Facebook shut down till emergency is lifted By Namini Wijedasa Social media giant says it will not allow hate speech or incitement to violence; ready to respond to situation View(s): View(s):

The temporary blockade of access to the social media site Facebook could remain in place till the State of Emergency lapses, authoritative sources said yesterday.

The Government had initially conveyed to Facebook that the suspension was in place for 72 hours, the sources said. However, it has gone on for longer. Presidential Secretary Austin Fernando, who is also chairman of the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC), told the Sunday Times that he could not say when the blockade would be lifted and that it would depend on the situation.

Yesterday, a spokesman for the social media site based in India told the Sunday Times that they were “responding to the situation in Sri Lanka and are in contact with the Government and non-Governmental organisations to support efforts to identify and remove” hate speech and incitement to violence.

“The safety of our community is critical to us,” the spokesman said, in response to questions sent via email. “We have clear rules against hate speech or incitement to violence and work hard to keep it off our platform.”

But Facebook also said it was concerned “with the way access to the internet is being restricted and depriving people of important connections and expression. We hope that access will be restored soon”.

The New York Times quoted a spokesman from President Maithripala Sirisena’s office as saying that the Sri Lankan Government raised more than 100 items with Facebook. Harendra B Dassanayake, Director Research and International Media at President’s Office, could not immediately divulge to the Sunday Times what these items were but he said they comprised certain pages and profiles on Facebook, including sites administered by Mahason Balakaya and Asura Sena.

“A number of Facebook profiles and pages were reported as instigating violence and spreading hate speech and, in some cases, using the Facebook platform to organise crimes in real time,” Mr Dassanayake said. For instance, one man–who is now in custody–posted a video on YouTube of him walking around Kandy, urging people to gather around mosques as Muslims were plotting to attack Buddhist temples.

He called on them to destroy all the mosques if even a single temple was attacked. The clip was circulated via social media.

Hatred and incitement to violence was also spread via messaging apps like Whatsapp and Viber, he said. “There was a WhatsApp group called ‘Muslim Media’. It circulated voice clips with step-by-step instructions on how to manufacture petrol bombs, how to mix caustic soda, battery acid and flour to make an instant explosion,” Mr Dassanayake said.

Meanwhile, during a meeting President Maithripala Sirisena hosted with the diplomatic community this week, the US Ambassador asked when the social media blockade would end. The President replied that it would be lifted once the situation cleared. But the sources said it could go on till the State of Emergency was lifted. Access to messaging apps is likely to be granted earlier.

It became clear that a considerable amount of misinformation, spreading of racial hatred and incitement was taking place using social media platforms including, in particular, Facebook, and communication networks such as Viber and WhatsApp, a senior legal source said.

“Therefore, using Emergency Regulations that were promulgated on March 6, the Ministry of Defence requested the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) to take necessary steps to cause a temporary blockade of access to those sites and systems,” he explained. The TRC requested digital data service providers to carry out the blockade and close down the relevant ports through which access was being obtained by users.”

“The blockade will be lifted soon and, in any event, will lapse no sooner Emergency is lifted,” he said. The State of Emergency is valid for a maximum of 14 days after which it must be approved by Parliament.

The authorities felt that, with the suspension of access, “spreading of misinformation and incitement stopped” and that it “definitely had a positive impact on de-escalation of violence”.

“I think, empirically, it can be shown that barring access did help in bringing the situation under control,” the legal source said.

Some internet users started using proxy sites–virtual private networks (VPN)–to access social media. “That VPN applications provide a bypass is correct,” he accepted. “However, I am advised that even with VPN accessibility, access to the blocked sites have come down to about 10 percent of the previous load.

The Facebook spokesman said the company would remove content that violated its community standards when reported to it. “We carefully review each report and may consider things such as a person’s physical location in determining whether a threat is credible,” he explained.

“We are concerned with the way access to the internet is being restricted and depriving people of important connections, and we hope that access will be restored soon,” he added, providing a link to the negative economic impact of the internet shutdown. He also pointed to third party voices, such as the Committee to Protect Journalists Asia, that have publicly criticised the ban.

“That it did cause some degree of restriction to peaceful communication and expression of freedom of mind is correct,” the legal source contended. “However, on a balance, I am firmly of the view that the blockade was reasonable and justified, and certainly lawful.” </s> In the wake of the terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand last month, Australia is putting major pressure on Big Tech to prevent the spread of hateful and violent content on their platforms, with a new law that threatens major fines and imprisonment.

The law positions Australia at the extreme end of a growing push to police the digital gatekeepers.

On Thursday, Australia’s parliament passed legislation that carries penalties of up to 10 percent of annual global net sales over the 12 months preceding an offense for the companies, and imprisonment of up to three years for company executives. It is unclear from the legislation which executives would be subjected to the law.

