News Analysis: Countries Want to Ban ‘Weaponized’ Social Media. What Would That Look Like?

SYDNEY, Australia — What if live-streaming required a government permit, and videos could only be broadcast online after a seven-second delay? What if Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were treated like traditional publishers, expected to vet every post, comment and image before they reached the public? Imagine what the internet would look like if tech executives could be jailed for failing to censor hate and violence. No established democracies have ever come as close to applying such sweeping restrictions on online communication, and the demand for change has both harnessed and amplified rising global frustration with an industry that is still almost entirely shaped by American law and Silicon Valley’s libertarian norms. “Big social media companies have a responsibility to take every possible action to ensure their technology products are not exploited by murderous terrorists,” Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, said Saturday. It should be the law.”
The push for government intervention — with a bill to be introduced in Australia this week — reflects a surge of anger in countries more open to restrictions on speech than in the United States, and growing impatience with distant companies seen as more worried about their business models than local concerns. There are precedents for the kinds of regulations under consideration. At one end of the spectrum is China, where the world’s most sophisticated system of internet censorship stifles almost all political debate along with hate speech and pornography — but without preventing the rise of homegrown tech companies making sizable profits. But the other end of the spectrum — the 24/7 bazaar of instant user-generated content — also looks increasingly unacceptable to people in this part of the world. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand argues that there must be a middle ground, and that some kind of international consensus is needed to keep the platforms from limiting public protection only to certain countries. “Ultimately, we can all promote good rules locally, but these platforms are global,” she said Thursday. Some social media companies are starting to say they are willing to accept more oversight and guidance. In an op-ed in The Washington Post on Saturday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, called for government help with setting ground rules for harmful online content, election integrity, privacy and data portability. “It’s impossible to remove all harmful content from the internet, but when people use dozens of different sharing services — all with their own policies and processes — we need a more standardized approach,” he wrote. At the same time, Facebook and the other major platforms insist they are doing everything they can on their own with a mix of artificial intelligence and moderators. Facebook, too, has said it will hire tens of thousands more employees to deal with finding and removing content that violates its rules. Facebook has “been on notice for some time that their policies and enforcement in this area were ineffective,” David Shanks, New Zealand’s chief censor, said in an email on Sunday. Experts say social media companies still take as a given that users should be allowed to post material without advance vetting. Neither the communications laws that govern broadcast nor the ratings systems applied to movies and video games affect social media, leaving a frictionless, ad-driven business model built to encourage as much content creation (and consumption) as possible. From a business perspective, the system works. In 2016, Facebook said viewers watched 100 million hours of video every day, while Twitter handles 500 million tweets a day, or nearly 6,000 every second. “The more speech there is on these platforms, the more money they can make,” said Rebecca Lewis, a doctoral student at Stanford and researcher at Data & Society who has studied radicalization patterns on YouTube. On Tuesday, the European Parliament passed a law that will make companies liable for uploaded content that violates copyright. A makeshift memorial for victims of the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand.CreditAdam Dean for The New York Times

The laws represent a significant setback for social media behemoths that have long argued that their platforms should be treated as neutral gathering places rather than arbiters of content. [For more Australia news with global context, get the Australia Letter in your inbox.]
The hate speech law in particular is being closely studied in New Zealand and Australia. It tries to hold platforms liable for not deleting content that is “evidently illegal” in Germany, including child pornography and Nazi propaganda and memorabilia. Australian officials said Saturday that they were also planning hefty fines. “The automation is just not as advanced as these governments hope they are,” said Robyn Caplan, a researcher at Data & Society and a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University. “We have to be incredibly careful and nuanced when we draw these lines,” Ms. Caplan said. “Mainstream media that broadcast such material would be putting their license at risk, and there is no reason why social media platforms should be treated any differently,” Attorney General Christian Porter said. John Edwards, New Zealand’s privacy commissioner, agreed but pointed to a different example: the Boeing 737 Max plane that has been grounded worldwide after two crashes believed to be tied to a software problem. “I would say Facebook’s ability to moderate harmful content on its live-streaming service represents a software problem that means the service should be suspended,” he said. “I think that’s just the right thing to do.”