Internet police are on their way to communication platforms All those who use social media platforms as a means to abuse or bully others, and all those who spread hatred and aggression and incite violence, suicide, or misinformation, should beware.. The police are on their way to your platforms, and countries are taking new measures and strict laws every day. Is it really possible to prevent the harmful and toxic publications that the world of communication platforms is swarming with?
Facebook , Twitter and Instagram will soon be held accountable, accused of ignoring abuse and spreading a culture of hatred among users. Instead of holding the abuser accountable, the platforms will be forced to take measures to prevent abuse from its origin.
It is expected that the British Internet Safety Act will impose penalties of up to two years in prison on the executives of electronic platforms, for failing to perform their duties to protect children from harmful content.
Britain will also oblige the platforms to conduct extensive age checks, to determine the legal contents that are permitted for adults but are not suitable for young people, such as nutrition advice and others, which will place a heavy burden on the platforms in light of users giving false information about their real age.
Next year, the European Union's Digital Services Act (DSI) will also come into force, which limits harmful and offensive content but promises to protect media from deletion of their media content.
As for Turkey, its government asked Twitter to censor information during its recent elections, while Brazil proposed a fake news law that would punish social networks for failing to identify and delete the source of misleading information, and India is publishing a bill to regulate the Internet that makes platforms responsible for content.
Is it possible for the censorship of all these countries to substitute for the self-censorship of man?
- The delay in accounting for social media platforms in the face of the chaos that the Internet is witnessing at the present time, in terms of insults to others and society, can not only be thrown on social networks, but also due to the absence of the role of some countries and international organizations in determining the type of content that is allowed to be published.
- Content identification should not be limited to social networks only.
- Internet police are applied by governments, and the great burden is on the United States, mainly along with the European Union and Britain , to control and monitor the Internet.
- The presence of other countries such as India and Brazil within the system to reduce the negative impact of social networks, especially on young people.
- The United States, the European Union, and Britain refuse to contribute to defining the meaning of hate speech , bullying , and calling for violence within societies, despite their importance.
- No decision has been made yet in determining this type of speech, despite the existence of many laws in this regard.
- The existence of a chapter in the United States Communications Law that exempts social networks from liability for the content of these networks, and there is no American desire to specify the content that should be prevented on the Internet.
- The upcoming US elections are the main reason for the presence of the Internet police because of the role of these networks in influencing the conduct of the elections and the results.
- The existence of huge financial fines rather than trials for these social networks, for example Facebook and Google.
- The European Union law, which will be implemented in the next few months, imposes a fine of up to 6% annually of the total revenues of these networks.
- Applying these fines to social networks would prompt them to invest more in protecting the privacy of their users and monitoring their contents without prejudice to freedom of expression.