The legislation received its stamp of approval following the mass murder of 50 Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand, by an alleged white supremacist terrorist from Australia. The massacre was streamed live on Facebook and other platforms. According to Facebook, even after removing the original footage an hour after its broadcast, it blocked a further 1.5 million uploads of the video and images of the attack.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the amount of time Facebook took to remove the footage of the Christchurch massacre as “unacceptable”.

The New Zealand Office of Film and Literature Classification classified the footage as “objectionable”, making it a severe criminal offence to distribute it. The French Council of the Muslim Faith has filed lawsuits against Facebook and YouTube for allowing the footage to be broadcast.

The terrorist attack has provoked swift government responses, particularly with regard to gun control in New Zealand, while Facebook has announced that it will ban content promoting white nationalism and white separatism (the movements with which the alleged Christchurch attacker was strongly associated).

The Australian parliament has now passed the Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material Bill, which proposes that social media and web hosting companies which fail to remove violent content “expeditiously” and inform police within a reasonable timeframe could face fines of up to 10 per cent of their annual global turnover and custodial sentences of up to three years for executives. Content depicting “abhorrent violent conduct” will include videos and photographs of murder, attempted murder, terrorist acts, torture, rape and kidnapping.

Judges will ultimately decide whether or not companies have complied with their responsibilities.

“It is important that we make a very clear statement to social media companies that we expect their behaviour to change,” said Mitch Fifield, the Australian minister for communications and the arts, speaking to reporters in Canberra. Christian Porter, the Australian Attorney-General, described the new law as a “world first in terms of legislating the conduct of social media and online platforms.”

The legislation was backed in parliament by the opposition Labor party, although it expressed concerns that the bill had been rushed in response to the Christchurch massacre. The party – which said that it would review the legislation if elected – warned that it may inadvertently implicate whistleblowers (although the bill includes an exemption for public interest journalism) and could fail to appropriately punish the executives most responsible for negligence.

It is also unclear whether Australian authorities would be capable of taking legal action against companies which do not have offices in the country.

The Digital Industry Group Inc (which represents Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Twitter and other technology companies) stated that the new law failed to appreciate the complexity involved in identifying and removing violent content: “With the vast volumes of content uploaded to the internet every second, this is a highly complex problem that requires discussion with the technology industry, legal experts, the media and civil society to get the solution right – that didn’t happen this week,” said Sunita Bose, managing director of the group.

Elsewhere in the world, anger continues to grow against the executives of major technology companies, who have been characterised as arrogant and negligent over their slow reaction to criticism. In particular, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was condemned by lawmakers from nine different countries for refusing to appear before a Grand Committee on Disinformation to answer questions about Facebook’s failure to crack down on fake news and protect user privacy.

In the US, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a new piece of legislation (the Corporate Executive Accountability Act) would could make it easier to take legal action against executives when their company allows customers’ data to be breached. The bill would make “negligent” executives of corporations (which turn over more than $1bn (£760m)) criminally liable when they commit crimes or harm many Americans through civil rights violations, such as data breaches.

“When a criminal on the street steals money from your wallet, they go to jail. When small business owners cheat their customers, they go to jail,” Warren wrote in the Washington Post. “But when corporate executives at big companies oversee huge frauds that hurt tens of thousands of people, they often get to walk away with multi-million dollar payouts.

“Personal accountability is the only way to ensure that executives at corporations will think twice before ignoring the law.”

Warren – who is competing to be the Democratic candidate who takes on President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election – has made consumer protection a key component of her election pledges. She is the first and only Democratic contender to announce that she would break up inappropriately powerful tech giants (including Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple) to allow for genuine competition in the sector.

Despite some concessions – such as Facebook executives acknowledging the need for government regulation of social media and announcing possible restrictions on livestreaming – Facebook has once again found itself mired in a week of public shaming.

Facebook was found to have been asking some users to provide the passwords to their email accounts and to have stored 540 million users’ passwords exposed on Amazon servers. In January, 600 million users’ Facebook passwords were found to have been stored in plaintext. Meanwhile, a Guardian investigation found that thousands of impactful Facebook ads apparently set up by two grassroots campaigns pushing Facebook users to demand a no-deal Brexit from their MPs were in fact orchestrated by right-wing political strategist Sir Lynton Crosby. The extensive and misleading astroturfing campaign is estimated to have cost around £1m.

