EU parliament approves rules for removing terrorist content within hours
The European Parliament has approved rules requiring tech companies to make terrorist content inaccessible within an hour. This brings the controversial rules one step closer.
Of the parliamentarians, 308 voted in favor and 204 against the proposal for the regulation. There are 70 MPs who abstained from voting. The European Parliament also voted on a large number of amendments. The amendment that removed the one-hour time limit from the text was almost all rejected, but by small majorities: the main one had 300 votes against and 297 votes in favour.
After this vote, the regulation, which Member States do not have to transpose into their own laws, but which is valid in one go without the intervention of countries, has come a step closer. The entire proposal now goes to the Council of the EU for approval. The aim of the regulation is to get terrorist content offline as quickly as possible if authorities discover it, according to the text.
There has been a lot of criticism of the legal text. Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales and Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker, among others, have signed a letter criticizing the regulation. The critics argue that the regulation in its current form restricts the basic rights of European internet users and undermines innovation on the internet.
One of the criticisms is that the term “terrorist content” in the current proposal is “extremely broad” and that there is no clear exception for educational, journalistic or investigative purposes. According to Berners-Lee and the other signatories, this adds to the “risk of removing too many legal and important public statements.”
In addition, the letter drafters consider the regulation to be disproportionate, as it applies to all internet hosting services, with no distinction being made on the basis of which type of services are actually expected to be confronted with illegal content. There is also criticism of the obligation to remove content within sixty minutes of a notification, on pain of fines. This can put a significant burden on smaller companies providing services in Europe and favors large multinational platforms that already have high-quality content moderation systems in place.