Channel crossings: Social media giants to crack down on posts encouraging migrants to make journey
Facebook, TikTok and X, formerly known as Twitter, will team up with UK law enforcement to crack down on posts by people smugglers encouraging migrants to cross the English Channel, the government says.
Rishi Sunak, who has made cutting the number of small boats arriving on UK shores one of his “five pledges”, said the new partnerships with various social media companies will tackle attempts to “lure” people into paying to make the perilous journey.
Group discounts, free spaces for children and offers of false documents are among the posts the prime minister wants removed to help achieve his promise to “stop the boats”.
In a thread on X, Downing Street posted a series of examples of the material it wanted to stop.
In one, an account on TikTok offers illegal journeys for Albanian families with “max 30 other people”.
In another, people are offered two nights in a hotel in addition to the Channel crossing, at a price of £4,000.
It comes as Home Secretary Suella Braverman accused the Labour Party of trying to “sabotage” its plan to stop Channel crossings with its links to charities and lawyers who oppose the scheme to send asylum seekers to Rwanda – a policy that is currently held up in the courts.
She told the Sunday Express that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was “secretly delighted at his web of cronies’ schemes to block our plans to stop the boats”.
“He’s in this for political point scoring and doesn’t care about what’s good for the country or the British people,” she said.
Writing in The Sun On Sunday, immigration minister Robert Jenrick also accused Labour of using “every trick and tactic to delay and prevent us from removing people with no right to remain in the UK”.
“And as they do so, they put two fingers up to the law-abiding majority who suffer from illegal migration,” he said.
In response, Labour claimed the Conservatives have been unable to remove failed asylum seekers from the UK and that it would take until 2036 just to clear the existing backlog.
Nearly 15,000 people have made the dangerous trip across the Dover Strait in small boats so far this year, according to official data compiled and analysed by Sky News.
This is about 15% less than the same time last year, the data suggests.
The voluntary partnership between social media firms and the National Crime Agency will seek to redirect people away from such content in the same way as is used to tackle content promoting extremism or eating disorders.
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Plans to house asylum seekers in tents
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, as well as TikTok and X, have all signed up to the plans, Downing Street said.
It comes as controversy over plans to house asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm barge continues.
Mr Sunak said: “To stop the boats, we have to tackle the business model of vile people smugglers at source.
“That means clamping down on their attempts to lure people into making these illegal crossings and profit from putting lives at risk.
“This new commitment from tech firms will see us redouble our efforts to fight back against these criminals, working together to shut down their vile trade.”
Read more:
Lords back down over government plans to stop small boats
Nearly 300 children have died or disappeared in Mediterranean crossings
Labour said the action was “too little, too late” and the Liberal Democrats said it amounted to “tinkering around the edges”.
Beginning a “small boats week” of linked announcements, Number 10 said the “legacy” backlog of asylum applications made before the end of June 2022 has been reduced by a third since December.
But Labour claimed nearly 40,000 people are still awaiting removal in the latest figures.
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said it was “just deluded” for the Conservatives to “boast about progress on tackling the Tories’ asylum chaos”.
“The Conservatives have totally lost any grip on the asylum system,” she said. “Suella Braverman is disastrously failing to even get the basics right.
“All she ever does is ramp up the rhetoric and make more and more empty promises, while failing to deliver. The Tories have completely broken the asylum system – failing to take decisions and failing to return people who have no right to be here.”
The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s Crypto Task Force has scheduled a roundtable discussion centered on privacy and financial surveillance for December, as a renewed focus on privacy grips the cryptocurrency industry.
The privacy roundtable is slated for Dec. 15. Like other SEC roundtables, crypto industry executives and SEC officials will discuss common pain points and solutions, but no hard policy proposals will be submitted.
Privacy has become a hot-button topic following several developments, including the partial guilty verdict in Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm’s trial in June, the Samourai Wallet developer sentencing in November and the privacy token price rally over the last two months.
“Authoritarians thrive when people have no privacy. When those in charge start being hostile to privacy protections, it is a major red flag,” said Naomi Brockwell, founder of the Ludlow Institute, an organization advocating for liberty through technology.
The renewed interest in privacy hearkens back to crypto’s cypherpunk roots, and one of the core reasons the cryptographic technology that underpins crypto was invented — to ensure secure communication channels between parties in hostile environments.
