BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
TODAY, society is far from the values of the Gospel. The institutional Church teaches sacramental practice for believers to get to heaven and avoid hell.
It has largely failed, with exceptions, to evangelize and preach the Gospel of social justice, love of neighbor, and protection of children, but covers up child sex abuse by clergy.
The internet platforms and ISPs are enabling and abetting these crimes and through algorithms and Artificial Intelligence software, they are promoting them. These very issues are presently on trial in the US Supreme Court this week. The telecommunication and social media corporations claim that they are not responsible and have immunity from prosecution under Section 230 of the US 1996 Communications Decency Act, which holds that the corporations are not liable for what is posted by others on their sites.
This is contradicted, as said above, by other laws that insist that all platforms must monitor their platforms and remove all indecent materials that induce crime, hatred, racism, extreme violence, obscene and child abuse. The issue is: should section 230 be repealed and will the justices of the US Supreme Court do it or not and does that US law apply in the Philippine and overstep Philippine sovereignty? That’s for the Philippine courts to decide.
Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act makes a big difference between ISPs and other media publications like radio, television and newspapers, which are strictly restricted and can be sued for libel or obscene content. The ISPs, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, make billions of dollars by inducing customers to stay on their social media platforms as long as possible because of advertising revenues. To achieve this, they have resorted to using Artificial Intelligence software and algorithms to recommend, suggest and push more and more related material in front of the visitors to their sites to increase advertising earnings.
Even if that is promoting illegal material like child sexual abuse and exploitation or terrorists acts, it allegedly doesn’t matter to them.
This is the issue before the US Supreme Court. The Gonzales family suffered the death of their children by terrorist attacks and are suing YouTube owned by Google for promoting the terrorist’s websites and terrorist recruitment and propaganda. They say YouTube and Google are aiding and abetting acts of terror that killed their child. Such acts are forbidden by the anti-terror laws.
The outcome of the US Supreme Court deliberations could be a shock for the powerful social media corporations that control so much of people’s lives, especially vulnerable children. Likewise, social media companies are using, aiding and abetting child abuse on-line by failing to block and are allowing child sexual abuse live shows to connect with customers and pass through the computers of the ISPs. They are using Artificial Intelligence software and algorithms to recommend, suggest and push more of these images to customers.
This is where they do not have the protection of Section 230. It is one thing to have material posted on their sites, which they say they try to take down, but to allow software to automatically find more abusive material and deliver it to the customer is a crime in itself, some say.
Will the US Supreme Court justices rule in favour of the social media corporations or in favor of protecting the public from this uncontrolled promotion of obscene images of child abuse? We will soon know when the decision is handed down if they have the intelligence and moral force to protect children or not. (preda.org)/PN
