AFP |
New Zealand’s leader Jacinda Ardern, collectively with other world leaders will launch a “Christchurch call” to curb online extremism at an international meeting in Paris on Wednesday (May 15), following the worst mass killing in her country’s recent history.
World leaders will commit to pledges to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content on social media and other online platforms.
Arden further blamed tech giants like Facebook to not going an extra mile to ensure there are no incidents of sort. Â
The move was prompted by the massacre in March at two Christchurch mosques by a self-described white supremacist, who broadcast live footage on Facebook from a head-mounted camera as he gunned down 51 people.
Read More: Christchurch accused to face 50 murder charges
Arden has time and again shown her support with the people of the migrant Muslim community which was targetted. She denounced the act of violence and promised strict measures against the perpetrators.
What has happened in Christchurch is an extraordinary act of unprecedented violence. It has no place in New Zealand. Many of those affected will be members of our migrant communities – New Zealand is their home – they are us.
— Jacinda Ardern (@jacindaardern) March 15, 2019
Read More: ‘What’s next?’: Christchurch Muslims struggle with shock, fear
Arden, deeply saddened by the incident is the driving force behind the Paris summit, co-hosted with French President Emmanuel Macron, following the tragedy.
“Macron was one of the first leaders to call the prime minister after the attack, and he has long made removing hateful online content a priority,” New Zealand’s ambassador to France, Jane Coombs, told journalists on Monday.
“It’s a global problem that requires a global response,” she said.
On 24th April Ardern called on world leaders to gather and devise workable strategies to eliminate online terrorism. Arden further blamed tech giants like Facebook to not going an extra mile to ensure there are no incidents of sort.
In an opinion piece in The New York Times over the weekend, Ardern said the Christchurch massacre underlined “a horrifying new trend” in extremist atrocities.
“It was designed to be broadcasted on the internet. The entire event was live streamed, the scale of this horrific video’s reach was staggering,” she wrote.
Facebook’s commitment to curb online terrorism
Ardern said Facebook removed 1.5 million copies of the video within 24 hours of the attack, but she still found herself among those who inadvertently saw the footage when it auto-played on their social media feeds.
“No company wants their platforms to become a pool of hateful content, nor do their advertisers or most of their users,”
Since the attack, Ardern has strongly criticized tech giants for not doing enough to combat online extremism.
Attendees at the Paris summit will include heads of state or government from Britain, Canada, Ireland, Norway, Jordan, Senegal and Indonesia.
Facebook was quick in recognizing the act as terrorism and vowed to take any measures necessary to not let their platform be used again for such a thing and provided on-the-ground resources to law enforcing agencies.
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/03/update-on-new-zealand/
Top executives from Twitter, Microsoft, Google and Amazon will also attend, though Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg will be represented by another executive from the social media giant, after meeting with Macron last Friday.
“We deliberately limited the number of participants to ensure we can move forward quickly, but the idea is to create something that we can open up to as many people as possible,” a source in the French presidency said.
‘Practical measures’Â
“Terrorists have always been a step ahead of us when it comes to the online techniques they use,” the source said, adding that companies needed to “anticipate how their features will be exploited.”
Firms themselves will be urged to come up with concrete measures, he said, for example by reserving live broadcasting to social media accounts whose owners have been identified, to avoid bad surprises from newly created anonymous accounts.
“No company wants their platforms to become a pool of hateful content, nor do their advertisers or most of their users,” he said.
Running alongside the G7’s “Tech for Humanity” meeting in the French capital, Ardern said the Christchurch Call was a voluntary code aimed to stop terrorist content being uploaded to social media platforms.
“(We’re) asking both nations and private corporations to make changes to prevent the posting of terrorist content online, to ensure its efficient and fast removal and to prevent the use of live-streaming as a tool for broadcasting terrorist attacks,” she wrote in The Times.
She added: “This is not about undermining or limiting freedom of speech. It is about these companies and how they operate.”
“It’s a global problem that requires a global response,”
While some – such as Zuckerberg – have called for better regulation to address the issue, Ardern said governments could not succeed without help from the tech sector.
“Practical outcomes are what we’re seeking from this work,” she told New Zealand’s Newshub.
“Not just governments regulating, but actually tech companies taking ownership and responsibility for their platforms and the technological solutions that they hold the key to.”
Ardern said New Zealand had been “left reeling” by the Christchurch massacre, and it wanted to prevent similar atrocities happening elsewhere.
“We have a reluctant duty of care, a responsibility that we now find ourselves holding,” she said.