Social media executives from Facebook, Google and Instagram could be held personally liable for harmful content distributed on their platforms, according to a person familiar with U.K. government plans.<\/p>\n
U.K. ministers are frustrated at the slow speed of self-regulation by internet giants amid the dissemination of images relating to terrorism, self-harm, suicide and child abuse.<\/p>\n
In legislation due to be published Monday, executives could be found liable for the images under a new legally-binding duty of care on the companies.<\/p>\n
A regulator, likely to be funded by the companies themselves, will be able to impose fines and hold bosses accountable.<\/p>\n
Search engines alongside online messaging services and file hosting sites will also come under the remit of the regulator, according to the person familiar with the plans.<\/p>\n
Annual reports on what companies have done to remove and block harmful content will also be required.<\/p>\n
The need for legislation has been highlighted by the terrorist attack in New Zealand last month in which 50 Muslims were killed while footage was live-streamed online.<\/p>\n
In the U.K., the case of 14-year-old Molly Russell has focused minds. According to her father, the teenager killed herself in 2017 after viewing self-harm and suicide content online.<\/p>\n
Social media executives from Facebook, Google and Instagram could be held personally liable for harmful content distributed on their platforms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":221973,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57364],"tags":[161,167,10424],"class_list":["post-301870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-enterprise","tag-facebook","tag-google","tag-instagram"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301870"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301870\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}