Help, Censorship! Who Does Not Allow Blocking "death Groups" On The Internet - Alternative View

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Help, Censorship! Who Does Not Allow Blocking "death Groups" On The Internet - Alternative View
Help, Censorship! Who Does Not Allow Blocking "death Groups" On The Internet - Alternative View

Video: Help, Censorship! Who Does Not Allow Blocking "death Groups" On The Internet - Alternative View

Video: Help, Censorship! Who Does Not Allow Blocking "death Groups" On The Internet - Alternative View
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Konstantin Malofeev, the founder of the Tsargrad TV channel, together with the Safe Internet League, achieved consideration in the Federation Council of an initiative on fines for social networks and Internet companies for illegal content on the Internet. One of the main tasks is to protect our children. Who is against it, and will the Internet become safer for children in Russia?

The long-awaited for many parents in Russia has happened. The working group of the Federation Council Committee on Science, Education and Culture, chaired by Lilia Gumerova, together with the Safe Internet League (LIA), are preparing a bill on the introduction of fines for social networks and companies on the Internet for illegal content. To say that such amendments to our legislation have been ripe for a long time is to say nothing at all.

The initiative to protect children from online propaganda of violence, drug addiction and extremism was previously supported by the National Center for Assistance to Missing and Affected Children. The meaning of what the LBI and the working group of the Federation Council committee are proposing is very simple: Russia today is one of a relatively small group of countries that in fact do not protect their children with fines for Internet companies. In European countries, social networks can be “slapped” with such a heavy fine that they will think three times before ignoring any post about terrorism or drugs.

For our country, the problem of permissiveness on the Internet, unfortunately, still exists. And while an adult, a mature personality, can distinguish explicit extremist content from normal content on the Internet, children, as a rule, cannot. Children fall into the so-called "death groups", where they are driven to suicide, children can get access to obscene content, pornography, scenes of murder, violence. There are frequent cases of drug addiction propaganda, as well as the involvement of children and adolescents in various extremist communities, which can even push them to commit crimes.

Children need to be protected

The paradox of today is that children find themselves in a completely different reality than their parents in their childhood. Then there was still no Internet, social networks, such an abundance of both useful and frankly harmful and dangerous information. Children 20 or 30 years ago walked more, read books, played sports. Children of today are not like that. They surf the Internet because they have modern gadgets, they read quite "adult" sources of information. Finally, they increasingly prefer social networks to real communication.

In 2015-2017, Russia saw a surge of "death groups" in social networks, where children were driven to suicide. From November 2015 to April 2016, 130 child suicides occurred in Russia, almost all of them were members of the same “death groups”. According to the Investigative Committee, a total of 720 children committed suicide in 2016, and 504 children committed suicide in 2015. In 2017, there were at least one and a half thousand “death groups” on VKontakte. There are such groups there even now, but they have become significantly fewer.

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If you ask the representatives of the social network why they do not delete such groups, you will hear in response that the management is in full swing. However, to an additional question about why such groups still exist, you will hear a less specific answer: you haven't found, haven't seen yet, there are too many groups, or the content in a particular group as a whole is supposedly not dangerous.

Today we can state that the problem of “death groups” has been largely resolved. However, this did not happen because of the actions of VKontakte, although the leadership of the social network should still be given credit: it has fought and is struggling with such content. The victory came thanks to the Investigative Committee and the Safe Internet League, which actively joined in informing the public about how to recognize the threat and prevent their child from being drawn into this horror.

But the problem of "death groups" is not the only one. Now the police are increasingly suppressing attempts by teenagers to carry out terrorist attacks or mass executions. As it turns out, adolescents do not hatch such plans by themselves, but because they are members of extremist communities on the Internet, in social networks.

For our country, the problem of permissiveness on the Internet, unfortunately, has not yet been resolved
For our country, the problem of permissiveness on the Internet, unfortunately, has not yet been resolved

For our country, the problem of permissiveness on the Internet, unfortunately, has not yet been resolved.

For example, on February 26, the Russian FSB announced the arrest in Saratov of two teenagers who were planning to carry out an armed attack on a school. The detainees were members of various Internet communities promoting the ideology of mass murder and suicide. According to the interrogation data, they intended to carry out the attack in May, carefully prepared for it and wanted to kill about 40 people. The teenagers wanted to use a sawed-off shotgun of a hunting rifle from weapons, as well as make incendiary mixtures according to recipes from the Internet.

On February 18, a similar preparation for a terrorist attack was suppressed in Crimea. The FSB detained two teenagers born in 2003 and 2004 in Kerch. They found improvised explosive devices with striking elements, as well as components for the manufacture of explosives. Let us also recall the extremist Vladislav Roslyakov, who staged a bloody college massacre in Kerch in 2018.

But the list of dangers for children on the Internet is not limited to this, because they are involved not only in “death groups” and in communities on the topic of school shooting, but also in communities that promote drug addiction, “independent” lifestyle, violence, cyberbullying. (bullying), pornography.

