WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Following your live-streaming on internet marketing of the mass shooting in Nz, the chair for the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security wrote a notice to top executives of 4 major technology companies urging the criminals to do a better job of removing violent political content.
In a letter dated Monday and released , Representative Bennie Thompson urged the primary executives of Facebook Inc , Alphabet Inc’s Google, which owns YouTube, Twitter Inc and Microsoft Corp to more swiftly remove content that might spawn political extremism.
The letter follows the fatal shootings of 50 worshippers in two mosques in Christchurch last week. The shooter, a suspected white supremacist, live-streamed the killings on internet marketing, where it was subsequently widely shared.
“Your companies must prioritize giving an answer to these toxic and violent ideologies with resources and a focus,” Thomson wrote. “If you are unwilling to implement it, Congress must consider policies so that terrorist content articles are not distributed upon your platforms, including by checking examples being set by other countries.
“Film was widely available on your platforms well once the attack, despite calls from New Zealand authorities to adopt these videos down,” he wrote.
Facebook claimed it removed 1.5 million videos showing the attack inside the first Round the clock after it occurred.
Thompson also asked the experienced businesses for a briefing over the matter.
A Facebook spokesman said the corporate “will brief the committee soon.”
Microsoft said late Tuesday it had received “the chairman’s letter and we’re wanting to work with him, the committee, sufficient reason for others to address the issues he raises.” Google said Tuesday as the shooting in New Zealand “we’ve removed 1000s of videos and terminated many accounts produced to promote or glorify the shooter.”
The company added that “the volume of related videos uploaded to YouTube while in the 24 hours following attack was unprecedented in the scale and speed, every so often as fast as a totally new upload every second.” Don’t know what, Google took several steps “including automatically rejecting any footage belonging to the violence, temporarily suspending the power to sort or filter searches by upload date, and making certain searches on this event opened up results from authoritative news sources.”
Twitter do not immediately interact to requests for comment.
Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who’s been critical of Facebook for privacy lapses, said on Tuesday that the government should tread carefully in reining in tech companies for being nervous about aiding dictators and various bad actors.
Wyden warned against revoking protections given in Section 230 of your Communications Decency Act that specifies tech companies are not the reason for what users say to the platform.
“If politicians like to restrict the most important Amendment or clear away the tools in which much of the globe communicates instantly, they should understand they have also been taking away the equipments that bear witness to government brutality, war crimes, corporate lawlessness and incidents of racial bias,” Wyden said within a statement.?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that advocates for civil liberties within the digital world, cautioned policymakers yesterday morning not to rush to alter speech on online platforms or else it could “disproportionately silence” some of the most vulnerable users, just like Egyptian journalist Wael Abbas, who had been kicked off YouTube for posting videos on police brutality.
EFF often known as for guidelines that urge social platforms being transparent about precisely how many posts and accounts they remove, and provides users notice in addition to a chance to appeal if the first of their posts is disassembled.