The legislation received its stamp of approval following the mass murder of 50 Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand, by an alleged white supremacist terrorist from Australia. The massacre was streamed live on Facebook and other platforms. According to Facebook, even after removing the original footage an hour after its broadcast, it blocked a further 1.5 million uploads of the video and images of the attack.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the amount of time Facebook took to remove the footage of the Christchurch massacre as “unacceptable”.

The New Zealand Office of Film and Literature Classification classified the footage as “objectionable”, making it a severe criminal offence to distribute it. The French Council of the Muslim Faith has filed lawsuits against Facebook and YouTube for allowing the footage to be broadcast.

The terrorist attack has provoked swift government responses, particularly with regard to gun control in New Zealand, while Facebook has announced that it will ban content promoting white nationalism and white separatism (the movements with which the alleged Christchurch attacker was strongly associated).

The Australian parliament has now passed the Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material Bill, which proposes that social media and web hosting companies which fail to remove violent content “expeditiously” and inform police within a reasonable timeframe could face fines of up to 10 per cent of their annual global turnover and custodial sentences of up to three years for executives. Content depicting “abhorrent violent conduct” will include videos and photographs of murder, attempted murder, terrorist acts, torture, rape and kidnapping.

Judges will ultimately decide whether or not companies have complied with their responsibilities.

“It is important that we make a very clear statement to social media companies that we expect their behaviour to change,” said Mitch Fifield, the Australian minister for communications and the arts, speaking to reporters in Canberra. Christian Porter, the Australian Attorney-General, described the new law as a “world first in terms of legislating the conduct of social media and online platforms.”

The legislation was backed in parliament by the opposition Labor party, although it expressed concerns that the bill had been rushed in response to the Christchurch massacre. The party – which said that it would review the legislation if elected – warned that it may inadvertently implicate whistleblowers (although the bill includes an exemption for public interest journalism) and could fail to appropriately punish the executives most responsible for negligence.

It is also unclear whether Australian authorities would be capable of taking legal action against companies which do not have offices in the country.

The Digital Industry Group Inc (which represents Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Twitter and other technology companies) stated that the new law failed to appreciate the complexity involved in identifying and removing violent content: “With the vast volumes of content uploaded to the internet every second, this is a highly complex problem that requires discussion with the technology industry, legal experts, the media and civil society to get the solution right – that didn’t happen this week,” said Sunita Bose, managing director of the group.

Elsewhere in the world, anger continues to grow against the executives of major technology companies, who have been characterised as arrogant and negligent over their slow reaction to criticism. In particular, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was condemned by lawmakers from nine different countries for refusing to appear before a Grand Committee on Disinformation to answer questions about Facebook’s failure to crack down on fake news and protect user privacy.

In the US, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced a new piece of legislation (the Corporate Executive Accountability Act) would could make it easier to take legal action against executives when their company allows customers’ data to be breached. The bill would make “negligent” executives of corporations (which turn over more than $1bn (£760m)) criminally liable when they commit crimes or harm many Americans through civil rights violations, such as data breaches.

“When a criminal on the street steals money from your wallet, they go to jail. When small business owners cheat their customers, they go to jail,” Warren wrote in the Washington Post. “But when corporate executives at big companies oversee huge frauds that hurt tens of thousands of people, they often get to walk away with multi-million dollar payouts.

“Personal accountability is the only way to ensure that executives at corporations will think twice before ignoring the law.”

Warren – who is competing to be the Democratic candidate who takes on President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election – has made consumer protection a key component of her election pledges. She is the first and only Democratic contender to announce that she would break up inappropriately powerful tech giants (including Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple) to allow for genuine competition in the sector.

Despite some concessions – such as Facebook executives acknowledging the need for government regulation of social media and announcing possible restrictions on livestreaming – Facebook has once again found itself mired in a week of public shaming.

Facebook was found to have been asking some users to provide the passwords to their email accounts and to have stored 540 million users’ passwords exposed on Amazon servers. In January, 600 million users’ Facebook passwords were found to have been stored in plaintext. Meanwhile, a Guardian investigation found that thousands of impactful Facebook ads apparently set up by two grassroots campaigns pushing Facebook users to demand a no-deal Brexit from their MPs were in fact orchestrated by right-wing political strategist Sir Lynton Crosby. The extensive and misleading astroturfing campaign is estimated to have cost around £1m.