{"id":5928,"date":"2017-05-31T21:55:06","date_gmt":"2017-05-31T21:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/uk-eyeing-fines-for-social-media-content-moderation-failures-2.html"},"modified":"2017-05-31T21:55:06","modified_gmt":"2017-05-31T21:55:06","slug":"uk-eyeing-fines-for-social-media-content-moderation-failures-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/uk-eyeing-fines-for-social-media-content-moderation-failures-2.html","title":{"rendered":"UK eyeing fines for social media content-moderation failures"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

After the U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May secured a joint statement\u00a0from the\u00a0G7 on Friday<\/a>,\u00a0backing a call for social media firms to do more to combat online extremism, a Conservative minister has suggested the party is open to bringing in financial penalties or otherwise changing the law in order to encourage more action on problem content from tech\u00a0companies\u00a0if it\u2019s\u00a0returned to government at the U.K. general election on June 8.<\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/a> reports the comments by security minister Ben Wallace, speaking to BBC Radio 4 on Sunday. Wallace\u2019s words follow an expos\u00e9 by the newspaper of Facebook\u2019s moderation guidelines \u2014 which the minister\u00a0dubbed \u201ctotally unacceptable,\u201d citing an\u00a0example of Facebook\u2019s moderator guidance saying it\u2019s \u201cOK to publish abuse of under-seven-year-old children from bullying as long as it doesn\u2019t have captions alongside.\u201d Facebook\u2019s\u00a0rules have also been\u00a0criticized<\/a> by child safety charities.<\/p>\n

The company\u00a0declined to comment for this story. But Facebook has previously said it intends to make it simpler for users to report content problems, and will\u00a0speed up the process for its reviewers to determine which posts violate its\u00a0standards (although it has not specified how it will do this). It has also\u00a0said it will make it easier for moderators\u00a0to contact law enforcement \u201cif someone needs help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond bullying and child safety issues, concern about social media platforms being used to spread hate speech and extremist propaganda has also been rising up the agenda in Europe.\u00a0Earlier this year<\/a>\u00a0the German cabinet backed proposals\u00a0to fine social media\u00a0platforms up to\u00a0\u20ac50 million if they fail to promptly remove illegal hate speech \u2014\u00a0within 24 hours after a complaint\u00a0has been made for \u201cobviously criminal content,\u201d and within seven days for other illegal content.\u00a0It appears a Conservative-majority U.K. government would also be looking seriously at applying financial penalties to try to enforce content moderation standards on social media.<\/p>\n

Wallace\u2019s comments also follow a U.K. parliamentary committee report, published\u00a0earlier this month<\/a>,\u00a0which criticized social media giants Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for taking a\u00a0\u201claissez-faire approach\u201d to moderating hate-speech content. The committee also suggested the government should consider imposing fines for content-moderation failures, and called for\u00a0a review of existing legislation to ensure clarity about how it\u00a0applies.<\/p>\n

After chairing a counterterrorism session at the G7 on Friday, which included discussion about the role of social media in spreading extremist content, the U.K.\u2019s PM May\u00a0said: \u201cWe agreed a range of steps the G7 could take to strengthen its work with tech companies on this vital agenda. We want companies to develop tools to identify and remove harmful materials automatically.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear exactly what those steps will be \u2014 but the possibility of fines to enforce more control over platform giants is at least now on the table for some G7 nations.<\/p>\n

For their part, tech firms have said they are already using and developing tools to try to automate flagging up problem content, including seeking to leverage AI. Although given the scale and complexity of the content challenge here, there will\u00a0clearly not be a\u00a0quick tech fix\u00a0for post-publication moderation in any near-term time frame.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month<\/a> Facebook also said it was adding\u00a0a further\u00a03,000 staff to its content reviewer team \u2014 bringing to 7,500 the total number of moderators it employs globally to review content being posted by its almost two billion users.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/VdXITQskZv0\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May secured a joint statement\u00a0from the\u00a0G7 on Friday,\u00a0backing a call for social media firms to do more to combat online extremism, a Conservative minister <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-5928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t