Facebook, Twitter and Google could face their worst regulation nightmares if the recommendations of parliament’s report into fake news, based on a leaked version published on Friday by the former campaign strategist for Vote Leave, come to pass.
The report is expected to call for the creation of a new legal framework for regulating technology firms, tightening their liabilities and imposing a requirement for them to take down “harmful and illegal content”. It will argue for the end of “safe harbour” provisions, whereby platforms are not liable for content hosted by them until it is flagged to them as problematic.
Instead, the report will argue, companies should be liable for “both content that has been referred to them for takedown by their users, and other content that should have been easy for the tech companies to identify for themselves”.
The goal, to create a new category that is neither “publisher” nor “platform”, recognises that the largest social media firms shape their platforms far more than the web hosts and forum providers of the early internet. “They continually change what is and is not seen on their sites, based on algorithms and human intervention,” the report notes.
In fact, the recommendation would largely formalise in law what the largest tech companies have been doing in practice for years. YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, the three largest platform holders in the UK, all proactively police their sites for illegal content in various ways. A source at one of the platforms described the perception that they did do this as “rubbish”, pointing to the vast effort publicly put into fighting such content.
Microsoft’s PhotoDNA technology, for instance, allows known child abuse imagery to be prevented from being posted, while all three companies have been investing in AI technology in an effort to find and flag terror propaganda before it is seen by any humans. Twitter, for instance, removes 93% proactively and catches 74% of terror accounts before they even tweet.
But a legal responsibility for content “that should have been easy to identify” will worry decision makers at all the “platisher” companies and risks pushing them to far greater acts of censorship than anyone would view as desirable.
YouTube, for example, already struggles to distinguish between terrorist propaganda and news reports about terrorism (as, indeed, many humans do). Is a video of an explosion followed by cheering militants propaganda or news? Can it be both? Currently, YouTube walks a careful tightrope, making mistakes in both directions but, if it faced legal liability for those errors, it would be likely to feel forced to simply remove vast swathes of valid material to stay legally safe.
Despite those threats, Facebook is expected to welcome the report as a whole. Part of the reason is that, aside from the new regulatory structure, some of the committee’s other recommendations are positively welcoming for technology companies. It suggests a pair of levies, one on social media specifically and one on the technology industry more generally, aimed at funding media education and the Information Commissioner’s Office. No one likes paying taxes, but Facebook would love to be able to open its wallet and make its problems go away.
Similarly, a raft of new regulations for online campaigning provide the legal guidance that Facebook and Twitter have been crying out for over the past year.
“All electronic campaigning should have easily accessible digital imprint requirements, including information on the publishing organisation and who is legally responsible for the spending, so that it is obvious at a glance who has sponsored that campaigning material,” the report will argue. It will call for a register of political advertising and an end to “microtargeting”, where different messages can be sent to different demographics.
Facebook and Twitter both provide some of this sort of information to voters in the US and Facebook has committed to provide the same in the UK in time for the 2019 local elections. But both companies have supported legislation in the US aimed at making such reporting mandatory in order to benefit from the resulting clarity around how far they should go in shaping the democratic process.
“The rules on modern political campaigning are for legislators to change and enforce,” the platform source said. “We are doing our bit already.”
Facebook will tell MPs it has already done more, such as provide more information on the Facebook page behind any ad and all the ads that the page is running; working on ways to authenticate and label political ads in the UK; and creating an archive of those ads that anyone can search.
If there is one takeaway for the tech firms from the report, it is that they could be in a much better place if they simply explained the decisions they made and the principles behind them. That too could become compulsory: one of the report’s recommendations is expected to be the creation of “a professional global code of ethics” to form “the backbone of tech companies’ work”.
But there is a stick: if they fail at living by their ethical principles, the report will warn, “the UK government should introduce regulation to make such ethical rules compulsory”.
Twitter and Google declined to comment.
