Malaysia to Hold Meta Platforms Accountable for Harmful Content

Malaysia’s government announced Friday that it will sue Facebook and Instagram’s’ parent company, Meta Platforms, for failing to delete objectionable and damaging content from its social networking platform.

According to the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission, Facebook has recently been troubled by “a significant volume of undesirable content” concerning sensitive themes such as race, religion, and royalty, as well as defamation, impersonation, online gambling, and scam marketing.

The commission stated that numerous attempts to contact Meta to delete damaging content were futile.

“Meta’s response, which has been sluggish and unsatisfactory, has not met the urgency of the matter and has led to increasing public concern and scrutiny,” the organisation said in a statement. “Because Meta has not provided sufficient cooperation, MCMC has no choice but to take definitive steps or legal action against Meta as a measure to ensure people’s physical security and protection.”

The commission stated that it will not accept the use of online platforms and telecommunications services for “malicious cyber activities, phishing, or any content that threatens racial stability, social harmony, or defies respect for rulers.” Malaysia has nine ethnic Malay state monarchs, whose position is mostly ceremonial but held in high regard by the Malay majority of the country.

Earlier this month, the government threatened Telegram with legal action because it failed to help with investigations into complaints about content and misuse of the service, including the selling of pornographic materials, drugs, and investment frauds. According to local media, Telegram scams have cost Malaysians 45 million ringgit ($9.6 million) since January 2020.

Telegram first stated that it would not engage in “any form of political censorship,” but later agreed to collaborate with local authorities to combat illegal activity.

The move against online platforms comes at the same time as six critical state elections that must be held by the end of August. While state elections have little bearing on the federal administration, they are closely monitored since they will be the first test of popular support for Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s unity government, which was created following a tumultuous general election in November.

Anwar is up against the Islamic-dominated National Alliance, which received unexpectedly high support from Malays in the November election. The National Alliance is expecting for another strong showing in the six state elections and has been fiercely criticising Anwar’s government on social media.

Meta’s Instagram and its network of pedophiles

Meanwhile, according to a Wall Street Journal exposé, Meta’s Instagram suggestion algorithms have enabled a “vast” network of pedophiles seeking illicit underage sexual content and activities.

The Journal reported in a 2,800-word story that it investigated child pornography on Meta-owned Instagram in partnership with experts at Stanford and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“Pedophiles have long used the internet, but unlike forums and file-transfer services that cater to people interested in illicit content, Instagram does more than just host these activities.” Its algorithms encourage them,” according to the Journal. “Through recommendation systems that excel at connecting those who share niche interests, Instagram connects paedophiles and guides them to content sellers.”

According to a Meta representative, the firm is “continuously exploring ways to actively defend against this behaviour, and we set up an internal task force to investigate these claims and immediately address them.” Meta admitted that the firm received reports of child sexual abuse in some cases but did not act on them, alleging a software problem that prevented them from being processed (which Meta claims has since been addressed). Furthermore, “we provided updated guidance to our content reviewers to more easily identify and remove predatory accounts,” according to a Meta representative.

“Child exploitation is a heinous crime.” “We fight it aggressively on and off our platforms, and we support law enforcement in their efforts to arrest and prosecute the criminals behind it,” the representative said in a statement. “Predators’ tactics in their pursuit of harming children are constantly changing, which is why we have strict policies and technology in place to prevent them from finding or interacting with teens on our apps, and we hire specialist teams who focus on understanding their evolving behaviours so we can eliminate abusive networks.”

According to Meta, its policy enforcement teams “dismantled 27 abusive networks” between 2020 and 2022, and in January 2023, more than 490,000 accounts were disabled for breaking child-safety standards. According to the business, as of the fourth quarter of 2022, Meta’s technology had eliminated more than 34 million pieces of child sexual exploitation content from Facebook and Instagram, with more than 98% of it discovered before it was reported by users.

According to the Journal, “technical and legal obstacles make determining the full scale of the [paedophile] network [on Instagram] difficult for anyone outside Meta to precisely measure.” The Stanford Internet Observatory research team was cited in the article for identifying 405 sellers of “self-generated” child-sex material (accounts apparently controlled by children themselves) utilising hashtags linked with underage sex. The WSJ piece also quoted data produced by network mapping programme Maltego, which revealed that 112 of those identities had a total of 22,000 unique followers.

According to the Journal, Instagram profiles that seek to sell illicit sex material “generally don’t publish it openly” and frequently link to “off-platform content trading sites.”

According to the study, researchers discovered that Instagram allowed anyone to search “explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex” and then connect them to accounts that advertised child-sex material for sale. According to the Journal, when researchers accessed a single such account, their test accounts “were immediately hit with’suggested for you’ recommendations of purported child-sex-content sellers and buyers, as well as accounts linking to off-platform content trading sites.” Following only a few of these tips was enough to fill a test account with child-sexualizing content.”

Furthermore, certain Instagram accounts “invite buyers to commission specific acts,” with some “menus” listing prices for videos of children harming themselves or “imagery of the minor performing sexual acts with animals,” according to the Journal report, which cites Stanford Internet Observatory researchers’ findings.

“At the right price, children are available for in-person’meet ups,'” according to the Journal.

According to the Journal, Snapchat and TikTok, among other internet sites, do not appear to support networks of paedophiles seeking child-abuse content in the same manner that Instagram does.

The Stanford Internet Observatory team identified 128 accounts on Twitter seeking to sell child-sex-abuse content; according to the researchers, Twitter did not encourage such accounts to the same extent as Instagram, and Twitter also terminated such accounts “far more quickly,” according to the Journal. (An email to Twitter’s press account requesting comment resulted in an autoreply with a faeces emoji.)