Twitter and Facebook have insisted that they cannot monitor posts and messages to their social networks as part of an effort to protect against online abuse.
The revelations come as the European heads of policy for the two companies appeared in front of the Lords Communications Committee on Wednesday to answer questions about social media offences.
Sinead McSweeney, director of public policy at Twitter in Europe, said: “With 500 million tweets a day, the basic answer is no, it’s not possible to monitor content.”
Both companies also argued that no new legislation was needed to deal with online abuse.
The two social media giants also gave some insight into their abuse reporting process.
Facebook policy head Simon Milner said that “hundreds” of people around the world handle abuse reports from Facebook’s 1.2 billion users.
Ms McSweeney said that “more than 100 people” at Twitter looked at each abuse report individually from its 255 million active users.
But Twitter did hint it was experimenting with some automated tools for detecting abuse.
She told the committee that software used to detect spam might also be applied to abusive behaviour online.
Last year, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) issued new advice in order to increase the threshold for prosecutors bringing social media abuse charges, after a glut of cases in the courts.
The CPS advised that there should be “credible threat of violence to the person or damage to property”.
Despite this, a Sky News investigation earlier this year found that police forces are still being inundated with complaints.
They investigate at least 20 cases each day and the number of investigations has risen by 5% since 2011.
Both Facebook and Twitter argued that their social networks were to some extent self-policing.
While London-based Mr Milner said that Facebook works “like a neighbourhood watch scheme at scale”, Ms McSweeney added that Twitter was a public space.
“The same standards of basic human decency that we expect of each other in the offline world, we expect those in the online world,” Dublin-based Ms McSweeney said.
Source Article from https://uk.news.yahoo.com/facebook-twitter-cant-monitor-abuse-203800167.html
Facebook And Twitter: We Can't Monitor Abuse
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