Re: Distraction tactics - attack is the best form of defence
The security forces knew about this guy
Well, they know about everyone who has a birth certificate, NI number, driver's license, criminal record and a passport. What of it?
but apparently we shouldn't blame them.
If you had kept tabs on how many court cases and convictions there have been of people planning things like this, and indeed noted the rarity of actual attacks, you'd realise that actually the security types are pretty good at what they do.
And apparently the security forces can't monitor t'interwebs and request takedowns, so GooBook will have to work out how to spot this stuff.
Well no, since there's billions of users, trillions of online items, and only a few thousand security types. Even if they could spend all day trawling the web, and even if Facebook did let them see inside every private group, etc. they'd never cover any more than a small fraction of it all.
Google and Facebook do have to spot this stuff. They rely too much on being able to say "it's not us that put it there". Well, it's their hard drives, and it's up to them whether or not they let anyone else in the world put dodgy shit on them anonymously. It's a lazy attitude to take, and one born out of commercial greed. Worse, and this is what really seems to have been the tipping point, their response time to notifications about illegal content is unacceptably slow. So slow that many suspect that it is a deliberate policy on their part to not be seen to take any responsibility for content whatsoever even if notified. The fact that they continue to profit from it is what makes it morally reprehensible.
Being free and none-too-fussy about who really lies behind a user account might be a great way to grow fast, but it's naive of them to think that they can run their businesses this way without attracting moral or legal responsibility somewhere down the line. In contrast, something like the old paid-for Compuserve model has many advantages; you know exactly who your customers are (the membership fee is drawn from a customer's credit card / direct debit / etc), and your customers know that ultimately they cannot hide their identity from enquiring policemen. Being traceable is probably the biggest deterrent to anyone thinking of posting some illegal material.
Put up a Great Firewall if you don't like the outside world.
No need. If Google and Facebook lose their revenue stream in Europe, they may as well stop offering the services. Twatter don't make any money anyway. Would that cause chaos in Europe? Perhaps for a while. Is it an opportunity for a domestic equivalent to finally get onto the playing field? Certainly.
Rapid Consequences?
Commercially this is a potential problem, for Google especially. They're under pressure from European legislators over their dominance of the Android platform. Cue a large fine. They've already copped a big fine in Europe for (Ii think) their search monopoly, they are (or were) under criminal investigation in France for tax evasion (they couldn't even play the Double Irish system properly), some of their shareholders were trying to sue them for corporate mismanagement of their business in Europe, That's before one starts counting the enormous sum of money they've wasted on self driving cars that aren't really. And now they've suddenly copping some pretty bad press over their profiting from extremist material and losing large clients fast. And that's before European governments go after their revenue stream by making their advertising customers criminally responsible for where their advertising money ends up (today's moral stance being taken by customers could become tomorrow's addition to laws on terrorist funding).
This is a pretty long list of problems for the company, and it can't be too long before some shareholder who really matters starts asking serious questions of the board like, "WTF is going on here guys?". For a company whose motto used to be "Don't be evil", they're pretty far from lilly-white goodness.