'Power of the regulator: Holding platforms to account when they potentially violate national laws'

Well Cecile Simons is a researcher specialising in digital harms and she joins us now from London. Thanks for speaking to us Cecile. Thank you for having me. So the poor man was shot with paintball guns, strangled, purportedly even put in the boot of a car which then drove over 50 miles an hour over speed bumps, constantly woken up with loud noises, slapping, liquid thrown on him. As far as digital harms go, this is surely some of the worst you've seen. I mean absolutely and I think that the platform was obviously flagged through multiple media investigations as well as by rights organisations for hosting extremely violent and likely illegal content. And of course KIK has advertised itself as a loosely moderated platform. Media reports have shown that it did not properly apply some content moderation policies and that really hosted a range of violent and potentially illegal content. Now the lawyer for one of his fellow streamers says it was all simply staged. I mean if that's the case the acting is very convincing. Graven was on stream crying. Absolutely and these social media platforms, these loosely moderated social media platforms which have emerged in recent years, really incentivise the creation of graphic degrading content, extreme challenges, all sorts of content which gets clicks and views and which then encourage that escalation. And we know that there is a level of desensitisation, there is a desensitising effect on social media when it comes to this type of content where it becomes sadly entertainment. Yeah just describe to us the monetary aspect of this for those who don't understand or know about these platforms. Because was it that people could give donations and in return they'd see some sort of punishment doled out to Graven? I mean KIK is known for being particularly kind of advantageous to content creators and people can kind of subscribe to channels. And what in the case of Polmanov is, what happened is that he created this content which was incredibly lucrative because it is shocking, because it is extremely violent. And the platforms created this permissive environment where the creation of that content and the monetisation of that content was incentivised. Now KIK has obviously banned the streamers involved now and it's also announced a review of all French language content. I wonder whether this is part of a wider problem in moderating not in the English language or was it simply lax oversight to moderation across KIK more globally? Well I mean KIK has looser content moderation policies. We know that obviously language specificities are important when it comes to content moderation but in the case of KIK it's very much a case of having that looser content moderation. But it's also the case of course of the regulator not stepping in when there were multiple warnings. And here we really see the power of the regulator in applying pressure and holding these platforms to account, especially when they potentially violate national laws. Yeah the government has now referred KIK to local regulators. In terms of KIK itself being aware of the content, they were because they were posting on their French social media channels promoting the kind of content going on. So they were well aware of what was going on. Is there not a kind of question around how these platforms can moderate themselves as well as being regulated by the regulators? I mean absolutely. Obviously here there are kind of moderation choices that are being made by these platforms. And as I said media reports have shown that KIK doesn't implement its quite lax content moderation policies. And it doesn't have or it didn't have a legal representative in the EU or at the time when this happened. So I think that the platforms will not kind of moderate themselves and there absolutely need to be pressure from the regulator to hold them to account for the permissive environment they have created. Yeah and KIK obviously being founded by the same people behind another website called STAKE, which is a gambling website, that's allowed them to pay their streamers more than rival Twitch and has allowed for perhaps people to come to KIK and then move on to STAKE. Is that a particularly toxic mix to have something like a streaming platform attached to a gambling platform in this way? Well I think when we think of harms we need to kind of have a holistic approach to a different sort of types of content that these kind of platforms produce. And look at some of the kind of architecture of the platforms and some of the ways in which their monetization kind of strategy allow certain types of content to proliferate. So we need to look at it together. And of course this was one of the most watched streams on KIK in France. It reminds me a bit of that saga with the Japanese game show all those years ago, 30 years ago, where a man came next to a starvation man but millions were tuning in and watching it each day. Our appetite to watch others suffer has just not changed over the millennium. There are some things that remain in the digital age. Absolutely. However what the platforms have done is gamify some of that violence. And they have created this environment where people are served more and more of that sort of content. There are incentives to create it. And there is desensitizing effect. So although obviously violence has always existed, it has become gamified through social media platforms and online platforms.