The legal system works in such ways as to bring about a peaceful relationship between individuals, to balance freedom and responsibility and to protect the interests of individuals from abuse by others.
While laws deal with specific types of crime, technological advances yielded two new by-products.
First is the provision of new tools and mechanisms to commit crimes. Second, we witnessed unprecedented crimes that used new technologies or exploited potential loopholes in software.
We can confidently say that the decades-long age of rigid legislation on crimes is over. As modern technologies are used to commit crimes that can destroy countries’ economies and infrastructure at the push of a button around the world, criminal deterrence is not enough anymore.
In the past few years, the world has tended to legislate against cybercrime. Many countries have recognized the importance of drafting legislation and laws to deal with what can be referred to as “new crimes.” We hear about new laws from time to time as the world exchanges experiences in this regard, particularly on crimes of terrorism and radicalism.
The Australian government has recently developed a new tough law to deal with the weaponization of social networks and the prevention of the live streaming of crimes, the latest example of which was the recent terrorist massacre of two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The far-right terrorist broadcast a 17-minute video of his attack through Facebook.
The Australian law applies to companies that own and operate social networking platforms. The law requires that radical content be removed immediately and ways must be found to detect and remove it in a timely fashion. The advantage of this law is that it breaks with the idea that the operator is not responsible for radical content.
Laws and legislation have so far treated the tech giants from a moral responsibility standpoint. Some countries threaten to block enforcement, while others put pressure on these multinationals, which now have more influence than some countries.
Such strict laws have definitely become a matter of absolute necessity for reasons other than technological evolution.
One reason is that the virtual world has become an active arena for recruiting and training terrorists. While some studies suggest that traditional terrorism, whether neo-Kharijite or far-right nationalist, is no longer as serious as Internet-based extremism.
The Internet has made the world not a small village, but like a neighbourhood. It has facilitated communication between terrorists from caves and mountains and limited the ability of security services to break the communication between terrorists and their financiers.
The introduction of terrorism into social media platforms has turned them into arenas of social radicalization and terrorist training camps. It is high time to counter this trend, especially as the world is still in the early stages of the fourth industrial revolution.
