Within hours of the assassination of a history teacher by an 18-year-old Islamist in France on Friday, fingers were pointed at social media platforms for having helped motivate the killer before he decapitated Samuel Paty and then for allowing him to gruesomely claim responsibility moments afterwards.
“Things began on social media and they ended on social media,” said Gabriel Attal, the French government spokesman. “We have to do better at bringing them under control.”
Paty’s fellow-teachers at the school in Conflans-Saint-Honorine near Paris expressed “deep concern about the impact of social media” in a joint statement on Tuesday. They called the speed and irreversibility of the messages broadcast “a real plague for the exercise of our profession”.
Marlène Schiappa, minister for citizenship, summoned representatives of social media groups, including Facebook-Instagram, Twitter, Google-YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat, to a meeting on “cyber-Islamism” on Tuesday and demanded they take responsibility for content on their platforms.
Big social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were already under pressure in Europe, the US and Asia to curb the spread of fake news and hate speech and to stop turning a blind eye to the promotion of violence.
Last year, the platforms pledged to boost their moderation capabilities and introduced new hate speech policies, after a white supremacist killed 51 people in an attack on two mosques in New Zealand and livestreamed the footage via Facebook’s Live service.
More broadly, Facebook and YouTube have been criticised for helping extremist groups recruit, radicalise and organise — because their algorithms tend to push users towards provocative and eye-catching content.
Lately, concerns have centred on the rise on the platforms of armed militias in the US ahead of the presidential election, and of pro-Trump conspiracy group QAnon.
Officials and politicians say the killing of Paty will inevitably accelerate legislation in France and the EU designed to hold social media platforms responsible for the sometimes inflammatory content posted by their users.
Investigators are still trying to piece together the sequence of events that led to Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Chechen refugee, hacking off the head of a teacher who had shown pupils caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in a class about freedom of speech.
But the fact that the murderer, who was shot dead by the police, came all the way from Evreux 80km to the west suggests that he learnt of Paty and Muslim complaints about him from videos posted on the internet. The videos were widely disseminated, with some pupils and parents at the school complaining they had been sent them multiple times.
Brahim Chnina, the father of one of the pupils in the school, had posted three videos highly critical of Paty, demanding he be fired and calling on people to take action, and BFMTV reported that he had been in touch with the killer via WhatsApp in the days before the assassination.
At least one of the videos could still be seen on Mr Chnina’s Facebook account on Monday evening. Mr Chnina made one of them with the help of Abdelhakim Sefrioui, an Islamist militant already categorised as a security risk by French intelligence. Both men have been detained.
After he had killed Paty, Anzorov sent a Twitter post with a picture of the severed head on the street addressed to President Emmanuel Macron, “leader of the infidels”, and boasted of killing “one of your hell dogs who dared to denigrate Mohammed”.
According to the newspaper Le Monde, Anzorov in recent weeks sent 400 tweets from that account, @Ttchetchene_270. The account had been notified in July to Pharos, a government site where the public can report lawbreaking or other concerns about the internet.
Twitter declined to say when it had removed the account — it is no longer visible — and refused to make any other comment on the attack. However, the company has said that Twitter does not tolerate terrorism or terrorism content and that its teams act “proactively on this type of content and are in contact with law enforcement agencies in order to act as quickly as possible”.
Facebook did not reply to requests for comment.
French leaders from Mr Macron down immediately announced plans to tighten controls on social media after what Mr Attal called the “public lynching” of Paty over the internet.
Gérald Darmanin, interior minister, said 80 investigations had been started since the attack into those who had sought to justify the murder or said the teacher “had it coming to him”.
Ironically, Mr Macron’s government had already finalised a law against internet hate in May, but its key clauses — including an obligation on social media networks to delete hateful content within 24 hours on pain of heavy fines, and a requirement for transparency — were struck down in June by the Constitutional Council on free-speech grounds.
Laetitia Avia, the member of parliament who drafted the law, described the killing of Paty as a tragedy which “reminds everyone that social media has been the terrain of dangerous content”.
She told the Financial Times on Monday she was continuing to work on the issue both in France and in Brussels, where the European Commission is set to present its new digital services law in December.
One problem, she noted, was that traditional media were counted in French law as publishers, while social media networks were treated as neutral “hosters”, even though they were really hybrids because their economic model meant they ranked and placed content to attract readers and viewers. Another problem was that apparently anodyne verbal violence was often a precursor to real violence.
“We must now treat dangerous content as a priority,” she said.
The B.C. government is putting its proposed online harms legislation on hold after reaching an agreement with some of the largest social media platforms to make people safer online.
Premier David Eby says in a joint statement with representatives of the firms Meta, TikTok, X and Snap that they will form an online safety action table, where they’ll discuss “tangible steps” towards protecting people from online harms.
