Mark Zuckerberg could face jail time under a new law. The Labour Party has called for tougher penalties against senior tech executives.
According to UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other Big Tech executives face going to jail if their social media platforms do not remove content deemed harmful under impending online safety legislation, reports Russia Today.
On Saturday, Dorries told Times Radio that Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and other tech executives might “absolutely” face jail time if they did not comply with the government’s new Online Safety Bill. She expressed her optimism that the bill will be a, “notice to the online platforms to say here it is, we’re letting you know what it is now, so start doing what you need to do.”
According to The Telegraph, under the bill’s proposed ‘duty of care’ framework, communications regulator Ofcom could jail tech leaders for up to two years for failing to delete illegal information. On Friday, the government said that the bill had been amended to include additional criminal charges such as revenge porn, hate crimes, fraud, the selling of illegal narcotics or weapons, the encouragement or assistance of suicide, people smuggling, and sexual exploitation.
The government stated that by labelling these infractions, Ofcom would be able to take swifter action against non-compliant businesses. However, according to Dorries, these platforms “do not need to wait for the bill” because they “have the power to [take action] now.”
What [tech firms] need to do now is to remove those harmful algorithms on [their] platforms. Stop directing people to suicide chat rooms, stop allowing [pile-on] hate, stop allowing people-trafficking, stop allowing threats of hate, violence and rape, and remove it all now.
Critics such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) have called her claims “rhetoric.”
The NSPCC’s head of child safety online policy, Andy Burrows, told The Independent that “tech bosses wouldn’t be personally liable for the harmful effects of their algorithms or failing to prevent grooming, and could only be prosecuted for failing to supply information to the regulator.”
Meanwhile, the Labour Party has called for tougher penalties against senior tech executives, with shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell claiming that Ofcom would be in a “David and Goliath situation” when “taking on some of the world’s biggest tech firms” and that it would need “access to the full range of tools in its belt, including making top bosses criminally liable for persistently failing to tackle online harms.”
Dorries’ assertions have elicited no responses from Meta or other tech titans.
Support GreatGameIndia
They pretend this punitive Bill is all about protecting childen, when the reality is it is part of a much larger attack on free speech. Ofcom is rapidly morphing into the Ministry of Truth and the Mother of Democracies into a totalitarian state.
Yeah this is garbage. You can’t police those things, there’s no way to know what someone is going to say before they say it. There will always be horseshit on social media , you can only remove it after it’s been posted. And it may have done it’s intended harm by then. Best you can do is go after the perpetrator the same way criminal investigations have always been happening. And no tech exec is going to jail, they’ll disappear into a hidden luxury underground bunker and take down their adversaries electronically, restore their reputation, and re-emerge in a favorable light.
If anyone deserves PRISON it is Zuckerberg, Soros, Bill Gates, Fauci, all of the CDC. There are others as we all know!
To use an outworn phrase… this is a slippery slope.
hi hello