Premier Steven Miles accuses social media giants of putting cash before community safety

Social media giants like Meta could use their powerful algorithms to stamp out videos of violent youth crime, but choose not to because it makes them money, Premier Steven Miles says.

Social media giants such as Meta could use their powerful algorithms to stamp out violent videos of children committing crimes on their platforms but choose not to because of the income it rakes in, Premier Steven Miles says.

Mr Miles’ latest salvo against tech titans including Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, comes after The Courier-Mail revealed violent videos of children stealing cars, doing drugs and breaking into homes were not being taken down despite breaching the sites’ guidelines.

“I’m very confident if these videos were costing Facebook money rather than making them money, that they would find a way to stop them,” he said.

“There are really three problems, the first is they are incentivising young people to commit crimes (and) secondly leaving those videos there … they’re leaving them as an educational resource teaching other young people to commit crime.

“And the third is they are profiting from it.”

Mr Miles said social media platforms already used artificial intelligence and their algorithms to take down videos of women breastfeeding or those containing copyright-infringing music.

“There is no reason why they wouldn’t be able to use it to flag videos of young people committing crimes, notify our law enforcement so that they can intercept those crimes, prevent them from going on to commit more crimes, and then remove those videos,” he said.

Meta has rejected accusations it promotes violent content on its platforms, claiming it took down 99 per cent of confronting videos before they were reported by users.

After The Courier-Mail revealed videos showing young people committing crimes were being left online across Instagram and TikTok, Meta said it was proactively working to take such content down.

It said that in the December quarter, 99.2 per cent of all violent and graphic content found to be violating guidelines on Instagram and 98.6 per cent on Facebook was deleted before it was reported by users.

“Meta’s policies prohibit people from promoting criminal or harmful activities and we will remove this content as soon as we become aware. We use a combination of technology, reports from our community, law enforcement and regulators such as the eSafety Commissioner, and review by our teams to help us act,” it said.

But federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, whose party is seeking to make new laws to prevent young people from “posting and boasting” about criminal activities said social platforms were not “living up to expectation”.

“It’s not about anything other than glorification online, and we should be starving them of that trophy,” he said.

“It’s obvious to all Australians at the moment that Meta and the other digital companies just aren’t living up to expectations.”

He said at a time when Meta was ”ripping billions” from the nation’s media industry, it had “a moral obligation to give back to our community”.