Meta, formerly Facebook, was recently slammed by an official in the United Kingdom for its rebranding and urged the firm to provide support for users on its social media platforms, it was reported on Friday.
Nadine Dorries, UK Minister for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, made the comments at a parliamentary hearing for Britain’s Online Safety Bill on Thursday.
She told MPs: “Rebranding doesn’t work. When harm is caused, we are coming after it.”
She also urged social media giants to “remove your harmful algorithms today” and vowed to sanction as well as prosecute tech firms that “have the ability to put right what they’re doing wrong now.”
According to Dorries, tech firms failing to comply with the new bill may see top tech executives face jail time of roughly three to six months, and social media companies could receive penalties up to 10 percent of global annual revenues or £18 million, depending on which comes first.
Damian Collins, Chair for the UK Parliament Joint Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill, is examining the bill and has previously scrutinised Facebook over the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Details of the Online Safety Bill
Speaking to MPs at the hearing, Dorries said that she thought the Online Safety Bill was “possibly the most important piece of legislation to pass through Parliament” in her 17-year career as a lawmaker.
The new bill would protect three principles, which included children, removing illegal online content, and forcing social media platforms to respond to legal, but harmful content.
She continued, stating,
“I think those three principles themselves highlight how important the bill is and how much it has to deliver, and it has to walk a very, very think tightrope between freedom of expression and those protections”
The measures come after Frances Haugen, a former employee of the Menlo Park-based firm, leaked a trove of documents and claimed the company failed to acknowledge the harmful mental effects of its social media platforms on young adults.
Haugen told UK Parliament last month regulators had a “slight window of time” to act on hate speech and other such content on the social media platform. Further concerns erupted after the killing of British MP David Amess, which fuelled a crackdown on anonymous online abuse and hate speech.
Nick Clegg, former Liberal Democrats leader and Meta’s Vice President of Global Affairs, vowed to protect users on the Metaverse in an interview and stated on a social media post he would work with organisation such as the XR Association in the US to create standards for the novel platform.
The news comes just days after Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Chief Executive and Founder, announced his company rebrand and unveiled a suite of application aimed at building social platforms for the Metaverse. The announcement also comes weeks after Facebook pledged $50 million to “ethically” build the successor to the Internet and to hire 10,000 employees in the European Union.
