I’ve yet to meet an oncologist, thank God. But if I did turn up to be told I had cancer I wouldn’t expect him to start treating me with a chainsaw. That was my thought this morning when I read that our national counter-terrorism chief had described the effect of exposing kids to violent content online as carcinogenic. Matt Jukes, Asistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations for the Met Police, suggested that a ban on social media for the under 16s was a way to address the scourge of adolescent maniacs mobilised by online extremism who turn hateful thought into lethal action.
Human frailty is harder to police than Big Tech
Jukes said: ‘To go back to the gap between finding smoking was harming people and really acting on it and harming young people and acting on it, this cancer, the content which is driving violence, is in our communities and in the lives of young people now.’
It’s still quite rare for a senior police officer to have a view on politics, the convention being that top cops get on with enforcing the law, rather than lobbying for change. But we are in new times, and Jukes was either making the most of this latitude or intervening because of what he saw as the seriousness of the situation.
Jukes and his colleagues have a very difficult job. Together with hostile state actors, teenagers radicalised online and fully mobilised ideologues have combined to pose an unprecedented security threat to this country which grows bigger by the day. The Online Safety Act has much to commend it, including the requirement of platforms to demonstrate that they are removing illegal content and doing everything possible to protect children from potentially harmful exposure. There are potentially huge penalties for social media companies who defy these requirements – although the change in government in the US might somewhat neuter enforcement.
There is a strong moral argument for removing access to media that might radicalise young people. I say ‘might’ because the research isn’t settled on the impact of such matters on young minds. On the one hand, there is evidence to suggest videos like extreme pornography dehumanise others. Other studies have shown that social environment and nurturing have a far greater impact than what people view online. In part, politicians and police officers want the connection between social media and violence to be solid because it avoids deeper, less comfortable and amenable questions such as how we parent our children. Human frailty is harder to police than Big Tech.
But while Jukes had mostly sensible things to say about controlling access to public expressions of hate, he went on to say that the government should tighten up the Online Safety Act to require platforms to police private messages. Here we see the departure from policy scalpel to blunt instrument.
The requirement for social media companies to monitor all private exchanges is malevolent, unworkable overkill. We have existing laws that permit the interception of communications in limited circumstances with judicial oversight. That is as it should be. Social media companies that deny access to material that would plainly assist in the prevention of terrorism or our understanding of spree killers ought to be ostracised and then fined. But this is the thin end of a civil liberties wedge.
The state cannot and must not be allowed to outsource and then extend its surveillance of harm to private companies. It’s not as if the police have their own house in order here. It took a jury just 17 minutes to unanimously acquit a former Royal Marine of a charge of inciting racial hatred on Facebook just yesterday. This was a ludicrous prosecution pursued after a complaint that a video he posted in the wake of the Southport massacre was racist. In court he explained, ‘I wanted to get some kind of security measures in place for our children.’ His prosecution was overseen by the Crown Prosecution Service’s special crime and counter-terrorism division. A first-year law student could have predicted this unwarranted assault on free speech was doomed to fail.
We know a lot now about the Southport killer Axel Rudakubana’s descent into murderous violence, including his obsession with extremely brutal videos. He was referred to the Prevent counter-terror programme three times and was failed by them repeatedly. We’ve also seen pictures of a chaotic home life where a machete, twelve arrows and a knife were recovered by police, as well as how-to manuals on terrorism and the ready-to-use bio-weapon ricin. How did all this activity escape his parents? We’ve learned about the repeated calls to the home by local police and Rudakubana’s involvement with social services, where his vulnerability seemed to be of greater concern than his risk to others.
We must do all we can to shield young people from the toxic effects of social media when their brains and personalities are developing. But the cancerous poison of extreme violence which seems to be seeping into some of our most troubled and troublesome youngsters requires treatment that is precise and targeted. It can’t be an excuse for closing down the very freedoms that extremists of all stripes want to deny us.
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