The EU has stated its beliefs that social media platforms like Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), YouTube, and Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) need to start doing more in order to remove extremist content that has been appearing on their sites.
Many European governments, especially those affected by recent terrorist attacks, have put pressure on the companies attached to the social media platforms to start taking more action in regards to getting the content under control. In response, the social media companies have boosted their resources and efforts into taking down any violent or extremist content. But the EU knows it will take more than just this.
“We are not there yet. We are two years down the road of this journey: to reach our final destination we now need to speed up our work,” were the words of the closing speech at the third meeting of the EU Internet Forum.
The EU said that if companies fail to remove extremist content and hate speech then next year they will create legislation to order to combat extremism. Germany has already acted on this; a legal code for digital hate speech will come into effect at the beginning of the new year.
The companies involved have been working towards stemming this content. Earlier this year, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube formed an international coalition to combine their efforts in removing extremist content from their platforms. Last year, they created a collection of identified “terrorist” propaganda. The database now contains over 40,000 digital fingerprints.
The companies are being further encouraged to remove “new and historical terrorist content, and to develop solutions to identify and remove terrorist content within 1-2 hours of upload, to the extent it is technically feasible, without compromising human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
The EU is asking for more automated systems to be put in place, and for companies to act faster on referrals from member states and Europol.
“It is feasible to reduce the time it takes to remove content to a few hours,” said Dimitris Avramopoulos, EU home affairs commissioner.
It was added that “[t]here is a lot of room for improvement.” The reporting from the companies “must become more regular and more transparent.”
Last week, Facebook reported that it had been removing 99% of content related to militant groups Islamic State and al Qaeda before it was reported. The company did not, however, say how many items it was removing.
The Counter Extremism Project (CEP), a non-profit organization, said efforts by the companies were encouraging but did were not enough to support a self-regulation system.
“Instead, what the EU Internet Forum should aim to deliver are concrete, industry-wide policies on blocking or rapidly removing illegal content and consistent enforcement of those policies,” said David Ibsen, Executive Director of the CEP.
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