Christchurch shooting: Morrison’s call to G20 leaders to bring order to ‘ungoverned’ internet

Scott Morrison will push the G20 for a global agreement to clamp down on social media platforms that are used to promote ­violence.

Scott Morrison in Melbourne yesterday. Picture: Getty Images

Scott Morrison will lead a push for a global agreement among G20 countries to clamp down on tech companies when social media platforms are used to promote ­violence, calling for greater regulation and warning it is “unacceptable to treat the internet as an ungoverned space”.

In the aftermath of Friday’s Christchurch massacre, the Prime Minister wrote last night to the G20 chairman, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, to elevate ­social media governance as a top-order agenda item for the world leaders’ meeting in June, saying it was up to the international community to act.

The Trump administration has also been informed of Australia’s decision to pursue the issue at the G20, as has Indonesia. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was included in the corres­pondence following her statements yesterday that the companies could do more.

Bill Shorten signalled that Labor might pursue penalties for companies that failed in their ­social duty, saying traditional media companies would end up in court if their newspapers published the material that social media platforms did.

Opposition legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus also said: “If we need to pass laws that improve the way in which social media platforms behave then we should pass those laws.”

In his strident letter to Mr Abe, revealed to The Australian, Mr Morrison questions the “un­restricted role played by internet technologies in this and other ­terrorist attacks”.

He calls on G20 leaders to ­“ensure that there are clear consequences, not only for those who carry out such horrific acts, but for those who facilitate them”.

In a clear reference to tech ­giants such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, Mr Morrison says the industry should be compelled to act more swiftly in “removing of content by actors who encourage, normalise, recruit, facilitate or commit terrorist and violent ­activities”.

“It is unacceptable to treat the internet as an ungoverned space,” Mr Morrison writes.

“It is imperative that the global community works together to ensure that technology firms meet their moral obligation to protect the communities which they serve and from which they profit.

“The notion of the law applying equally online as it does offline was an underlying principle. In 2018, G20 leaders ­restated their commitment to full implementation of the Hamburg Statement.”

Ms Ardern said yesterday there should be more powers to take a “very direct approach” to stop speech on social media sites that incited violence or hate.

Australia was the first to put the governance of cyberspace on the agenda of the G20 when then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull succeeded in having the use of the “dark web” by terrorists included in the final communique of the 2016 meeting in Hamburg. This paved the way for tougher encryption laws to force companies to co-operate with security agencies. Mr Morrison told The Australian last night that tech companies were international, so it was up to the international community to act and the G20 was the right forum to advance those concerns.

“Social media companies are international businesses and it’s up to the international community to force them to act,” he said.

“They can’t ­operate as if the law doesn’t apply to them. The simple fact is, if a company cannot offer part of its service safely, it has a corporate social responsibility to consider the ethics of whether it should be offered at all.

“Today’s technology means this type of content can be identified quickly and automatically, without having to wait for someone to phone it in. This is insufficient.

“There is no doubt they can develop the technological capability to … address this issue. The question is whether there is the will to make it happen.”

Mr Morrison yesterday chaired another meeting of the national security committee of cabinet as concerns continued about the potential for Australia to be targeted by copycat or revenge attacks.

Mr Shorten called on the tech giants to meet him and his frontbench as he warned there should be “consequences” for content published on social media platforms, just as there were for traditional media.

Flagging regulation as an ­option to crack down on Facebook, Google, YouTube and others, the Opposition Leader said: “I will be asking tech titans, the big multinationals of the new media platforms to meet with me and my colleagues because we need to have a conversation that ‘before you publish, we need to be better at detecting the dangerous content, at restricting it before it happens’.

“There should be consequences … we’ve got to have one rule applying for everyone.” It took a full hour for Facebook to remove the Christchurch shooter’s live-streamed video, during which nearly 250,000 people viewed it and copies were made to both Facebook and YouTube, often with small edits intended to bypass the website’s filtering features.

Of the 1.5 million videos of the attack Facebook removed globally in the first 24 hours, 1.2 million were blocked automatically at upload.

Ms Ardern called on social media platforms to “demonstrate the kind of responsibility” that both “lead to these events” and perpetuate the messages in the ­aftermath. “They’ve indicated that they are working very proactively on the sharing of videos and content in the aftermath,’’ she said.

“They’ve acknowledged some of the systems they have already around what they term ‘hate speech’. My view is there is more that can and should be done.”

Former prime minister Tony Abbott also pushed for a “much better policed internet” and said social media users should not be able to hide behind pseudonyms.

“We’ve got to wake up to ourselves here. So many dreadful things are happening online, it’s got to be policed and people can no longer be anonymous,” he told 2GB radio.

The technology community has discussed several options to prevent attacks being live-streamed on Facebook.

These include limiting the live broadcasting feature to selected influencers, partners or companies, or banning the feature altogether.

Telstra and Optus have started blocking a number of sites hosting footage of the attack, with the telcos pre-empting any potential moves by agencies to issue the companies with a takedown order of the footage.

Additional reporting: David Swan