Facebook Not To Blame For Rigby Murder Says Clegg

Parliamentary  Report Puts Facebook In Bad Light

Nick Clegg has defended Facebook over allegations that the social media giant is partly responsible for the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby earlier this year in East London.

He said this in response to a report by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) revealed that Rigby’s murderers had spoken on Facebook exclaiming a desire to murder a soldier. The report suggests that Facebook did not notify the security services about the online posts and that if they had, the horrific murder could have been prevented.

source: takeyourtips.com

Clegg commented that it was wrong if people were trying to “somehow trying to blame an internet service provider.” (I agree with you, Nick. For once. But just a heads up, Facebook isn't an internet service provider as they don’t provide us with internet. Try to keep up!)

He went on to say that “What this independent report by the committee highlighted was that more needs to be done so that the internet service providers have got their kind of own alarm systems. So that with all the millions of communications that go across their networks that where something of serious concern happens that can be sort of flagged up.”

Once again, I agree. But now we end up in the very grey area of privacy on the internet. The US has been making a lot of noise recently over the National Security Agency (NSA). The US wants to be protected against attacks of all sorts, as does any other nation. But it seems that they have a huge issue with the NSA monitoring their lives. It’s a tricky situation, isn’t it? You want to feel safe, like someone is watching over you, but that they’re not really looking.

Richard Barrett, the former counter terror chief at M15 and M16, had already defended Facebook prior to Clegg’s radio interview. He argued that Facebook is simply too large to completely moderate.

source: experss.co.uk

“Facebook has about one and a third billion users and about five billion posts a day so clearly on a worldwide basis it would be almost impossible to deal with the amount of stuff that was referred, and even in the United Kingdom there are about 25 million users of Facebook and so let’s say possibly about 125m posts a day. And even if you take out all the pictures of kittens which were put up you’d still be left with an awful lot to go through and then quite a percentage of those perhaps would be passed on for the police or security services to look at. So it would be an enormous task, I think.”

But then surely - if the report by ISC holds true – no matter how enormous the task may be it is something that should be tackled? More moderation and more flag warnings for certain content. 

Regardless, if we do agree to these measures, we will inevitably begin to lose our internet privacy. Looks like it’s time to decide which we value more.

Difficult choice, isn't it? 

Tom Welby

Tom has just graduated from University of East London in Creative and Professional Writing. He loves writing and is currently interning as content writer hoping to go further. His other loves include Arnold Schwarzenegger films and his dog. Follow him @TomAtSMF

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