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Meta treads fine line in criticizing Malaysia's social-media licensing plan
By Jet Damazo-Santos ( November 1, 2024, 07:19 GMT | Insight) -- Meta Platform’s criticism of Malaysia’s "exceptionally accelerated" and “unclear” social-media licensing plan appears to have backfired, triggering an angry response from the country’s communications minister. “I don’t understand why Meta is defending these scammer and pedophile groups,” Malaysia’s Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil said in a minute-long video posted last night on his official page on the Meta-owned Facebook platform. He was responding to questions from reporters who asked him about Meta’s call to be given more time to comply with the new regulatory framework issued on Aug. 1. Under the framework, social-media and Internet-messaging services with at least 8 million users in Malaysia are required to apply for a license before Jan. 1, following which they would have to implement more stringent measures for online safety. “Honestly,” the minister said, “we absolutely can’t allow more time for scammers and pedophile groups, which are rampant right now.” Fahmi said they’ve received complaints from the public about pedophile groups operating on Facebook with tens of thousands of members that have been running for years. “Just get on with it. We’ve been discussing this with them since the beginning of the year. They already know — I even went down to Singapore to address it with them. They keep giving excuses, but for me, the safety of Malaysians, especially children and families, is something we will not compromise on.” The minister’s statements came a day after Meta's director of public policy for Southeast Asia, Rafael Frankel, told Reuters in an interview that the government’s deadline to apply for a license was "exceptionally accelerated" and the obligations for social-media firms under the plan were unclear. The draft code of conduct under the licensing framework is currently undergoing public consultation, which Meta is expected to provide feedback on. “These regulations tend to take a couple years to go through multiple iterations... to properly structure them and to balance the need for safety and ensure that you don't inadvertently cap innovation and digital economic growth,” Frankel was quoted as saying. Frankel’s interview was published after a meeting between Meta and the ministry, during which the minister said he “admonished Meta for its ongoing failure to address issues of pedophilia and child grooming on its platform, especially on Facebook.” This back and forth between the government and tech giants has been going on for months. In August, the Asia Internet Coalition, a tech lobby group representing companies such as Meta, Google and X, wrote an open letter calling on Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim to reconsider the licensing plan. The group warned that the framework could stifle innovation, deter investments and destabilize Malaysia's digital economy by imposing undue regulatory burdens without sufficient industry consultation. But the government was unmoved. In July, Fahmi said that while Meta platforms had the highest compliance rate with takedown requests, ranging from 79 percent for WhatsApp to 88 percent for Instagram, the scale of the problem on Facebook is massive. Fahmi said the ministry has sent almost 100,000 complaints to Meta to take down fraud content. “So even though Facebook's compliance rate is high, the number of scam cases is also big,” he said, adding that Meta needed to take more proactive actions....
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