Global leaders and Big Tech are taking another crack at policing online terrorist content.
On Wednesday, French President Emmanuel Macron, the United Kingdom’s Theresa May, as well as high-profile executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter will sign up to non-binding commitments — dubbed the “Christchurch Call” after the March 15 terror attack — aimed at curbing the spread of terrorist material on the web.
The proposals come after 51 people were murdered at two mosques in New Zealand in March in shootings livestreamed on social media by the alleged gunman, who had also posted a hate-filled manifesto online. Both the video of the attack and the manifesto were circulated widely online, despite efforts to remove them from platforms like Facebook’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube.
The announcement, which is expected later on Wednesday, comes amid growing calls from politicians worldwide for social media companies to do more to tackle the hate speech, disinformation and terrorist material that now proliferates online.
But amid mounting demands for new legislation, policymakers, tech executives and freedom of speech campaigners have yet to decide how best to protect people online while not harming their right to freedom of speech.
While the leaders and tech executives gathered in Paris will renew their calls for action — countries like France, Germany and the U.K. already have laws or proposals to limit the posting of extremist content online — the latest push to be announced Wednesday still does not grapple with the underlying problem of how to regulate the global internet when few policymakers can agree to legally binding rules to stop the worst content from being shared online.
“The future of how we decide what is legitimate and non-legitimate speech is at stake,” said David Kaye, a United Nations special rapporteur for freedom of expression and digital communications, who recently published a book on global internet governance.
“These are matters of public debate and governments have a right to play a role,” he added. “My concern is about the approach that they decide to take.”