The Australian parliament has passed legislation to crack down on violent videos on social media, despite furious reaction from the tech industry, media companies and legal experts...The Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material bill creates new offences for content service providers and hosting services that fail to notify the Australian federal police about or fail to expeditiously remove videos depicting "abhorrent violent conduct". That conduct is defined as videos depicting terrorist acts, murders, attempted murders, torture, rape or kidnap.

...The Digital Industry Group, which represents Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Verizon Media in Australia, has warned the bill was passed without meaningful consultation and threatens penalties against tech companies for content created by users.

...The group's managing director, Sunita Bose, said... "This 'pass it now, change it later' approach to legislation, such as we saw with the encryption law, creates immediate uncertainty for Australia's technology industry... It threatens employees within any company that has user-generated content to be potentially jailed for the misuse of their services – even if they are unaware of it."... The chief executive of Atlassian, Scott Farquhar, said that no one wanted abhorrent violent material on the internet but "the legislation is flawed and will unnecessarily cost jobs and damage our tech industry."... Corporate penalties range up to $10.5m or 10% of annual turnover.