The new Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material bill requires hosting services and content service providers to notify law enforcement and “expeditiously” remove content that depicts “abhorrent violent conduct,” which the bill defines as terrorist acts, murder, attempted murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping.

The law does not limit its scope to the executives of major corporations like Google or Facebook. Instead, those who run any site or service that fails to remove “abhorrent violent material” from their servers are also subject to potential fines or imprisonment under the law.

The bill was drafted in response to the horrific shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, during which the shooter livestreamed his attack and white supremacist messages on Facebook. After the original livestream was removed, the video rapidly proliferated across the platform as Facebook moderators scrambled to remove hundreds of thousands of re-uploads. The company says it automatically blocked 1.2 million versions while another 300,000 made it past their filters. Videos were also shared on Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube, all of which likewise struggled to contain it.

Australia’s attorney general, Christian Porter, told reporters on Thursday that Twitter and Facebook “should not be playing footage of murder,” according to The Guardian. “There are platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook who do not seem to take their responsibility to not show the most abhorrently violent material seriously,” Porter told reporters.

The Guardian reports that Porter explained a jury would have to decide what constitutes an “expeditious” timeframe for removal of offending content, meaning it is not specifically defined by the law. Porter added, “every Australian would agree it was totally unreasonable that it [the Christchurch video] should exist on their [Facebook’s] site for well over an hour without them taking any action whatsoever.”

Digital Industry Group Inc (DIGI), an Australian group that represents Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Amazon, among other tech companies, denounced the new law.

“This law, which was conceived and passed in five days without any meaningful consultation, does nothing to address hate speech, which was the fundamental motivation for the tragic Christchurch terrorist attacks,” DIGI managing director Sunita Bose said, in a statement.

Bose said that DIGI members try to remove abhorrent content as fast as possible. “But with the vast volumes of content uploaded to the internet every second, this is a highly complex problem that requires discussion with the technology industry, legal experts, the media and civil society to get the solution right,” Bose said.

“We have zero tolerance for terrorist content on our platforms,” a Google spokesperson told Gizmodo. “We are committed to leading the way in developing new technologies and standards for identifying and removing terrorist content.”

Facebook and Twitter directed Gizmodo to the statement from DIGI.

In an interview on Good Morning America that aired shortly after the bill was passed, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected calls made after the Christchurch attack to add a delay to livestreams, because it would “fundamentally break what livestreaming is for people.” </s> Facebook has finally responded to international outrage following the live streaming of the massacre of worshippers in two Christchurch mosques.

Four days after a gunman went on rampage killing 50 people and injuring dozens of others, Facebook vice president Chris Sonderby defended the platform’s response to the live stream and reassured users it was working to stop hate content being posted on the platform.

He said the live stream had fewer than 200 viewers and more than 1.5 million videos of the massacre were removed or blocked in the 24 hours after the attack.

“We remain shocked and saddened by this tragedy and are committed to working with leaders in New Zealand, other governments, and across the technology industry to help counter hate speech and the threat of terrorism,” he said.

“We continue to work around the clock to prevent this content from appearing on our site, using a combination of technology and people.

“We have been working directly with the New Zealand Police to respond to the attack and support their investigation.

“We removed the attacker’s video within minutes of their outreach to us, and in the aftermath, we have been providing an on-the-ground resource for law enforcement authorities.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Sunday said she would raise her concerns directly with Facebook about whether live streaming should be stopped.

The Australian and British governments have joined in increasing pressure on Facebook, Google and Youtube to act swiftly on terrorist content being shared on their platforms.

Mr Sonderby said New Zealand police had asked that some details of the response to broadcast not be released, but he revealed details about the action Facebook took when it became aware a terrorist attack had been live streamed.

He said no Facebook users reported the video during the live broadcast, which was viewed fewer than 200 times.

He said the first user report was made 12 minutes after the broadcast ended.

The original Facebook Live video was removed and the personal accounts of the shooting suspect were removed, Mr Sonderby said.

“In the first 24 hours, we removed about 1.5 million videos of the attack globally,” he said.

“More than 1.2 million of those videos were blocked at upload, and were therefore prevented from being seen on our services.

“This incident highlights the importance of industry cooperation regarding the range of terrorists and violent extremists operating online.” </s> Australia will fine social media companies up to 10 percent of their annual global turnover and imprison executives for up to three years if violent content is not removed “expeditiously” under a new law passed by the country’s parliament on Thursday.

The new law is in response to a lone gunman attack on two mosques in Christchurch on March 15, killing 50 people as they attended Friday prayers.

The gunman broadcasted his attack live on Facebook and it was widely shared for over an hour before being removed, a timeframe Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described as unacceptable.

