The Prime Minister of Australia is calling on world leaders to take measures against social networks that allow terrorist attacks to be broadcast, considering the New Zealand mosques massacre, which was broadcast live on Facebook by the murderer.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison penned a letter with his request to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who chairs the G20 – an international forum for the governments and central bank governors of 19 countries and the European Union.
Morrison called for "clear implications" for networks that facilitate "terrible acts.”
Last year, Israeli legislators came close to passing what was known as the “Facebook Bill,” which would have allowed the government to use administrative means to remove content from social networking sites.
The bill passed several readings but was stopped at the last minute by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to Dr. Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler of the Israel Democracy Institute, who wrote a policy statement on the Facebook Bill, there is no democratic country that currently allows the government to remove content, even that which is deemed incitement to violence and terrorism.
Facebook tries to monitor its site for calls of violence. In an interview earlier this year, a spokeswoman for Facebook in Israel told The Jerusalem Post that “praise and support for terrorism is not allowed on Facebook, and we remove this type of content when it is reported to us.”
Following the New Zealand attacks, Facebook reportedly removed 1.5 million videos of the attack.