Social media organisations and companies have to act effectively in curtailing or stopping any hate posts by removing them instantly and ensure that their platforms are not used for such purposes, experts said at a panel discussion on the second and concluding day of an international conference yesterday.
The International Conference on ‘Social Media: Challenges and Ways to Promote Freedoms and Protect Activists’ organised by the National Human Rights Committee discussed the social media challenges and freedom of expression at a working group session titled ‘Regulating Big Tech - Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation’.
The panellists at the session said some responsibilities and supervision of the content moved from countries to companies. They also pointed out that the social media companies have their own agenda and drag the people into them. The session was moderated by Nazila Ghanea, professor at University of Oxford, UK, while the rapporteur for the session was Iris de Villars, head of Tech Desk, Reporters Without Borders, Paris.
Senior political adviser of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs in the EU, Matilda Sisatto, examined the impact of social media and various applications on human life and highlighted the importance of e-privacy.
“E-privacy regulates online movement as well as offline movement. Social media intelligence must ensure the privacy of activists to lead a normal life while making sure that disinformation is rooted out effectively,” she said .
She also noted that although these applications and websites have made it easy for people to see their important matters, they have become at the same time a way to monitor people and collect data about them. Jillian York, director of the International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that some governments and social media companies deliberately ignore civil society organisations in many of the agreements between the two sides.
York pointed out that governments always have problems that they seek to confront on social media, such as extremism, terrorism and hate speech, but some of them deal with these issues as technical issues although they are societal rather than technical problems.
She also noted that after years of monitoring and supervision by governments on social media to face many societal problems, the result was negative, as it was unable to provide solutions to these problems, confirming that many governments and social media companies participate in repression through the Internet.
The repression is carried out through legislation enacted by governments with companies to limit freedom of expression.
Jerald Joseph, commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission of Malaysia, stressed the importance of working to change laws dating back to colonial times and called on governments to respect human rights and freedom of expression for which activists are being prosecuted.
Joseph said that companies, in turn, are called upon to respect human rights, noting the need to co-operate with the government side in order to make progress on these levels.
Social media expert in Taiwan and East Asia, Michel Shia, said some countries have used electronic applications to monitor their citizens, while others have used them to counter false and fabricated news issued against them.
Fernand de Varennes, UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issuse, pointed to the high level of hatred towards minorities in recent years through social media platforms, and noted that there are major challenges in this area, which the international community must raise to reduce the level of hatred.
He explained that three quarters of hate in social media is directed against minorities.