Denmark plans to force social media companies such as Facebook to remove illegal posts within 24 hours after anonymous trolls inundated the grieving relatives of a terrorism victim with videos of her execution.
Danish ministers are under pressure to rein in the platforms amid a public outcry at the case of Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, a 24-year-old backpacker who was beheaded in Morocco in 2018 by Islamic State supporters.
Since the murder, her mother and sister have been bombarded with clips of the decapitation through Facebook. In at least ten instances, it allegedly failed to delete the videos and still images despite complaints from the family. The resulting 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.
Denmark is following in the footsteps of Germany, which forces all platforms with more than 2 million users to take down “clearly illegal” posts less than 24 hours after they are notified or face fines of up to €50 million. France gives the companies as little as an hour to remove highly offensive content such as terrorist propaganda or images of child abuse.
Last month the European Commission also 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 German-style 24-hour deadline for getting rid of unlawful posts.
The Danish law, which is likely 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 television documentary detailing the suffering of Vesterager Jespersen’s family.
The young woman from Ikast, a town 40 miles west of Aarhus, had been travelling through the Atlas mountains in Morocco. She disappeared with Maren Ueland, 28, a friend from Norway, on a walking trail at the foot of Mount Toubkal. They were captured by a gang of Islamist extremists who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State. Three of the jihadists, who have since been sentenced to the death penalty, 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. This weekend she told Danmarks Radio (DR), the public broadcaster, that her tormentor had persistently pestered her with the footage ever since.
She said she had reported every instance of the harassment to Facebook but in a number of cases it had left the video online. She also complained that Danish police had failed to identify the culprit.
Simon Kollerup, 35, the Danish trade minister responsible for internet regulation, said Facebook’s “hopeless” response had underscored the need for more stringent EU rules on social media.
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 it had done its best to eradicate the execution 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 told DR. “It’s a perpetual battle.”
Facebook is the worst, why is anyone still on that dumpster fire site ?
Long term, this won’t work unless people are willing to pay for using social media.
The business model doesn’t pull enough money in to have big enough teams of mods etc to remove stuff that fast.
You get what you pay for – and we pay nothing for using social media. Hence the service is so shitty, almost non existent in many cases. Imagine if they don’t even remove beheading videos how hard it is to get them to remove illegal stuff that is much less bad.
It would tbh make more sense to just ban SoMe without enough staff to do moderation – which is, I guess, all of them. I think you’d have to pay a subscription fee in order for the site to make money enough to have a service.
What absolute scum trash lowlifes that continue send these videos to the family.
I am completely on Denmark’s side on this topic. Close Facebook down in Denmark if nothing else helps.
Block facebook at the provider level/DNS level. 99.9% of their customers in Denmark will be unable to reach the website. This will be a net loss for facebook and their old customers will look for another platform.
Just block it.
It’s like the mandatory vaccination, once you’ve started it you will wonder why you didn’t do it earlier.
How do we plan to enforce this?
Are posts about Denmark spying other EU countries going to be illegal?
Sounds decent, but how can that even be possible for such a widely used service
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paywall
Denmark plans to force social media companies such as Facebook to remove illegal posts within 24 hours after anonymous trolls inundated the grieving relatives of a terrorism victim with videos of her execution.
Danish ministers are under pressure to rein in the platforms amid a public outcry at the case of Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, a 24-year-old backpacker who was beheaded in Morocco in 2018 by Islamic State supporters.
Since the murder, her mother and sister have been bombarded with clips of the decapitation through Facebook. In at least ten instances, it allegedly failed to delete the videos and still images despite complaints from the family. The resulting 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.
Denmark is following in the footsteps of Germany, which forces all platforms with more than 2 million users to take down “clearly illegal” posts less than 24 hours after they are notified or face fines of up to €50 million. France gives the companies as little as an hour to remove highly offensive content such as terrorist propaganda or images of child abuse.
Last month the European Commission also 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 German-style 24-hour deadline for getting rid of unlawful posts.
The Danish law, which is likely 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 television documentary detailing the suffering of Vesterager Jespersen’s family.
The young woman from Ikast, a town 40 miles west of Aarhus, had been travelling through the Atlas mountains in Morocco. She disappeared with Maren Ueland, 28, a friend from Norway, on a walking trail at the foot of Mount Toubkal. They were captured by a gang of Islamist extremists who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State. Three of the jihadists, who have since been sentenced to the death penalty, 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. This weekend she told Danmarks Radio (DR), the public broadcaster, that her tormentor had persistently pestered her with the footage ever since.
She said she had reported every instance of the harassment to Facebook but in a number of cases it had left the video online. She also complained that Danish police had failed to identify the culprit.
Simon Kollerup, 35, the Danish trade minister responsible for internet regulation, said Facebook’s “hopeless” response had underscored the need for more stringent EU rules on social media.
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 it had done its best to eradicate the execution 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 told DR. “It’s a perpetual battle.”
Facebook is the worst, why is anyone still on that dumpster fire site ?
Long term, this won’t work unless people are willing to pay for using social media.
The business model doesn’t pull enough money in to have big enough teams of mods etc to remove stuff that fast.
You get what you pay for – and we pay nothing for using social media. Hence the service is so shitty, almost non existent in many cases. Imagine if they don’t even remove beheading videos how hard it is to get them to remove illegal stuff that is much less bad.
It would tbh make more sense to just ban SoMe without enough staff to do moderation – which is, I guess, all of them. I think you’d have to pay a subscription fee in order for the site to make money enough to have a service.
What absolute scum trash lowlifes that continue send these videos to the family.
I am completely on Denmark’s side on this topic. Close Facebook down in Denmark if nothing else helps.
Block facebook at the provider level/DNS level. 99.9% of their customers in Denmark will be unable to reach the website. This will be a net loss for facebook and their old customers will look for another platform.
Just block it.
It’s like the mandatory vaccination, once you’ve started it you will wonder why you didn’t do it earlier.
How do we plan to enforce this?
Are posts about Denmark spying other EU countries going to be illegal?
Sounds decent, but how can that even be possible for such a widely used service