Lower House wants stricter rules after revelation about online extremism among children

A coordinated approach to online extremism and also age verification on social media platforms, where various members of the House of Representatives argue after reading the research of NRC About online extremism among children.

NRC On Monday, in collaboration with research collective Capitol Terrorists Exposers, that Dutch children participate in online chat groups of the international movement ‘COM’ (an abbreviation for ‘community’). They hunt for mostly vulnerable children through game platforms such as Roblox and Minecraft and then squeeze them and force them to sexual abuse and violence. Both the FBI and Interpol and Europol are currently conducting research into the COM movement.

You want to protect personal data, but also that authorities on online platforms can keep a finger on the pulse

Tank The Hague Center for Strategic Studies (HCSS) also warns in a report published on Sunday for this kind of online extremism among children. HCSS signales that the radicalized perpetrators are still often out of the picture of the investigating agencies.

“It is horrible to read how these criminals know exactly how they get vulnerable young people in a trap,” says MP Barbara Kathmann (GroenLinks-PvdA, digital business) through a spokesperson. “We all have to get the dynamics of such an online community much better, only then can we do something about it.” D66 MP Hanneke van der Werf finds it “unacceptable that children are exposed to this kind of dangerous online environments.”

Strict

Van der Werf also emphasizes that tech companies have the responsibility to protect minors on their platforms. “That means standard strict privacy settings, age verification and limitations so that not everyone can contact children.” NSC MP Jesse Six Dijkstra also mentions age verification as a means to protect children. Through this verification, platforms could better maintain a minimum age.

In addition, Six Dijkstra says to support a coordinated approach via the National Coordinator for the fight against Terrorism and Security (NCTV) and the Online Terrorist and Children’s Pornographic Material (ATKM) Authority. The chairman of the ATKM, which was established to identify and take offline for terrorist online content, suggested NRC That the NCTV could take control.

Children are extorted through Roblox and Minecraft and forced into sexual abuse and violence

Kathmann also argues for “a broad national program” to tackle online extremism. She also sees a role for a network of prevention parties and criminals, including the Media Wisdom network, Stichting Offlimits, the ATKM and the NCTV.

In the report From meme to murder: how online extremist breeding rooms a new generation of violence HCSS identifies that supervisory authorities are against legal limits, among other things, when they want to investigate digital networks such as COM. For example, they come across the AVG, a relatively strict interpretation of European privacy legislation, says the main author of the Gerben Bakker report. “As a result, Dutch authorities are reluctant to download and process a lot of data from social platforms to automatically identify terrorist content.”

Dilemma

Another bottleneck is the legal protection of hosting services, which under European guidelines do not have to monitor proactively on illegal content on their servers. With current legislation there is soon a legal dilemma, says Bakker. “On the one hand you want to protect the personal data of citizens well, on the other you want authorities to be able to keep a finger on online platforms when it comes to this kind of extremism.”

The VVD believes that the police should be able to look more easily in private app groups such as Telegram, a spokesperson for MP Ingrid Michon (VVD) responds. In a motion after the violence incidents against Israeli football supporters in Amsterdam, in November last year, party leader Dilan Yesilgöz already evoked that the police should get more options for this.

Instead of a coordinated approach to online extremism by the NCTV, Bakker would rather see that investments are being made in specialist knowledge on the investigation side: the police and – when it comes to national security – the AIVD. “To understand the language and memes of these young people, you need specialists who have been trained in Osint [Open Source Intelligence]. It says a lot that the information about the COM movement now comes from journalists and citizens who specialize in this. ”

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