Related: Crypto investors flee visibility for anonymity as privacy coins surge 80%
Crypto community sounds the alarm about privacy following precedent-setting legal cases
The verdict in the Storm trial and other cases where open-source software developers have been convicted or imprisoned for creating non-custodial, privacy-preserving protocols has set a dangerous precedent for privacy technology in the US, legal experts have said.
Crypto industry executives and advocates argue that the prosecutions are meant to dissuade developers from building privacy-preserving tools.
The verdict in the Samourai Wallet case is analogous to the US government accusing car manufacturer Toyota of a conspiracy because terrorists and criminals also use their cars, according to journalist and crypto advocate Lola Leetz.
“People should not be held accountable for what other people do with the tools they build,” Leetz said.
In August, Matthew Galeotti, the acting assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s criminal division, signaled the agency would no longer prosecute open-source software developers for writing code.
“Our view is that merely writing code, without ill intent, is not a crime,” Galeotti said. “The department will not use indictments as a law-making tool. The department should not leave innovators guessing as to what could lead to criminal prosecution.”
Magazine: 2026 is the year of pragmatic privacy in crypto: Canton, Zcash, and more
Politics
All four UK governments ‘failed to appreciate’ scale of COVID pandemic threat – inquiry finds
All four UK governments failed to appreciate the scale of the threat posed by COVID-19 or the urgency of the response the pandemic required, a damning report published on Thursday has claimed.
Baroness Heather Hallett, the chair of the inquiry, described the response to the pandemic as “too little, too late”.
Tens of thousands of lives could have been saved during the first wave of COVID-19 had a mandatory lockdown been introduced a week earlier, the inquiry also found.
Noting how a “lack of urgency” made a mandatory lockdown “inevitable”, the report references modelling data to claim there could have been 23,000 fewer deaths during the first wave in England had it been introduced a week earlier.
The UK government first introduced advisory restrictions on 16 March 2020, including self-isolation, household quarantine and social distancing.
Had these measures been introduced sooner, the report states, the mandatory lockdown which followed from 23 March might not have been necessary at all.
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All four UK govts ‘failed to appreciate’ scale of pandemic
COVID-19 first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019, and as it developed into a worldwide pandemic, the UK went in and out of unprecedented lockdown measures for two years starting from March 2020.
Lady Hallett admitted in her summary that politicians in the government and devolved administrations were forced to make decisions where “there was often no right answer or good outcome”.
“Nonetheless,” she said, “I can summarise my findings of the response as ‘too little, too late'”.
‘Toxic culture’ at the heart of UK government
The report said there was “a toxic and chaotic culture” at the heart of the UK government during the pandemic.
The inquiry heard evidence about the “destabilising behaviour of a number of individuals” – including former No 10 adviser Dominic Cummings.
It said that by failing to tackle this chaotic culture – “and, at times, actively encouraging it” – former PM Boris Johnson “reinforced a culture in which the loudest voices prevailed and the views of other colleagues, particularly women, often went ignored, to the detriment of good decision-making”.
‘Misleading assurances’
The inquiry found all four governments in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland failed to understand the urgency of response the pandemic demanded in the early part of 2020.
The report reads: “This was compounded, in part, by misleading assurances from the Department of Health and Social Care and the widely held view that the UK was well prepared for a pandemic.”
The report notes how the UK government took a “high risk” when it significantly eased restrictions in England in July 2020 – “despite scientific advisers’ concerns about the public health risks of doing so”.
Lady Hallett has made 19 key recommendations which, if followed, she believes will better protect the UK in any future pandemic and improve decision-making in a crisis.
Repeated failings ‘inexcusable’
In a statement following the publication of Thursday’s report, Lady Hallett said there was a “serious failure” by all four governments to appreciate the level of “risk and calamity” facing the UK.
She said: “The tempo of the response should have been increased. It was not. February 2020 was a lost month.”
Read more:
A timeline of the UK’s response to the pandemic
Lady Hallett said the inquiry does not advocate for national lockdowns, which she said should have been avoided if at all possible.
She said: “But to avoid them, governments must take timely and decisive action to control a spreading virus. The four governments of the UK did not.”
Lady Hallett said none of the governments were adequately prepared for the challenges and risks that a lockdown presented, and that many of the same failings were repeated later in 2020, which she said was “inexcusable”.
She added: “Each government had ample warning that the prevalence of the virus was increasing and would continue to do so into the winter months. Yet again, there was a failure to take timely and effective action.”
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