03:16

The Australian parliament has passed legislation to crack down on violent videos on social media, despite furious reaction from the tech industry, media companies and legal experts.

The Labor opposition combined with the ruling Liberal-National Coalition to pass the law on Thursday, despite warning it won’t allow prosecution of social media executives as promised by the government. Tech giants expressed the opposite concern that it may criminalise anyone in their companies for a failure to remove violent material.

The bill was drafted in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attack, when video of the alleged perpetrator’s violent attack spread on social media faster than it could be removed.

The Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material bill creates new offences for content service providers and hosting services that fail to notify the Australian federal police about or fail to expeditiously remove videos depicting “abhorrent violent conduct”.

On Thursday the attorney general, Christian Porter, said Facebook and Twitter “should not be playing footage of murder”, in the same way that commercial television stations would not show it.

Porter:

“There are platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook who do not seem to take their responsibility to not show the most abhorrently violent material seriously.”

“This law would prevent that and criminalise that and offer the government an ability to respond where an organisation like Facebook let something livestream and play for a long time on their platform.”

Porter said a “reasonable” or “expeditious” timeframe to remove material would depend on the circumstances and be up to a jury to decide, but “every Australian would agree it was totally unreasonable that it should exist on their site for well over an hour without them taking any action whatsoever”.