French President Emmanuel Macron and New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern spearheaded global document Chirstchurch Ca... Read More

NEW DELHI: India became one of the signatories to the Chirstchurch Call for Action to remove extremist and violent online content. The global document, spearheaded by French President Emmanuel Macron and New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern, signed in Paris on Wednesday brought together governments and technology giants to commit to action that would weed out such content from online spaces like Facebook etc.

The idea, which germinated during Macron’s visit to Wellington in April, culminated in the release of a global document on Wednesday at an event attended by leaders of Britain, France, Canada, Ireland , Senegal, Indonesia , Jordan and the European Union as well as tech giants like Twitter, Google, Microsoft among others. India was represented by Ajay Prakash Sawhney, secretary in the ministry of electronics and information technology.

The document “outlines collective, voluntary commitments from governments and online service providers intended to address the issue of terrorist and violent extremist content online and to prevent the abuse of the internet as occurred in and after the Christchurch attacks.”

Facebook, which has come under sustained criticism for refusing to battle the growing menace pledged to tighten restrictions and committed $7.5 million to fund research for technology to remove such content. The Christchurch killer posted the video of his massacre on Facebook. Increasingly, terror attacks in many parts of the world are happening as a result of online radicalisation.

This issue of removing and fighting terrorist content online will be one of the issues to be discussed at the G7 summit in Biarritz and the G-20 summit in Osaka. The commitments are at present voluntary.

Interestingly, the Christchurch Call for Action is a rare instance where governments and private sector have made similar pledges with the same intent. Of course, this will run into objections from free speech activists, but increasingly there is a growing concern among countries about the need to regulate online content. This was brought home quite starkly during the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka , as well as the Holey Artisan Bakery attack in Dhaka in 2016.

