UK Military Censors Dismayed US Tech Companies Won’t Do More Censoring
Like highway patrol officers bitching about the fact they couldn't talk a driver into a voluntary search, a British censorship board is complaining about the fact they can't get US companies to comply with takedown requests they're under no legal obligation to comply with.
That's the gist of this article, as reported by Laurie Clarke and Tamlin Magee of Politico's European-focused wing.
Britain's media censorship board is trying to woo Big Tech. But the Silicon Valley giants just aren't interested.
Tech firms including Google, Meta, and X have repeatedly spurned the secretive British committee in its mission to prevent state secrets spreading across social platforms.
The Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee is run by retired military officers and counts some of the U.K.'s biggest media brands, including Sky, the BBC, and the Times, among its members.
There's no reason for US companies to feel interested." The DSMA is (supposedly) an independent board that can issue requests to take down content that might threaten the UK's national security, but has no real legal weight behind its requests.
The so-called D-notices" rely on voluntary compliance, even in the UK. UK media companies might feel a bit more obliged to comply, but refusing to comply doesn't actually mean they're breaking the law. Sure, things are a bit tougher due to recent legislation (namely, the National Security Act), but the DSMA is still mostly on the outside, legally speaking. It can request and hope that those requests are honored.
It's that voluntary nature that has secured the most compliance, not the latent threat of UK national security laws. Approaching entities with requests, rather than legal threats, has worked out well for the DSMA for much of its existence.
Its biggest win - as Politico points out - was preventing extensive reporting on the Snowden leaks. But it looks as though the Snowden leaks may have changed things overseas, resulting in less compliance by US tech companies which were stung by reporting that detailed their complicity in domestic and overseas surveillance efforts.
Still, the DMSA feels it has the right to complain about US tech companies being less than compliant with D-notices they're not obliged to comply with.
We've been trying to break into the so-called tech giants," said DSMA notice secretary and former military diplomat, Geoffrey Dodds, in an interview. He said Meta and Google were among the social media companies the committee had reached out to.
At present, governments can ask social platforms likeMetaandXto remove content if it violates local laws or platform rules.
But Dodds suggested that tech firms could monitor their platforms like they do for illegal content, such as child abuse material- and, if they saw something pertaining to D-Notices, seek advice from the committee.
There it is: yet another suggestion from someone who's never worked in the field of content moderation that tech companies can always do more to proactively vet content that's uploaded by the gigabyte every second on behalf of hundreds of government agencies that all want something different monitored on their behalf.
Tech companies do make efforts to take down and report content that is obviously illegal. What's never immediately obvious is whether reporting or content shared on their platforms violates the hundreds of national security laws put in place by dozens of governments all over the world.
The DSMA likes to claim that it's an independent body, presumably in hopes that distancing itself from the UK government might make service providers more receptive to its would you kindly" requests. But, much like a majority of independent" police oversight boards in this country, the DSMA is closely tied to the government entities it hopes to protect.
The DSMA committee claims to be independent from government, but is currentlyrun bythe Ministry of Defence's director general for security policy, Paul Wyatt. The committee includes government members hailing from the Foreign Office, Cabinet Office, MoD and the Home Office, and the meetings take place in the MoD.
I'm not sure how an entity run and overseen by current government employees can pretend it's not a government entity. And if it can't be honest about itself, it shouldn't expect others - especially those not located in the UK - to honor its requests" for content removal.
No matter where the targets of D-notices are located, the simple fact remains they just aren't used that often. This is probably due to compliance being mostly voluntary, especially if the targets are not UK-based content providers. According to the DSMA secretary, the last notice was sent out in January of this year. Prior to that, it was used sparingly, with only a few requests sent out between April 2023 and January 2024.
If the DMSA isn't carpet-bombing service providers with takedown requests, the loss of some US allies hardly seems worth complaining about. That the board is bitter about US companies refusal to comply (or refusal to partner up with UK companies) seems like the sort of sour graping that would have been better off being relegated to the DMSA's Slack channel.
Complaints about incremental gains in NatSec are the sort of complaints that just make an entity look bitter, rather than useful. Given the makeup of this board (in every way), there's nothing in this for US tech companies, which currently have their hands full dealing with US government pressure and a half-dozen (unconstitutional) state laws that insist these private companies shouldn't be allowed to moderate content on their own.
Then there's this, which suggests... well, I don't know exactly what, but it's hardly flattering:
As the committee attempts to modernize, the minutes - which until recently bore Dodds' signature in the Comic Sans typeface - also reveal internal agonizing over the group's lack of diversity. Asurvey foundthe committee was overwhelmingly pale and male" and half of participants had attended a private school.
The UK equivalent of a good ol' boys" club presided over by someone who thinks Comic Sans is an acceptable font for official communications. God bless the king/queen/whatever the fuck. May I suggest Papyrus might be more effective moving forward?