Insanity: Theresa May Says Internet Companies Need To Remove 'Extremist' Content Within 2 Hours

Insanity: Theresa May Says Internet Companies Need To Remove 'Extremist' Content Within 2 Hours

7 years ago
Anonymous $wKBR2uNMvM

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170920/15380038253/insanity-theresa-may-says-internet-companies-need-to-remove-extremist-content-within-2-hours.shtml

It's fairly stunning just how much people believe that it's easy for companies to moderate content online. Take, for example, this random dude who assumes its perfectly reasonable for Facebook, Google and Twitter to "manually review all content" on their platforms (and since Google is a search engine, I imagine this means basically all public web content that can be found via its search engine). This is, unfortunately, a complete failure of basic comprehension about the scale of these platforms and how much content flows through them.

Tragically, it's not just random Rons on Twitter with this idea. Ron's tweet was in response to UK Prime Minister Theresa May saying that internet platforms must remove "extremist" content within two hours. This is after the UK's Home Office noted that they see links to "extremist content" remaining online for an average of 36 hours. Frankly, 36 hours seems incredibly low. That's pretty fast for platforms to be able to discover such content, make a thorough analysis of whether or not it truly is "extremist content" and figure out what to do about it. Various laws on takedowns usually have statements about a "reasonable" amount of time to respond -- and while there are rarely set numbers, the general rule of thumb seems to be approximately 24 hours after notice (which is pretty aggressive).