The world has been trying for many years now to find ways of making online platforms more accountable for content that is harmful to minors.
In the past decades, among the biggest problems related to cyberspace was its facilitation of the online sexual abuse and exploitation of children.
Apart from OSAEC, law enforcement and anti-cybercrime agencies have warned of the emergence of a new and more dangerous threat: the spread of nihilistic violent extremist groups. NVE groups prey on impressionable youths with a penchant for violent online games, with adults “grooming” the minors to commit acts of mass violence and self-harm. With no specific political or religious objectives, these NVE communities are tough to track down.
The Philippines is not the only country that has seen the lethal, tragic consequences of such NVE-groomed minors unleashing their violent tendencies in their schools.
Several countries have moved to restrict minors’ access to social media. This can be challenging to enforce in the Philippines, where a national identification system has yet to be fully operationalized.
Another proposal is to treat social media platforms like broadcasting entities and require them to secure a congressional franchise. The proposal was made amid the inability of the government to compel the developer of GoreBox, the sandbox game that promotes “unrestrained destruction,” to face probers in the Philippines.
The government has also had limited ability to make tech giants like Meta answer questions about their self-regulation rules and the impact on minors of violent content on their platforms.
The idea of having jurisdiction over the social media giants through the requirement for a congressional franchise will likely be tempting for lawmakers. But minors aren’t the only ones who use social media, and the proposal could spell disaster for freedom of information in this country.
Considering the record of politicians in dealing with media franchises, the trend should be toward reducing their say on the matter to a minimum rather than expanding their jurisdiction. This is to prevent a repeat of the shutdown of broadcasting giant ABS-CBN because congressmen, several of whom admitted having personal axes to grind, rejected the renewal of the network’s franchise.
Jurisdiction over primary broadcast franchises should be fully turned over to the National Telecommunications Commission, to de-politicize the regulatory process. This is the situation in the US, where broadcast franchises, licenses and regulation are under the Federal Communications Commission.
A congressional franchise for Meta? The last thing we need is for all Filipinos to lose access to major online platforms because lawmakers felt slighted on social media.