Responsible

Social media giants have a corporate and societal responsibility to do the right thing

It’s tempting to still think of social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram X (formerly Twitter) or even TikTok as the little upstarts which made good. Or to think of them as a way to share pictures and connect with family and friends.

Everyone knows the story of Facebook being created by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and their university friends in a dormitory in early 2004.

But the companies which control them, especially Meta, hold a power few other companies possess, putting them in the same realm as Apple and Microsoft.

When you think of day-to-day life, consider the role Facebook particularly plays – it’s the conduit through which people run many of their online accounts, it’s how prospective employers check you out and, most crucially, it’s how many people now access the news.

Yet despite this mighty and powerful position in society, these giants are frequently failing in their responsibility to monitor and moderate what is going on to their digital platform.

It has been revealed today that violent videos of Australian children stealing cars, doing drugs and breaking into homes are not being removed from social media despite clearly breaching the platform’s guidelines and amplifying the nation’s youth crime epidemic.

Content shared by child gangs on social media - depicting a range of crimes - have remained online for more than a year.

Examples including one TikTok video showing a young boy speeding with the police chasing them captioned “too slow” from March last year.

Another video on Instagram showed a break-and-enter from December 17, 2023.

A third video from a Queensland account that was posted in September 2022 showed kids speeding at 220km/h through a tunnel.

The Gold Coast has seen its own share of young criminals sharing videos of their exploits on social media in recent years, if only to brag about their crimes.

It must stop and the buck stops with the social media giants who continue to allow this to continue.

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

Standards must be lifted.