewer than 200 times live, but it was viewed about 4,000 times before it was taken down.

That was enough for the graphic video to be copied and then re-uploaded millions of times to multiple platforms, including Facebook.
Twitter declined to provide details on steps it is taking to remove the video from its platform.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/19/tech/new-zealand-attack-video-zuckerberg/index.html

 

[Cpt. Rishwat]

That quote which was attributed to Voltaire:

‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' seems way off base now. Freedom of speech is a great principle, but clearly open to abuse.

 

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Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has come under fire for tweeting his support of the Australian cricket team during a time of widespread bushfire catastrophes.

The cricket tragic’s tweet suggesting bushfire victims and firefighting heroes will get something to cheer for watching Australia take on Pakistan in the First Test at the Gabba on Thursday went down like a led balloon with some Aussie commentators.

Morrison met up with Aussie captain Tim Paine and star batsman Steve Smith during Australia’s final training session on Wednesday, but his decision to take to Twitter to share his excitement for the upcoming summer of cricket has been savaged across the country.

Morrison also on Wednesday tweeted about his visit to the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services Centre, where he urged Australians to stay updated on any fires in their regions.

South Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young led the outcry against Morrison, by declaring the Prime Minister is “out of touch.”.

“I just want to say how disgusted I was at the Prime Minister’s tweet yesterday,” she said on Thursday.

“ While South Australia was burning, while homes were being lost here and lives were being lost in Queensland and NSW, we have the Prime Minister tweeting about how excited he was to be hanging out with cricket stars. It is insensitive. It shows a total lack of empathy. And really it shows how out of touch the Prime Minister we have is.”

It comes after Morrison said domestic climate action has no bearing on individual fires raging across the country.

Morrison again defended his government’s action on climate change as blazes burn across the nation during an early and savage start to the fire season.

“To suggest that with just 1.3 per cent of global emissions that Australia doing something differently — more or less — would have changed the fire outcome this season, I don’t think that stands up to any credible scientific evidence at all,” he told ABC radio on Thursday.

He said an international response was critical to addressing the issue.

https://www.news.com.au/sport/sport...t/news-story/9ef3bcedb04b714009ffc4b90957c92b