Big Tech takes a beating as online safety experts accuse companies of doing bare minimum
Technology companies are doing just enough to show a degree of compliance with the UK's Online Safety Act, but are failing to meet the needs of the individuals and young victims the legislation exists to protect, experts say.
Key points
- Walker said there was real concern about how platforms behave and whether they comply with existing regulation, and about what that means for specialist services supporting survivors in limo, particularly without an online commission to advocate for victims' and survivors' interests.
- She said that more needs to be done from the tech side to ensure different parties in the chain of publication are detected early and downranked or blocked accordingly.
- With the harmful content still on the site, all it takes is a VPN connection to access it, and bypass the age assurance mechanisms in the process.
A panel of online safety pros assembled before Parliament's Communications and Digital Committee on Tuesday, taking aim at the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta, and ByteDance for failing to act on important matters.
Additional details
- Clare McGlynn, professor of law at Durham University and expert on violence against women and girls (VAWG), was especially critical of major search engine providers for their inconsistent downranking of harmful content search terms.
- "Rape porn," for example, is correctly downranked and no user sees any relevant links until the tenth page of results, although adjacent terms such as "unwilling porn" can be found as early as the third page, McGlynn said.
- "So, they don't rank some of them, but just not systematically or wholly consistently." McGlynn went on to say that during her own research, "force porn" was rightly downranked heavily, although terms as similar as "forced porn" were not.
- "If you were trying to think of the words that would be similar to say rape, and rape porn is extreme porn and it's not supposed to be on those platforms anymore, you would think of words like unwilling and unwanted," she added.
- "And we know your algorithm would." Google inevitably took much of McGlynn's flak due to its dominance of the search engine market, although the professor said the same issues can be observed on Bing, too.
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