‘We need law to hold social media liable for content that they publish’

SOCIAL media firms should be held legally responsible for what is published on their platforms, face punitive fines if they fail to tackle harmful content and have a regulator with the power to raid them, says the chairman of the Commons committee overseeing the sector.

Backing The Telegraph’s duty of care campaign, Damian Collins said there should be a new law which would end the social media firms’ “neutrality” that makes them not liable for what is published on their platforms.

Instead, he argued that they should become legally responsible for any harmful content once alerted to it, and have systems in place to identify it.

He is proposing that a new regulator would have the powers to go into the firms to investigate whether they had adequate safeguards in place and fine them if they did not.

Asked about The Telegraph’s campaign, he said: “As far as duty of care is concerned, I am 100 per cent in the same place. I feel very strongly that, as we did with broadcasting, Parliament should set in statute a code that places obligations on companies to act against harmful content, defines sanctions if they don’t do it and establishes a regulator who can investigate them when they don’t.

“The regulator would not just investigate individual instances but also have the right to go into a tech company to look at how the algorithms are working and to make an assessment as to whether they are doing enough to make harmful content difficult to find, to remove it when they see it and have the resources in place to do that effectively.

“In the tech sector, good governance has not developed as fast as the sector has developed. It has become an anomaly in a way.

“There need to be some standards and rules here because increasingly social media is the gateway to the internet. A lot of the information that people receive is through social media.”

Mr Collins said he hoped the Government’s forthcoming White Paper on social media would not just tackle the removal of illegal content but also target legal but harmful content.

“Cyberbullying is an example. It’s unpleasant and we should be doing something about it and those who do it, but it is not illegal content,” he said.

He believed fines should be of a similar scale to those applied to data protection laws of a maximum of €20million (£17.5million) or four per cent of global turnover, whichever was higher.

For Facebook, that would mean up to $2billion (£1.6billion) of its $55billion (£43billion) revenues.

“What we want to be able to do is not just to say that content should be removed and we are to going to fine you if it is not, but also have the power to go in and investigate: Why did that happen? Was it a failure of systems? Was it that they had spotted it but did nothing about it?” he said.

“To give the regulator that sort of power in the round as regulators have in other industries would be much better.”