Crackdown over Facebook kill clips

Denmark plans to force social media companies to remove illegal posts within 24 hours after trolls tormented the family of a terrorism victim with videos of her murder.

Murder victim Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24.

Denmark plans to force social media companies such as Facebook to remove illegal posts within 24 hours after trolls ­repeatedly tormented the grieving relatives of a terrorism victim with videos of her murder.

Ministers are under pressure to act amid a public outcry over the case of Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, a backpacker beheaded in Morocco in 2018 by ­Islamic Stae supporters.

Since the killing her mother and sister have been bombarded with clips of the decapitation on Facebook. In at least 10 instances, it allegedly failed to delete the videos and pictures despite complaints from the family.

The uproar has led to calls for a wholesale regulatory crackdown on Facebook and its competitors, such as Twitter and YouTube.

In recent years European states have taken the lead in compelling social media companies to get to grips with content that breaks the law. Germany forces all platforms with more than two million users to take down “clearly illegal” posts within 24 hours of being notified or face fines of up to €50m ($79m). France gives the companies as little as an hour to remove highly offensive content such as terrorist propaganda or images of child abuse.

The European Commission last month drew up a plan to criminalise online hate speech against women and vulnerable minorities, although it is thought to have stopped short of imposing a 24-hour deadline for getting rid of unlawful posts.

The Danish law, which is ­expected to be put to a vote in parliament next month, has been in the works for several months but the efforts have been galvanised by a TV documentary detailing the suffering of Vesterager Jespersen’s family. The woman had been travelling in the Atlas Mountains with Maren Ueland, 28, a friend from Norway. They were on a walking trail at the foot of Mt Toubkal when they were captured by a gang of Islamist extremists. Three of the jihadists, who have since been sentenced to death in Morocco, filmed themselves cutting off the women’s heads.

Days later a Facebook ­account under a false name sent the video to Helle Vesterager Jespersen, Louisa’s mother. She told Danmarks Radio at the weekend that her tormentor had pestered her with the video ever since. She said she had reported every instance to Facebook but in several cases it had left the video online. Danish police had failed to identify the culprit.

Martin Ruby, 48, Facebook’s head of public policy for the ­Nordic and Benelux regions, said he was sorry “if we made the wrong calls in this case” but ­insisted that the company had done its best to eradicate the murder clips.

He said that the code for the videos was being continually tweaked to elude Facebook’s censorship algorithms. “The problem is that these evil people are sitting there and changing the format on them,” he said. “It’s a perpetual battle.”

The Times