READ MORE: Christchurch shooting video triggers lawsuit against Facebook and YouTube by French Muslim group

Australian Brenton Tarrant, 28, a suspected white supremacist, has been charged with one murder following the attack and was remanded without a plea. He is due back in court on April 5, when police said he was likely to face more charges.

It is now an offense in Australia for companies, such as Facebook Inc and Alphabet’s Google, which owns YouTube, not to remove any videos or photographs that show murder, torture or rape without delay.

Companies must also inform Australian police within a “reasonable” timeframe.

WATCH: New Zealand PM says they’ve attempted to remove video of mosque shootings

“It is important that we make a very clear statement to social media companies that we expect their behavior to change,” Mitch Fifield, Australia’s minister for communications and the arts, told reporters in Canberra.

Juries will decide whether companies have complied with the timetable.

A spokeswoman for Google declined to comment on the legislation specifically, but said the company has already taken action to limit violent content on its platforms.

READ MORE: New Zealand’s inquiry into mosque shootings will look at social media, spy agencies and guns

A spokeswoman for Facebook was not immediately able for comment.

Facebook said last week it was exploring restrictions on who can access their live video-streaming service, depending on factors such as previous violations of the site’s community standards.

Australia’s opposition Labor party backed the legislation, but said it will consult with the technology industry over possible amendments if it wins power at an election due in May.

Australia’s parliament will rise until after the election. The newly elected lawmakers will not sit until at least July.

Critics of the legislation said the government moved too quickly, without proper consultation and consideration.

“Laws formulated as a knee-jerk reaction to a tragic event do not necessarily equate to good legislation and can have myriad unintended consequences,” said Arthur Moses, head of the Australian Law Council. </s> Facebook said on Thursday it was banning Alex Jones and other controversial U.S. political personalities for violating the social media company’s policies on “dangerous individuals and organizations.”

Most of the individuals whose accounts are being removed are popular figures on the far right, including commentators Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer and Paul Joseph Watson.

Facebook also said it is banning Paul Nehlen, an avowed white supremacist who ran for Congress in 2018, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has preached black separatism and referred to Jews as “termites.”

The company will remove any accounts, pages, groups and events associated with the banned individuals, both on its core social network and its photo-sharing app Instagram. It says it bans any users who promote violence or hate.

However, Facebook stopped short of prohibiting other users from praising or supporting the banned individuals on its platforms, as it has done for militant groups like Islamic State and al-Qaeda in the past.

Hours after his account disappeared, videos of Louis Farrakhan were still visible on Instagram among the 17,000 posts with the hashtag #louisfarrakhan, including a video where he defends his descriptions of Jews.

“If it is truth, then it is not anti-Semitic,” he says in the clip.

Facebook announced the ban before removing the affected accounts, giving the account owners time to redirect their thousands of followers to other channels before the accounts disappeared, as captured in screen shots by BuzzFeed journalist Ryan Mac.

Alex Jones, who has promoted conspiracy theories about the Sandy Hook school shooting and hosted Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes on his show, quickly opened a new account and live-streamed himself talking about the ban, CNBC reported.

Infowars, the website run by Jones, posted a response saying that the ban “… amounts to editorial control over user content – and a donation in kind to the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.”

Social media companies have an uneasy history with voices on the far right, struggling for years to decide how to handle extremist content even as its purveyors used the services to amass followers and catapult themselves into the mainstream.

The result has often been haphazard enforcement of policies: Facebook removed pages associated with Jones and his Infowars website starting last year, but left up his personal profile, for example.

Apple, Google parent Alphabet, and Twitter also banned Infowars last year.

The companies have faced backlash over their suspensions of accounts from conservatives, who accuse them of censorship and bias. Civil rights groups say social media giants have failed to confront extremism.

Facebook says it enforces its rules without prejudice. It tightened those policies further last month with a decision to ban praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism. </s> Australia has passed a tough new law that could see big tech executives jailed if their platforms host violent video content.

Attorney General Christian Porter said Thursday that the new penalty regime would target social media firms and clamp down on the circulation of content that broadcasts violent crimes.

It comes after tech giants Facebook, Google and Twitter failed to remove videos of a shooting in a New Zealand mosque last month, where 50 people were killed.

Australia's new legislation makes it a criminal offence for social media platforms not to swiftly remove "abhorrent content."

Executives may be jailed for up to three years if their platforms fail to comply, and companies face fines of up to 10 percent of their annual global turnover.

The law will also require social media firms — regardless of their location — to notify the Australian Federal Police if they become aware that their service is streaming violent conduct that is happening in Australia. Failure to do so will see company executives fined up to 168,000 Australian dollars ($119,300), while corporations face penalties of up to 840,000 Australian dollars.

