CANBERRA, Nov. 7 (Xinhua) -- Australian government has called for greater cooperation with social media giants in the fight against terrorism.
Peter Dutton, the Minister of Home Affairs, on Tuesday attended a counter-terrorism meeting in Jakarta where Agung Yudha, the chief of Twitter in Indonesia, gave a presentation on how the platform was working to fight against terrorism.
Yudha told representatives from nine countries that Twitter suspended more than 1.2 million accounts of users suspected to be involved in terrorist activity between August 2015 and December 2017.
Following the meeting, Dutton said Twitter and other social media companies that use encrypted messaging had a "significant obligation" to work closely with law enforcement.
"It is a significant figure but it may just be the tip of the iceberg in terms of the problem we need to deal with, not only today but as use of social media increases as years go by," he added.
"People in Australia would expect law enforcement and intelligence agencies to be able to detect a message which was being conveyed over a social media platform, that had it not been detected could have resulted in significant loss of life,"Dutton said.
Australia's governing Liberal-National Party (LNP) is currently trying to pass new encryption laws that would grant authorities the power to compel technology giants to provide "back door" access to data on their platforms.
In a submission to a parliamentary inquiry on the proposed laws, U.S. tech giant Apple said the legislation was "dangerously ambiguous" and should be "alarming to all Australians."
