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“Institutional standards should not contain elements pushed in by lobbies, since they are detrimental to public interests. Of course lobbies have financial and political means to ignore or distort standards in their products, but they want more. T

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.

Representatives from the creative industries, leading UK search engines, and the IPO developed a Voluntary Code of Practice dedicated to the removal of links to infringing content from the first page of search results.

Signatories of the Voluntary Code of Practice are: Google Bing BPI Motion Picture Association

n the up-side, flexible standards would give platforms more leeway to figure out meaningful technical improvements, and perhaps arrive at more nuanced automated assessment of content over tim

The down-sides of open-ended SDOC standards could be considerable, though. Proactive measures devised by platforms themselves would, even when coupled with transparency obligations, be far less subject to meaningful public review, accountability,

It’s a place where, in stark contrast to the perks lavished on Facebook employees, team leaders micromanage content moderators’ every bathroom and prayer break; where employees, desperate for a dopamine rush amid the misery, have been found having sex inside stairwells and a room reserved for lactating mothers; where people develop severe anxiety while still in training, and continue to struggle with trauma symptoms long after they leave; and where the counseling that Cognizant offers them ends the moment they quit — or are simply let go.

The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”

The use of contract labor also has a practical benefit for Facebook: it is radically cheaper. The median Facebook employee earns $240,000 annually in salary, bonuses, and stock options. A content moderator working for Cognizant in Arizona, on the other hand, will earn just $28,800 per year. The arrangement helps Facebook maintain a high profit margin. In its most recent quarter, the company earned $6.9 billion in profits, on $16.9 billion in revenue. And while Zuckerberg had warned investors that Facebook’s investment in security would reduce the company’s profitability, profits were up 61 percent over the previous year.

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.

. In e-commerce in particular, market surveillance authorities have great difficulty tracing non-compliant products imported into the Union and identifying the responsible entity within their jurisdiction.

In its 2017 work programme 4 , the Commission announced an initiative to strengthen product compliance and enforcement Union harmonisation legislation on products, as part of the 'Goods Package'. The initiative is to address the increasing amount of non-compliant products on the Union market while offering incentives to boost regulatory compliance and ensuring fair and equal treatment that will benefit of businesses and citizens.

The development of e-commerce is also due to a great extent to the proliferation of information society service providers, normally through platforms and for remuneration, which offer intermediary services by storing third party content, but without exercising any control over such content, thus not acting on behalf of an economic operator. Removal of content regarding non-compliant products or where it is not feasible blocking access to non-compliant products offered through their services should be without prejudice to the rules laid down in Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council 55 . In particular, no general obligation should be imposed on service providers to monitor the information which they transmit or store, nor should a general obligation be imposed upon them to actively seek facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity. Furthermore, hosting service providers should not be held liable as long as they do not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or information and are not aware of the facts or circumstances from which the illegal activity or information is apparent.