"The tragedy in Christchurch just over two weeks ago brought this issue to a head," Porter said in a press release Thursday.

"It was clear from our discussions last week with social media companies, particularly Facebook, that there was no recognition of the need for them to act urgently to protect their own users from the horror of the live streaming of the Christchurch massacre and other violent crimes, and so the government has taken action with this legislation." </s> EXPECT fewer status updates from Papua New Guinea. The country’s Information and Communications Technology Authority is planning a month-long Facebook shutdown to conduct research on how the social media platform is being used.

Sam Basil, the communications minister, told local news outlets that the downtime will allow information to be collected to identify the country’s fake users, as well as those who upload “false or misleading” information or pornographic content. His department will also use the month to look into creating a new social network for citizens of Papua New Guinea.

It is not clear why the experiment is focusing on a Facebook shutdown, rather than studying the site up and running. Only around 12 per cent of citizens have access to the internet.

China, Iran and North Korea all have blanket bans on Facebook, and other countries have blocked the platform temporarily, often during protests or in the run-up to elections.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Papua New Guinea Facebook break” </s> Facebook removed 1.5 million videos of the mass shootings at two mosques in New Zealand in the day after the attack Friday.

Mia Garlick, director of policy for Facebook New Zealand, issued a statement saying that Facebook removed 1.5 million videos of the shooting, including 1.2 million that were blocked at upload, in the first 24 hours after the attack.

Garlick did not specify the reason why 20 percent of the videos were not blocked at upload.

"Out of respect for the people affected by this tragedy and the concerns of local authorities, we're also removing all edited versions of the video that do not show graphic content," she added.

The accused shooter, who has since appeared in court, live streamed the attack at two mosques in the city of Christchurch on Friday in which 50 people were killed and 36 were hospitalized as of Saturday.

Facebook said police alerted it to a video of the shooting on the platform shortly after the shooter started the live stream his Facebook profile. The social media giant said it "quickly removed both the shooter's Facebook and Instagram accounts and the video."

Garlick said Facebook will also remove "any praise or support for the crime and the shooter or shooters as we're aware."

"We will continue working directly with New Zealand Police as their response and investigation continues," she said.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that there were "further questions to be answered" by Facebook and other social media sites, regarding their response to the events surrounding the shooting.

On Sunday, New Zealand's government informed Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other online platforms that sharing any version of the footage, including those edited to remove graphic content, is a violation of the law.

Ardern said New Zealand did as much as it could do to "remove or seek to have removed some of the footage" but the primary task of preventing the spread of the videos was "up to those platforms."

This article has been adapted from its original source. </s> The United States will not be joining the Christchurch Call for Action, a push by New Zealand and France to encourage tech companies and countries to work together to end the use of social media in acts of terrorism, the Trump administration announced Wednesday.

“While the United States is not currently in a position to join the endorsement, we continue to support the overall goals reflected in the call. We will continue to engage governments, industry and civil society to counter terrorist content on the internet,” the White House said in a statement.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron announced the Christchurch Call earlier Wednesday in Paris at a meeting of digital leaders for the G7 nations, just two months after the March 15 mass shootings on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, left 51 dead and many wounded.

Facebook removed 1.5 million videos of the Christchurch attacks in the first 24 hours after the massacre. It also blocked 1.2 million of them at upload, meaning they would not have been seen by users.

“When it came to the way this attack was specifically designed to be broadcast and to go viral, (responding) to that needed a global solution, so that was why we immediately got in contact with international counterparts,” Ardern told CNN Tuesday.

Facebook has signed on to the agreement, introducing new rules for live-streaming. Under the new policy, the alleged Christchurch shooter would not have been able to livestream the massacre from his account in March, a Facebook spokesperson told CNN Business.

The US thanked Ardern and Macron “for organizing this important effort” in its Wednesday statement, noting that the administration “(agrees) with the overarching message” in the nonbinding agreement.

The statement condemned terrorist and violent extremist content online “in the strongest terms,” however, it cited freedom of expression and freedom of the press as reasons it would not be joining the agreement.

“We encourage technology companies to enforce their terms of service and community standards that forbid the use of their platforms for terrorist purposes. We continue to be proactive in our efforts to counter terrorist content online while also continuing to respect freedom of expression and freedom of the press,” the statement read.

It continued: “Further, we maintain that the best tool to defeat terrorist speech is productive speech, and thus we emphasize the importance of promoting credible, alternative narratives as the primary means by which we can defeat terrorist messaging.”

The Trump administration has been involved in efforts to end online terrorist content, including its September 2017 endorsement of the Zurich-London Recommendations on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism and Terrorism Online.
The suspension of Facebook remains in place until the riots end.