Eby says the social media companies have “agreed to work collaboratively” with the province on preventing harm, while Meta will also commit to working with B.C’s emergency management officials to help amplify official information during natural disasters and other events.
“We have had assurance from Facebook on a couple of things. First, that they will work with us to deliver emergency information to British Columbia in this wildfire season that (people) can rely on, they can find easily, and that will link into official government channels to distribute information quickly and effectively,” Eby said at a Tuesday press conference.
“This is a major step and I’m very appreciative that we are in this place now.”
The announcement to put the bill on hold is a sharp turn for the government, after Eby announced in March that social media companies were among the “wrongdoers” that would pay for health-related costs linked to their platforms.
At the time, Eby compared social media harms to those caused by tobacco and opioids, saying the legislation was similar to previous laws that allowed the province to sue companies selling those products.
Last August, Eby criticized Meta over its continued blackout of Canadian news outlets as wildfires forced thousands from their homes. Eby said it was “unacceptable” for the tech giant to cut off access to news on its platforms at a time when people needed timely, potentially life-saving information.
“I think it’s fair to say that I was very skeptical, following the initial contact (with Meta),” Eby said Tuesday.
Eby said one of the key drivers for legislation targetting online harm was the death of Carson Cleland, the 12-year-old Prince George, B.C., boy who died by suicide last October after falling victim to online sextortion.
The premier says in announcing the pause that bringing social media companies to the table for discussion achieves the same purpose of protecting youth from online harm.
“Our commitment to every parent is that we will do everything we can to keep their families safe online and in our communities,” the premier said in his statement.
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VICTORIA — Premier David Eby has pushed the pause button on a contentious bill that would have allowed the province to recover health care and other costs attributed to the marketing of risky products in B.C.
Two dozen business and industry groups had called for the New Democrats to put the bill on hold, claiming it was so broadly drafted that it could be used to go after producers, distributors and retailers of every kind.
“It is safe to say that we got the attention of these major multinational companies,” the premier told reporters on Tuesday, citing the deal with Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and X, the major players in the field.
“They understand our concern and the urgency with which we’re approaching this issue. They also understand the bill is still there.”
The New Democrats maintain that the legislation was never intended to capture the many B.C. companies and associations that complained about it.
Rather it was targeted at Facebook owner Meta and other social media companies and the online harm done to young people. A prime example was the suicide of a Prince George youth who was trapped by an online predator.
Still, there was nothing in the wording of Bill 12, the Public Health Accountability and Cost Recovery Act, to indicate its application would be confined to social media companies or their impact on young people.
Some critics wondered if the bill’s broad-based concept of harms and risks could be used to prosecute the liquor board or the dispensers of safer-supply drugs, products with proven harms greater than any sugary drink.
Perhaps thinking along those lines, the government specifically exempted itself from prosecution under the Act.
This week’s announcement came as a surprise. As recently as Monday, Attorney General Niki Sharma told reporters the government had no intention of putting the bill on hold.
Tuesday, she justified her evasion by saying the talks with the social media companies were intense and confidential.
She said the pause was conditional on Meta and the other companies delivering a quick response to government concerns.
“British Columbians expect us to take action on online safety,” she told reporters. “What I’ll be looking for at this table is quick and immediate action to get to that better, safety online.”
A prime goal is addressing online harassment and “the online mental health and anxiety that’s rising in young people,” she said
“I want to sit down with these companies look at them face to face and see what they can do immediately to improve the outcomes for British Columbians.”
Meta has already committed to rectifying Eby’s concern that it should relay urgent news about wildfires, flood and other disasters in B.C. Last year, those were blocked, collateral damage in the company’s hardball dispute with the federal government over linking to news stories from Canadian media companies.
Eby says he was very skeptical about the initial contact from the companies. Now he sees Meta’s willingness to deliver emergency information as a “major step” and he’s prepared to give talks the benefit of the doubt.
Not long ago he was scoring political points off the social media companies in the harshest terms.
“The billionaires who run them resist accountability, resist any suggestion that they have responsibility for the harms that they are causing,” said the premier on March 14, the day Bill 12 was introduced.
Given those characterizations, perhaps the big, faceless billionaires will simply direct their negotiating team to play for time until the legislation adjourns as scheduled on May 16.
“The legislation is not being pulled and we’re not backtracking,” said Sharma. “We can always come back and bring legislation back.”
The government could schedule a quick makeup session of the legislature in late May or June or even in early September, before the house is dissolved for the four-week campaign leading up to the scheduled election day, Oct. 19.
More likely, if the New Democrats feel doublecrossed, they could go back to war with the faceless billionaires with a view to re-enacting Bill 12 after a hoped-for election victory.
Even if the New Democrats get some satisfaction from the social media companies in the short term, they have also framed Bill 12 as a way to force the marketers of risky products to help cover the cost of health care and other services.
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