Saturday 6 June 2015

“Gissajob!”

A leading child protection charity has demanded Facebook and other social networks be held to account following a clash over a "disturbing" video.
The NSPCC says the video shows a "terrified, sobbing baby" being dunked repeatedly in a bucket of water and wants the UK government to intervene.
And FaceBook has looked at it and (despite referring it to authorities themselves, and placing a warning on it) established that it doesn’t breach its rules.

The UK government isn’t responsible for FaceBook, which is based in the US. So what more can they do?
The charity wants the government to create a new organisation "armed with the legal powers to ensure internet companies are transparent and accountable".
Aha! In other words, a nice little tame quango that will need to ‘liaise and consult’ with…well, with the NSPCC of course!

But how much of an issue is this wretched video anyway?
… the clip has since become "unavailable" - perhaps because the woman who posted it has deleted it.
Facebook has acknowledged that more than one copy of the video has been shared on its site, and that it only adds warning messages after being alerted to an instance by its users. It is therefore unknown at this stage how many times the clip has been watched.
*sigh* Storm in a teacup, purely designed to increase pressure on the freedom of the Internet and assist charities in their incessant lobbying.

2 comments:

ivan said...

So they want another unaccountable quango like the Internet Watch Foundation (that bans things like pictures of old pop record covers) to impose their much more narrow viewpoint on people rather than improving education.

JuliaM said...

Yup, that's exactly what they want. Who else is going to employ all those arts graduates?