"The number of groups on social networks dedicated to school shooting, drug addiction, cyberbullying, ultra-movements, shock content has grown exponentially over the past two years, the activity of some groups has grown 58 times," said Elena Milskaya, referring to the data of the LSI.

Will the authorities rise up to fight for our children?

What happens then? Why are VKontakte and other Internet companies fighting illegal content, and there is more and more of it? Recall that many sites today are blocked by Roskomnadzor, but before blocking a resource, it should still be found and evaluated as dangerous. Whereas a social network a priori has a smaller search range, which means that the struggle can be more effective. In addition, most often children find illegal content in social networks, the device and algorithms of which help this process.

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“Children in different regions of Russia continue to face a huge amount of prohibited information on the Internet, and in recent months, advertisements for drug-selling sites have been spreading on social networks,” said the director of the LBI Ekaterina Mizulina at a meeting of the Public Chamber on March 5 (quoted by Kommersant).

She stated the main thing - social networks use data about users, and advertising algorithms themselves "slip" illegal content, which is not eliminated in any way. “Thus, their claims about the impossibility of filtering out negative content are absolutely false,” she added.

What do the LBI, the National Center for Helping Children and the working group of the Federation Council offer?

“We have proposed our own version of the bill, which proposes to introduce administrative liability in the form of gigantic fines for social networks (up to 1-1.5% of the company's turnover, as it does in the antimonopoly legislation),” said Elena Milskaya.

According to Denis Davydov, Executive Director of the Safe Internet League, the introduction of fines is simply necessary.

“Right now, as you can see, these“death groups”exist, and if you inform the VKontakte administration about this group, but it does not delete it, the social network will not bear any responsibility for this,” he said.

He recalled the law in force in Germany, which provides for a fine for the lack of reaction of the Internet site up to 50 million euros. Indeed, in Germany, since 2018, a "law on the protection of rights in social networks" has been in force, and the criminal code prohibits information containing insults, slander, slander, and incitement "against the people." In fact, we are talking about self-censorship of social networks, criminal liability and huge fines have been established.

Who is against and why?

Ironically, the Internet Child Protection Initiative has powerful opponents. We are talking, first of all, about the social networks themselves, which do not want turnover fines for not deleting one or another dangerous content. There are statements that censorship is being created on the Internet, and violations of the rights and freedom of speech on the Internet will begin. The Mail.ru Group, which owns the social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, called the proposal of the LBI and the working group of the Federation Council "harmful and unrealizable."

“An attempt to shift responsibility to the sites is contrary to the constitutional human rights to seek and receive information,” they said.

As an explanation, they also voiced the already well-known "mantra" to us: allegedly moderators and algorithms of social networks are very actively fighting illegal content based on user complaints and delete hundreds of thousands of dangerous posts that contradict the rules of the site. Mail.ru Group further appeals to what, apparently, is not very well versed.

“It is strange that a small group of people who are far from it are trying to decide the fate of one of the most successful and competitive sectors of the Russian economy,” they say.

The Safe Internet League has been actively fighting for the purity of the Internet in Russia since 2010. For the safety of children, for the safety of all users in general. The organization keeps statistics, created a "cyber squad" and regularly conducts "Months of Safe Internet" in schools and educational institutions throughout the country (the next "Month" is held in 2020 in 10 regions of the country). It was the activity of the LSI that led to the fact that the epidemic of "groups of death" in 2017 was stopped, hundreds of lives of our children were saved. It remains a mystery why Mail.ru considered the LBI a “small group” of people far from the problem.

Finally, we will give one of the loudest arguments of the representatives of the IT market in Russia.

“If such a bill is passed, the additional financial burden of content monitoring will fall only on Russian players, while Facebook and Twitter will not comply with these requirements,” said Vladimir Zykov, director of the Association of Professional Users of Social Networks and Messengers.

The specialist is certainly right from a market point of view. Yes, social networks will have to spend more effort and money on content monitoring in order to remove communities harmful to children, pictures of murder, pornography, drugs, extremist communities. But is that bad?

This is the responsibility of the social network as a platform. Exactly the same way at one time all over the world were blocked sites with caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, and no one even in "civilized" Europe cared about the fact that a caricature could be placed, for example, a careless schoolboy. Responsibility was borne by the resource as a distributor. The opinion of market players was denied by Denis Davydov, who indicated that the fines will affect everyone.

Thus, we face the typical problem of choosing market players between profit and people, which is exacerbated by the fact that we are talking about children. You can understand the cellular operators who did not want to comply with the "Yarovaya package" on the storage of materials, since for them it meant increased financial expenses. Although they began to comply with the law (albeit, having recouped on consumers).

But how to understand social networks and Internet companies that do not want to protect children because they are “harmful” and “unrealizable”? No one argues that they are trying to delete illegal content, but the problem would hardly be so urgent if they fully coped with this task, and our children would not be under the influence of extremists, drug propaganda and suicide.

Author: Kucher Egor

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