UK denies going easy on terrorist social media content
London: Britain’s Science and Technology Minister Michelle Donelan has asked social media representatives to explain their processes for removing terrorist content, but denied her response was weak compared with the EU, which has sent X owner Elon Musk a “please explain” letter.
Donelan spoke to this masthead to spruik the UK’s upcoming summit on artificial intelligence.
X gives users the option of putting a content warning on their posts, but they rarely do.Credit:
Asked if she shared concerns about the proliferation of disinformation online relating to the war between Israel and Hamas, Donelan said she had already asked the social media companies for an explanation.
“I am concerned about the bots we are seeing in particular, which are peddling a lot of this content – and we’ve asked all of those social media companies to send in writing their full policies so we can make sure they actually deliver on what they said they’re going to do, which I think is a reasonable request,” she said.
UK Minister for Science and Technology Michelle Donelan.Credit: UK Gov
The EU has issued letters to the major social media companies including X (formerly Twitter), Meta and TikTok, demanding written explanations for the spread of hate speech, terrorist and other violent content on their platforms.
Musk responded by asking the EU to identify what content it was alluding to. The EU later added TikTok and Meta to the probe.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said it had a “well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks during a crisis while also protecting expression”.
Under Europe’s newly enacted Digital Services Act, it can fine companies as much as 6 per cent of their global turnover.
Donelan said the UK was on the verge of its own online safety bill coming into law and denied she had been weak on the issue.
“We’ve called them into a room, we’ve asked them for their policies, we’re going to hold them to account on their policies, we’re making sure that they do deliver on that.”
Once Britain’s law is enacted, technology companies could face fines of up to 10 per cent of their revenue and have their CEOs imprisoned.
Donelan said AI posed a “humongous risk” to society, especially given it was not possible to know how exactly it would affect our lives.
AI’s ability to generate highly realistic content has led to fake images, audio and video of people being generated, that can be used to mislead people, sway political debate, produce child pornography and even in hoax kidnappings.
When asked what the British government believed were the greatest threats posed by AI, Donelan said nobody had a handle on the risks.
The EU has sent Elon Musk a letter asking that he ensure terrorist content is removed from X.Credit: Bloomberg
“I think the biggest risk here is the unknown,” she said. “The biggest risk that we face in reality is that we don’t know where this technology will lead.
“The unpredictable nature of it, and the fact that it is advancing so quickly, is the biggest risk.”
She said that given AI’s large language models, including ChatGPT, went from being incapable of stringing a sentence together to passing complex legal and medical exams within a few years, nobody knew what AI’s capabilities would be within the next year or two.
“If we think about that man went from the horse and cart to the space race within one lifetime, but this is nothing compared to that,” she said.
“The reality is not even the developers know, so that is the biggest risk.
“The technology is advancing so quickly.”
Donelan said the UK’s two-day summit to be held at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing cracked the Enigma code during World War II, was not about regulating AI, but discussing the risks and opportunities of “frontier AI” or the next generation of capabilities.
The summit will focus on the potential for the loss of controls of AI models, misuse by state or private actors, as well as societal harms including misinformation and disinformation.
Science Minister Ed Husic will represent the government at a London conference on the future of AI.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Australia’s Science Minister Ed Husic is expected to represent Australia at the gathering, but few world leaders are expected to show up.
Donelan said China, as a producer of AI, would attend, but would not say if Russia, Iran or North Korea would be represented.
“We have said that we have been in talks with the Chinese in terms of their attendance at the summit because they’re a leading AI nation,” she said.
“It would be foolish of us to cut them out of the conversation because it wouldn’t have the same impact that we want to have to really make this a strategic and developed conversation in relation to the risks and what we can do going forward.”
Donelan said that unlike the EU, which has already written an AI act, the UK would not be rushing to legislate so it could regulate the technology.
In July, the White House, in consultation with a string of jurisdictions, including the UK and Australia, although not the EU, secured commitments from the seven leading AI companies aimed at the safe development of the technology.
These included pledges by the companies to watermark AI-generated content.
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