I agree with the police watchdog. Let’s jail Zuckerberg and Co to stop tech showing child sex abuse.

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I am a big fan of Sir Tom Winsor. Today he is the police watchdog but made his name as the rail regulator. He did the job for five years and for the first time took on the overpaid executives who have done so much to ruin my commute to work.

He held their feet to the fire and they hated it. Good.

Now he has turned his forensic mind on to tech companies and their failure to prevent their platforms being exploited by child sex abusers.
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Correctly Sir Tom said that fining companies was not enough to ensure something would be done. After all if you are an executive you would simply look on the fines as a cost of sale. It’s what Google are doing right now with fines totalling billions that being handed to them by the EU  for their anti-competitive sales tricks.

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His suggestion is that executives should go to jail “in the most egregious cases if the appropriate level of intent can be established - and that can include wilful neglect and negligence”.

He said; “I was a partner in a US law firm before I took this job and I can tell you senior executives really care if they could be standing in the dock.”

He says of the images; “We would never tolerate in any public display of those things in our streets or in our theatres or on our ordinary television screens so why do we tolerate them on our smartphones.”

Good point. The bosses of Google and Facebook claim they can’t stop the images turning up. Let’s see if by some tech miracle they can solve the problem before getting seven years in jail. I suspect they will.

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