LONDON (Parliament Politics Magazine) – Proposed online safety legislation include additional criminal offences such as sending “genuinely threatening” or “knowingly fraudulent” messages.
If the government’s internet safety measure is implemented, social media companies could be fined 10% of their global turnover in case of failure to remove harmful content.
As a result of the changes, they will have to remove potentially harmful content ahead of time.
The bill also prohibits the use of human trafficking, online suicide promotion, extremism and revenge pornography, .
It was already established that websites that contain user-generated content, such as Twitter and Facebook , would be required to remove illegal content as soon as it was reported to them.
They will now need to take proactive measures to prevent illicit activities.
With racist harassment of footballers, revenge porn and cyberflashing, and Covid misinformation being highlighted as important safety concerns for social media corporations to solve, the topic has recently become a point of conversation.
Nadine Dorries, Culture Secretary, has urged online companies to begin making changes now, before the measure takes effect.
“They can start doing what they need to do to remove those harmful algorithms and to remove much of the damage that they do, particularly to young people and to society as a whole.” she said on BBC Breakfast.
The minister went on to say that the action would bring the feet of social media firms to the fire for the first time, holding them accountable for “damaging lives.”
Judy Thomas, whose 15-year-old daughter Frankie committed suicide in September 2018, stated that in the hours and months leading up to her death, her school computer and tablet were used to access distressing content.
she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, “Back in January, February, March [2018] she’d been accessing, at school, horrendous sites.”Â
Ms Thomas advocated for obligatory age verification to protect minors online, and she stated that the policy should apply to all websites, not just larger ones.
It was important to ensure that young people cannot readily access internet harms, and that if firms do anything wrong, there was a real price to pay, she said.
Ms Thomas went on to say that the consequences must not only be monetary, as many corporations could “absorb that easily,” but that the owners of these businesses must also be “held accountable.”
