03/05/17 - Social media firms must face heavy fines over extremist content – MPs

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/01/social-media-firms-should-be-fined-for-extremist-content-say-mps-google-youtube-facebook

The article talks about the fact that social media firms will be forced to face heavy fines from governments after a report found that a lot of extremist content is not being removed. In Germany, the report points out that they are considering putting up fines of up to 50 million euros on social media companies that are slow to remove illegal content. Some of the material included antisemitic, hate-crime attacks on MPs that had been the subject of a previous committee report. Material encouraging child abuse and sexual images of children was also not removed, despite being reported on by journalists.

• An inquiry by the Commons home affairs committee condemns technology companies for failing to tackle hate speech
• Social media companies are putting profit before safety and should face fines of tens of millions of pounds for failing to remove extremist and hate crime material promptly from their websites
• The inquiry, launched last year following the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox by a far-right gunman, concludes that social media multinationals are more concerned with commercial risks than public protection.
• “One of the world’s largest companies has profited from hatred and has allowed itself to be a platform from which extremists have generated revenue.”
• During its investigation, the committee found instances of terror recruitment videos for banned jihadi and neo-Nazi groups remaining accessible online even after MPs had complained about them.

Personally, I think this is the right way to add a certain aspect of gatekeeping back to the internet. Although, I belive in the freedom of the internet, I do believe that there are some content that are down right immoral and unethical which should not be shared as it can be argued that some of that content is shared purely because of the freedom to be able to. However, I do not agree with extremely restrictive monitoring which would prevent the freedom of the internet, yet I do think some level of content monitoring which takes down outright unethical and extremist content. I also believe that charging companies with heavy heavy fines is exactly what will get their attentions.