Tech giants warned: Act or face jail

SOCIAL media giants will be today threatened with jail time if they allow dangerous terrorist content to fester on their platforms.

Scott Morrison – who has summoned the Australian chiefs of Facebook, Google and Twitter to Brisbane – will deliver the blunt ultimatum while lobbying other world leaders to take similar action.

After growing frustration over social media giants’ defiance to address the issue, which have been magnified after the Christchurch massacre, new criminal laws are now being drafted.

Under the proposed laws, it would be an offence for social media giants to fail to remove terrorism footage as soon as it was reported or if they knew that the offending footage was being hosted on their platform.

The laws would allow the Government to declare the footage of an incident filmed by a perpetrator and being hosted on a content site as “abhorrent violent material”, creating a separate criminal offence. The longer the footage remained on the platform, the higher the penalties.

Brenton Tarrant, 28, livestreamed his bloody rampage of 50 Muslim worshippers at two Christchurch mosques.

Facebook said the first report on the original video was received 29 minutes after the video started. In the first 24 hours, it removed about 1.5 million videos of the attack and more than 1.2 million videos were blocked at upload.