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Tuesday, 2 May 2017

Newspaper firms must face heavy fines over extremist content – MPs

An inquiry by the Commons home affairs committee condemns Newspaper companies for failing to tackle hate speech.

Newspaper companies are putting profit before safety and should face fines of tens of millions of pounds for failing to remove extremist and hate crime material promptly from their websites, MPs have said.

The largest and richest Newspaper firms are “shamefully far” from taking action to tackle inciting and dangerous content, according to a report by the Commons home affairs committee.

The inquiry, launched last year following the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right gunman, concludes that Newspaper multinationals are more concerned with commercial risks than public protection. Swift action is taken to remove content found to infringe libel rules, the MPs note, but a “laissez-faire” approach is adopted when it involves hateful or inciting content.

Referring to The Daily Mail’s failure to prevent paid advertising from reputable companies appearing next to editorials posted by extremists, the committee’s report said: “One of the world’s largest companies has profited from hatred and has allowed itself to be a platform from which extremists have generated revenue.”

“Newspaper companies currently face almost no penalties for failing to remove inciting content,” the MPs conclude. “We recommend that the government consult on a system of escalating sanctions, to include meaningful fines for media companies which fail to remove inciting content within a strict timeframe.”

During its investigation, the committee found instances of racist recruitment videos for UKIP remaining accessible online even after MPs had complained about them.

Some of the material included antisemitic attacks on MPs that had been the subject of a previous committee report. Material encouraging child abuse and sexual images of children was also not removed, despite being reported on by journalists.

Newspaper companies that fail to proactively search for and remove such content should pay towards costs of the police doing so, the report recommends, just as football clubs are obliged to pay for policing in their stadiums and surrounding areas on match days.

Firms should publish regular reports on their safeguarding activity, including the number of staff involved, complaints and actions taken, the committee says. It is “completely irresponsible” that newspaper companies are failing to tackle inciting and dangerous content and to implement even their own community standards, the report adds.

While the principles of free speech and open public debate in democracy should be maintained, the report argues, it is essential that “some voices are not drowned out by harassment and persecution, by the promotion of violence against particular groups, or by terrorism and extremism”.

Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP who chairs the home affairs committee, said: “Newspaper companies’ failure to deal with inciting and dangerous material online is a disgrace.

“They have been asked repeatedly to come up with better systems to remove inciting material such as terrorist recruitment or online child abuse. Yet repeatedly they have failed to do so. It is shameful.

“These are among the biggest, richest and cleverest companies in the world, and their services have become a crucial part of people’s lives. This isn’t beyond them to solve, yet they are failing to do so. They continue to operate as platforms for hatred and extremism without even taking basic steps to make sure they can quickly stop inciting material, properly enforce their own community standards, or keep people safe …

“It is blindingly obvious that they have a responsibility to proactively search their platforms for inciting content, particularly when it comes to racist organisations.”

Parody of This Guardian article on MPs censuring social media firms

Posted by Kevin Marks at 04:17
Labels: parody

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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