{"id":315733,"date":"2017-05-01T13:09:51","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T13:09:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citifmonline.com\/?p=315733"},"modified":"2017-05-01T13:09:51","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T13:09:51","slug":"social-media-giants-shamefully-far-from-tackling-illegal-content","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/2017\/05\/social-media-giants-shamefully-far-from-tackling-illegal-content\/","title":{"rendered":"Social media giants ‘shamefully far’ from tackling illegal content"},"content":{"rendered":"
Social media firms are “shamefully far” from tackling illegal and dangerous content, says a parliamentary report.<\/p>\n
Hate speech, terror recruitment videos and sexual images of children all took too long to be removed, said the Home Affairs Select Committee report.<\/p>\n
The government should consider making the sites help pay to police content, it said.<\/p>\n
But a former Facebook executive told the BBC the report “bashes companies” but offers few real solutions.<\/p>\n
The cross-party committee took evidence from Facebook, Twitter and Google,the parent company of YouTube, for its report.<\/p>\n
It said they had made efforts to tackle abuse and extremism on their platforms, but “nowhere near enough is being done”.<\/p>\n
The committee said it had found “repeated examples of social media companies failing to remove illegal content when asked to do so”.<\/p>\n
It said the largest firms were “big enough, rich enough and clever enough” to sort the problem out, and that it was “shameful” that they had failed to use the same ingenuity to protect public safety as they had to protect their own income.<\/p>\n
“White Genocide” and “Ban Islam”<\/strong><\/p>\n Among the examples the committee found were:<\/p>\n The MPs said it was “unacceptable” that social media companies relied on users to report content, saying they were “outsourcing” the role “at zero expense”.<\/p>\n Yet the companies expected the police – funded by the taxpayer – to bear the costs of keeping them clean of extremism.<\/p>\n The report’s recommendations include:<\/p>\n “Social media companies’ failure to deal with illegal and dangerous material online is a disgrace,” said committee chairwoman Yvette Cooper.<\/p>\n Ms Cooper said the committee’s inquiry into hate crime more broadly was curtailed when the general election was called and their recommendations had to be limited to dealing with social media companies and online hate.<\/p>\n\n
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