Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to lead global attempt to shutdown social media terrorism

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern will co-chair a meeting to be held in Paris next month.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron will next month co-chair a meeting in Paris aimed at addressing how social media plays a part in promoting terrorism.

The meeting on May 15 – two months after the Christchurch terror attacks which claimed the lives of 50 people – aims to see world leaders and tech company bosses agree to the "Christchurch call" – a pledge to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.

Ardern is confident all major social media companies will honour the call, telling Newstalk ZB she has already spoken to a number of social media bosses about the plan.

"The March 15 terrorist attacks saw social media used in an unprecedented way as a tool to promote an act of terrorism and hate," Ardern said this morning.

"We are asking for a show of leadership to ensure social media cannot be used again the way it was in the March 15 terrorist attack."

Ardern called on leaders of tech companies to help achieve the goal of eliminating extremism online at the Christchurch summit in Paris.

"We all need to act, and that includes social media providers taking more responsibility for the content that is on their platforms, and taking action so that violent extremist content cannot be published and shared."

Following the Christchurch shootings, Ardern has been working towards a global co-ordinated response that would make the likes of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter more responsible for the content they host.

Ardern spoke specifically today about Facebook, saying it is critical that it is not perverted as a tool for terrorism.

Instead, she said, Facebook should become part of what she called a global solution to countering extremism.

"This meeting presents an opportunity for an act of unity between governments and the tech companies."

Speaking to Newstalk ZB this morning, Ardern said she was confident all major social media companies would sign up to the Christchurch call.

"We have been working on something behind the scenes for some time now, since the 15th of March. I have also recently had calls with a handful of chief executives."

The call, she said, would place the onus on Governments, in terms of their ability to regulate, as well as on the social media companies themselves.

"I think that's where we need to move; this can't just be about individual country's [ability to] regulate because this is obviously global technology and we need to have those companies accept responsibility as well."

She said that the principals of a free, open and secure internet would "absolutely be maintained".

The accused Christchurch mosque gunman livestreamed 17 minutes of the attack on Facebook and the social media giant has been criticised for failing to prevent the footage being reshared on its site.

A senior Facebook manager later told the US Congress that it failed to detect the Christchurch mosque gunman's livestream because its content was not "particularly gruesome".

Ardern has said this wasn't good enough. Shortly after the Christchurch terror attack, she said: "We cannot simply sit back and accept that these platforms just exist and that what is said on them is not the responsibility of the place where they are published."

New Zealanders had become united in the common purpose to make sure attacks like that never happened again.

"If we want to prevent violent extremist content online we need to take a global approach that involves other governments, tech companies and civil society leaders," she said today.

"Social media platforms can connect people in many very positive ways, and we all want this to continue."

But she said for too long it has been possible to use social media platforms to incite extremist violence, and even to distribute images of that violence, as happened in Christchurch.

"This is what needs to change."