Web giants must face up to responsibilities

IT’S not just parents who see social media and ‘online life’ as the biggest threats to children’s welfare. Now even the internet generation themselves are acutely uneasy about the monsters taking over their lives.

A survey of 2,000 children finds four out of five believe web giants do too little to protect them from online porn, self-harm websites and cyberbullying, with Facebook named among the worst offenders.

Hardly a day goes by without further concerns being raised over the conduct of the internet giants. Yet the billionaires who control the biggest firms merely shrug their shoulders, denying all responsibility for grotesque offences against civilised values committed on their websites.

Take this week in Thailand, when a father hanged his 11-month-old daughter on camera and posted a video of her murder on Facebook before killing himself. The gruesome footage remained online for 24 hours, watched by hundreds of thousands.

Or consider Twitter’s decision to block Britain’s security services from checking streams of data to identify potential terrorist threats. The firm loftily declared it ‘absolutely unacceptable’ to allow governments access to information for ‘surveillance’ (though it has no such qualms about harvesting users’ private details for commercial advantage).

This paper accepts that the internet has brought myriad advantages to humanity.

But with the spread of cyberfraud, fake news, terrorist training videos and ever more extreme pornography, it has also given rise to countless social ills.

How much longer can the arrogant, filth-peddling, tax-dodging firms that profit from it remain a law unto themselves before they face the social responsibilities that go with their power to harm?