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In a six-month period from October 2017 to March 20178, 21m sexually explicit pictures, 3.5m graphically violent posts and 2.5m forms of hate speech were removed from its site. These figures help reveal some striking points.

As expected, the data indicates that the problem is getting worse.

For instance, between January and March it was estimated that for every 10,000 messages online, between 22 and 27 contained graphic violence, up from 16 to 19 in the previous three months.

Entwurf für ein Gesetz zur Bekämpfung des Rechtsextremismus und der Hasskriminalität

oviders of commercial telemedia services and associated contributors and intermediaries will, in future, be subject to the same information obligations as telecommunications services. A new Article 15a TMG obliges them to disclose information about their users’ inventory data if requested by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, law enforcement or police authorities, the Militärische Abschirmdienst (Military Counterintelligence Service), the Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service) or customs authorities

To this end, they are required, at their own expense, to make arrangements for the disclosure of such information within their field of responsibility. Services with over 100 000 customers must also provide a secure electronic interface for this purpose.

On 6 February 2020, the audiovisual regulator of the French-speaking community of Belgium (Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel – CSA) published a guidance note on the fight against certain forms of illegal Internet content, in particular hate speech

In the note, the CSA begins by summarising the current situation, highlighting the important role played by content-sharing platforms and their limited responsibility. It emphasises that some content can be harmful to young people in particular, whether they are the authors or victims of the content. It recognises that regulation, in its current form, is inappropriate and creates an imbalance between the regulation of online content-sharing platform operators, including social networks, and traditional players in the audiovisual sector

ould take its own legislative measures without waiting for work to start on an EU directive on the subject. 

86% of which was identified by our technology before it was reported to Facebook.

For hate speech, our technology still doesn’t work that well and so it needs to be checked by our review teams. We removed 2.5 million pieces of hate speech in Q1 2018 — 38% of which was flagged by our technology.

addition, in many areas — whether it’s spam, porn or fake accounts — we’re up against sophisticated adversaries who continually change tactics to circumvent our controls,

Procedural accountability” was a focus of discussion at the March 2018 workshop on platform responsibility convened by LSE’s Truth, Trust and Technology Commission. The idea is that firms should be held to account for the effectiveness of their internal processes in tackling the negative social impact of their services.

o be credible and trusted, information disclosed by online firms will need to be independently verified.

Piloting a Transparency Reporting Framework

new measures are designed to make it easier to identify hate crime on the Internet. In future, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will not only be able to delete posts that incite hatred or contain death threats, but also report them to the authorities, along with the user’s IP address.

ossibility of extending the scope of the Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz

new rules on hate crime will be added to the German Strafgesetzbuch (Criminal Code), while the definition of existing offences will be amended to take into account the specific characteristics of the Internet.

elf-assessment reports submitted by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Twitter

bserved that “[a]ll platform signatories deployed policies and systems to ensure transparency around political advertising, including a requirement that all political ads be clearly labelled as sponsored content and include a ‘paid for by’ disclaimer.”

While some of the platforms have gone to the extent of banning political ads, the transparency of issue-based advertising is still significantly neglected.

Article 15 prevents Member States from imposing on internet intermediaries, with respect to activities covered by Articles 12-14, a general obligation to monitor the information which they transmit or store or a general obligation to actively seek out facts or circumstances indicating illegal activities. This is important, as general monitoring of millions of sites and web pages would, in practical terms, be impossible and would result in disproportionate burdens on intermediaries and higher costs of access to basic services for users. [73] However, Article 15 does not prevent public authorities in the Member States from imposing a monitoring obliga tion in a specific, clearly defined individual case.[73] In this context, it is important to note that the reports and studies on the effectiveness of blocking and filtering applications appear to indicate that there is not yet any technology which could not be circumvented and provide full effectiveness in blocking or filtering illegal and harmful information whilst at the same time avoiding blocking entirely legal information resulting in violations of freedom of speech.

Beyond the potential negative economic aspects, several speakers at the Copycamp conference rang the alarm bells over the potential fallout of round-the-clock obligatory monitoring and filtering of user content on the net. Diego Naranjo from the European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) reported: “I heard one of the EU member state representatives say, ‘Why do we use this (filtering system) only for copyright?’,” he said. The idea of bringing down the unauthorised publication of copyrighted material by algorithm was “a very powerful tool in the hands of government,” he warned.

In contrast to the dark picture presented by many activists on copyright, multi-purpose filtering machines and the end of ownership in the time of the internet of things, chances for reform are presented for various areas of rights protection.

EU copyright reform itself is a chance, argued Raegan MacDonalds from the Mozilla Foundation, calling it “the opportunity of a generation to bring copyright in line with the digital age, and we want to do that.” Yet the task, like in earlier copyright legislative processes, is to once more expose what she described as later dismantled myths of big rights holders, that any attempt to harmonise exceptions would kill their industry.