Home Affairs Committee proposes new hate crime laws to regulate “completely irresponsible” social media giants
The House of Commons Home Affairs Committee has published the report of its inquiry into online hate crime. The Committee has severely criticised social media companies Google, Facebook and Twitter, recommending that following the general election, laws should be passed which would make it a criminal offence for social media companies to fail to remove criminal hate speech and incitement within a strict timeframe, citing a German proposal to fine companies up to £44 million. The mooted law would include significant escalating fines for the companies.
Google (which owns YouTube), Facebook and Twitter had all been hauled before the Committee where they were on the defensive from the outset.
The Committee was particularly shocked by a phenomenon that most social media users are now all too familiar with: social media companies outsource reporting hate speech to social media users. Campaign Against Antisemitism and many others have long demanded that social networks proactively search for and remove hate speech from their platforms, and the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee has now joined the call. Indeed the Committee went as far as proposing that social media companies pay towards the cost of police units specialising in online hate crime if they fail to adequately keep illegal material off their networks.
In response to Google, Facebook and Twitter’s “unacceptable” attempts to avoid questions about what they actually do to clean up their platforms, the Committee proposed that the companies should be required by law to publish quarterly reports on their safeguarding activity including the number of staff, complaints and action taken.
Calling the social media companies “completely irresponsible”, the Committee attacked their failure to implement even their own community standards, and noted the contrast between their lax approach to hate crime and their tough and speedy response to copyright infringement. The Committee found numerous examples of hate speech not being removed by social media companies, for example Google communications chief Peter Barron brazenly told the Committee that Google’s lawyers did not consider a video by a renowned American racist, David Duke, to be antisemitic, despite Duke using the video to claim that “the Jews” were conspiring to subvert Western society to bring about a “white genocide”.
As the report was published, Yvette Cooper MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “Social media companies’ failure to deal with illegal and dangerous material online is a disgrace…This isn’t beyond them to solve, yet they are failing to do so. They continue to operate as platforms for hatred and extremism without even taking basic steps to make sure they can quickly stop illegal material, properly enforce their own community standards, or keep people safe…They have been far too slow in dealing with complaints from their users, and it is blindingly obvious that they have a responsibility to proactively search their platforms for illegal content, particularly when it comes to terrorist organisations. Given their continued failure to sort this, we need a new system including fines and penalties if they don’t swiftly remove illegal content.”
We welcome the findings of the Committee, which has robustly held the social media giants to account. Campaign Against Antisemitism believes that internet giants must do much more to tackle hate crime on their platforms, particularly by developing proactive algorithms to take down antisemitic material in the same way that they already remove copyright material, or child abuse. We also believe that it is important for the social networks to verify the true identities of their users, and to provide evidence to police when British laws are broken, not only American laws.
Campaign Against Antisemitism recognises the improvements made by social media companies, but ultimately we agree with the Committee that their approach to date has been abjectly irresponsible and slow. We therefore applaud the Committee’s recommendation that the law should be changed to compel companies to adopt effective strategies against hate crime or face criminal charges and extremely heavy fines.
