Christchurch massacre: tech bosses agree to face-to-face with Morrison and ministers

Scott Morrison will haul in tech giants to demand they take greater responsibility for violent and disturbing content.

Communications Minister Mitch Fifield will be in the room when Scott Morrison confronts tech giants. Picture: AAP

Scott Morrison will haul in tech ­giants for a meeting next Tuesday to demand they take greater responsibility for violent and disturbing content published on their platforms, or face a legislative crackdown, amid community outrage over the live-streaming of the Christchurch terrorist attack.

The Prime Minister, Communications Minister Mitch Fifield and Attorney-General Christian Porter are set to meet with executives from Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to consider new measures that can be adopted to remove hateful content from social media platforms.

Senator Fifield said the onus was on those who owned and managed social media sites to take action, but the government was prepared to step in if they failed to do so. “In the wake of Christchurch … the government has started looking at measures to address the ways digital platforms were used and abused,” Senator Fifield told The Australian.

“The time has come for those who own and manage platforms to accept a greater responsibility for how they’re used.

“A best-endeavours approach is no longer good enough. It’s clear that while social media companies have co-operated with authorities to remove some of that disgusting content, more needs to be done. If they won’t act, we need to.”

Mr Morrison and Bill Shorten both declared tech giants could make better use of algorithms to ban or delete “hate content”.

Opposition communications spokeswoman Michelle Rowland said nothing should be off the table and if new or tougher laws were needed Labor was “absolutely up for that”. “We need to utilise every layer of governance to ensure platforms are well regulated, content is well monitored and sanctions are well enforced,” she said.

Speaking for the first time since the Christchuch massacre, Facebook vice-president Chris Sonderby said the alleged gunman’s video was viewed fewer than 200 times as it went out live to users and about 4000 times before it was removed from the platform.

About 1.5 million videos of the attack were removed globally in the first 24 hours, with 1.2 million of those blocked at upload and prevented from being seen on Facebook’s services.

The personal Facebook and Instagram accounts of the Australian-born terrorist who allegedly killed 50 people were taken down while videos similar to the original live-stream were “detected and automatically removed” from the platforms. “Some variants such as screen recordings were more difficult to detect, so we expanded to additional detection systems, including the use of audio technology,” Mr Sonderby said.

Mr Morrison is pushing for an agreement among G20 countries to ensure the internet is not an “ungoverned space” and tech companies meet their moral obligation to protect communities they serve and from which they profit.

Mr Shorten said it was not beyond the capacity of some of the “richest, largest, most powerful, cleverest, most sophisticated businesses in the world” to be more responsive in monitoring material before it was published.

Stephen Sheeler, a former Facebook CEO in Australia and New Zealand, said big tech must consider banning live-streaming and, adding that artificial intelligence measures to stop extreme content were not working. Laws targeting executives and board members could encourage tech companies to be more proactive, he said.

Additional reporting: Primrose Riordan