On Thursday, the government and SD presented a new initiative to provide the police with better tools to stop gang activity on the internet. Among other things, they will be given "extended opportunities" to "take robust action" against, for example, the recruitment of children and young people.
Illegal content already violates the platforms' terms of use.
Remove content
Lukasz Lindell, communications manager for Tiktok in the Nordic region, says that the platforms are already working on this. At the end of last year, after meetings with the Nordic justice ministers, Snap, Meta, Google, and Tiktok promised to more closely monitor and remove gang-related violence from their platforms.
That's still the case, says Lindell, and continues:
The foundation is to identify and remove all content that violates our rules. After the meeting, we have closer contact with the police, they have a greater opportunity to share a little more information with us.
Bad for criminals
Lindell emphasizes that all platforms are different, but that Tiktok – by far the most popular platform among young people – would be a "bad app" for someone who wants to communicate about criminal things.
We don't have an encrypted chat, for example, says Lindell.
But even encrypted services have a hard time pressing a big red button and "stopping violent content", says Jonas Lejon, cybersecurity expert who has worked with encryption for many years:
Where it used to be about special physical phones that criminals could buy anonymously, it's now about publicly available encrypted apps.
Integrity issue
Even if there are niche "criminal apps" that are sometimes cracked by the police, it's easy for criminals to move the conversation to another app.
The problem now is that they use apps that everyone uses, says Lejon.
And giving someone, for example the police, access to a backdoor in a widely used, encrypted chat service creates a moral dilemma, according to Lejon:
It's the ordinary person who is affected by the intrusion into integrity. If you start building backdoors into services, the question arises "who should get access to this backdoor?". Historically, it has been seen that if you build in these backdoors, others can exploit them.
