‘Copycat effect’ on social media making youth crime worse: Police

Young offenders bragging about their illegal antics online and the “copycat effect” is making the crime issue worse, with Queensland Police now bolstering their ability to tackle the issue.

Young offenders bragging about their illegal antics online and the “copycat effect” is making the crime issue worse, Queensland Police have warned amid the expansion of a dedicated team of social media investigators.

But the sheer scale of young people posting dangerous and high-risk online content is such that community members feel nothing is being done about the material they report despite social media giants removing a staggering amount of content before it sees the light of day.

Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll on Tuesday confirmed the “Digital Intelligence Collection and Evaluation” (DICE) team would be expanded from five social media experts to 30 “very soon”.

The team will work to “gather intelligence on youth who boast about their crimes online” while engaging with administrators of online community forums to “instil confidence” about what actions police were taking to prevent and intervene in crime.

A Queensland Police spokesman said the prevalence of young people posting videos about illegal activity online and “challenging others to participate” on social media had “growing in recent years”.

“(It) is an ongoing concern for police as we continue to combat youth crime,” he said.

“Police believe the ‘copycat effect’ of young people posting dangerous and high-risk online videos is perpetuating youth crime issues in Queensland.”

Toowoomba resident Jo Noble, who runs the town’s crime alerts Facebook community group, said she had reported at least ten posts to social media platforms in the last month as she came across concerning content but did not receive any feedback about what action had been taken.

But millions of Facebook and Instagram posts globally are removed each month according to Meta’s transparency centre, with a staggering majority proactively pulled before the public sees it.

The same goes for TikTok, which between July and September 2022 removed 546,330 videos — nearly 94 per cent proactively — in Australia alone for breaching community guidelines. This includes depicting “illegal activities and regulated goods”.

The number of requests by governments for social media companies to remove accounts or content is significantly smaller, with TikTok reporting 231 requests from across Australia in the first six months of 2022 while Facebook recorded more than 1800 requests for data.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner and Queensland Police have described social media platforms as cooperative when it comes to removing content when requested.

Queensland federal MP Garth Hamilton has been pushing for laws to give the eSafety Commissioner more powers to ask social media companies to take down youth crime content.

The state government’s new youth crime laws, expected to be passed in parliament later this week, includes making it so a child can face a steeper penalty if it’s found they boasted about the offence on social media.

“This is aimed at sending a clear message to all offenders that the re-traumatising and glorification of crimes through these social media posts will not be tolerated,” Police Minister Mark Ryan said.