Brexit row may be watershed for curbs on social media

THE now notorious “toxic” debate in the House of Commons on Wednesday rightly attracted waves of disapproval but it may well go down in history as a watershed in our attitudes to theWildWest of social media.

As things stand, any bigot, bully or bile-spouter can sign up for Facebook, Twitter or YouTube using an untraceable email address and make the most vile threats imaginable without fear of redress.

As Paula Sherriff MP pointed out, many MPs were “subject to death threats and abuse every single day”.

And social media sites are not the only online megaphones for the rantings of the deranged. A Google search will pick up the postings of any vaguely internet-savvy blogger, with often devastating consequences.

America’s anti-vax movement, which promotes the myth that the MMR vaccine is linked to autism, has been so effective that the incidence of measles in the US is now at a 25-year high.

If illegal content is posted on social media, it is the person who posted it – rather than the social media companies – who is most at risk of prosecution.

This is a situation that needs to change – and that will require legislation. The tech giants can see the writing on the wall and are already making some effort to self-police their channels.

FACEBOOK, which owns Instagram, claims that it has 30,000 people globally working on safety and security and says it removed 15.4 million pieces of violent content between last October and December, up from 7.9 million in the previous three months.

The video-sharing site YouTube says that 7.8 million videos were taken down between July and September last year.

And yet the man responsible for the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March that left 51 dead published a 74-page “manifesto” before embarking on his killing spree and live-streamed his attack on Facebook.

Despite the tech giant’s precautions, a number of users evaded its censors and uploaded videos of the deadly incidents, which then proved difficult to scrub.

Concern over such activity has reached the highest levels in the US. Only last week, senators questioned Facebook, Google and Twitter executives in an effort to establish if their platforms have become conduits for real-world violence.

And the Big 3’s broad-brush approach to censorship has done little to stem the flood of threats against our own elected representatives. It appears that the only measure that will do that is compulsory registration of social media users.

This has long been opposed by civil libertarians and others on the basis that it is a restriction on freedom of speech, but it is easy to be an angel when nobody ruffles your feathers.

As the MP Jess Phillips wrote a year ago: “It might be easy to brush away the febrile atmosphere online as a nasty by-product of free expression: it’s less easy when it happens to you.

“When someone wrote messages fantasising about my children hanging by their necks I sought legal recompense. Alas, they led to a server in Colombia, a dead end.”

Given the ubiquity of such threats, why shouldn’t people be forced to register? After all, we have no problem providing proof of age and address if applying for a bank account or a driving licence.

Opponents of this approach argue that it’s one thing to give our personal details to a reputable financial institution or government agency, quite another to pass them on to a faceless, stateless media giant.

The model for a way forward may come from an unlikely quarter: the online pornography sector.

UNDER the Digital Economy Act of 2017, commercial providers of pornographic content will be forced to install age-verification checks on their websites in order to prevent children from viewing explicit images and videos.

Mindgeek, the company that owns online sex sites Pornhub and YouPorn, has developed a system called AgeID, which involves verification of age by means of such options as credit card, passport of driving licence details.

The Government was due to introduce the system in July but it has been delayed indefinitely by an “administrative error”.

The challenge now is to apply this mould-breaking approach to everyone, not just sex-mad teenagers.

‘Someone wrote messages fantasising about my children hanging by their necks’