Europe struggles to find united front to combat illegal content online

Theresa May will tell the likes of Google and Facebook they must remove terror content within two hours or face potential hefty fines.

Europe can’t make up its mind about policing terrorist propaganda and hate speech online.

That divide will again be on display Wednesday when British Prime Minister Theresa May will tell the United Nations that the likes of Google and Facebook must remove terror content within two hours or face potential hefty fines. Not to be outdone, new laws in Germany will take effect in early October that may dole out financial penalties of up to €50 million if tech giants fail to take down hate speech from their digital platforms.

While some of Europe’s largest countries are pushing ahead with new legislation and possible fines to clamp down on such illegal online material, other EU member countries, as well as the European Commission, have yet to be convinced.

Many countries, particularly those from the former Soviet bloc, are concerned that this aggressive policing of what can, and cannot, be posted online may restrict people’s freedom of expression, even if such material borders on either terrorist propaganda or hate speech directed at vulnerable groups like refugees.

EU policymakers also have so far restrained from crafting legislation that mirrors domestic efforts from the British or German governments, among others, instead relying on voluntary codes to nudge companies like Twitter to do more to remove illegal content from their social networks.

This muddled approach, experts warn, raises questions about how the EU is approaching the growing amount of illegal material online when it already has pushed ahead of other countries, notably the United States, in policing the digital world.

By potentially forcing tech companies to decide what can be published online, others fear Europe is moving toward outsourcing decisions over freedom of expression to private companies often headquartered outside of the EU.

“Until Europe has a consistent position on these things it is really hard to lecture others on this,” said David Kaye, U.N. special rapporteur on the protection of freedom of expression. “The fundamental problem is this imposition of liability on the companies for their own policing of expression.”

In response, tech companies say they have removed hundreds of thousands of accounts from their platforms that shared illegal material and invested in new technologies and manpower to combat illegal content whenever they are made aware of it by users online. The digital giants also continue working with governments, including a new voluntary global initiative announced Wednesday aimed at combating jihadist material online.

“Combatting terrorism requires responses from government, civil society and the private sector,” said a spokesperson for the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism,  an industry body set up to fight online jihadist propaganda. “We are committed to doing everything in our power to ensure that our platforms are not used to distribute terrorist content.”

These efforts, though, are unlikely to win over critics in Europe, including some of the region’s most powerful lawmakers.

In her speech on Wednesday, May will demand that the world’s largest tech companies remove jihadist material within two hours — a target that goes beyond the 24 hours that many European governments now ask for. The likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter already struggle to comply with the existing deadline, according to EU statistics.

May’s comments come soon after she agreed with French President Emmanuel Macron to create new legal liabilities for tech companies that fail to remove illegal material from their digital platforms.

Heiko Maas, Germany’s federal justice minister, has also criticized tech companies for not doing enough to halt online hate speech. A recent government-funded study, for example, found that Facebook and Twitter removed fewer than 50 percent of illegal posts within 24 hours of being notified in Germany.

“Facebook and Twitter missed the chance to improve their takedown practices,” Maas said when announcing the country’s new hate speech laws that take effect next month. “For companies to take on their responsibility in question of deleting criminal content, we need legal regulations.”

This heavy-handed approach, though, has not won support in other European countries, nor within the European Commission, which has been working with tech companies under voluntary codes of practice to combat terror content and illegal hate speech since 2015.

Věra Jourová, the EU’s justice commissioner, said companies such as Facebook earned enough money from their global operations to hire more people to monitor what was posted on their networks. In May, the social networking giant said it would employ 3,000 additional staff to remove illegal material.

“They need to have people sitting everywhere,” she said in an interview in July. “We want the rule of law to apply in the internet sphere.”

And while the Commission may eventually step in with legislative measures, Andrus Ansip, the EU’s digital vice president, said there was still a need to balance people’s legitimate right to express themselves online with the need to clamp down on material such as jihadist propaganda, online hate speech and outright fake news.

“If there’s illegal content, the rules work well,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “I want to see self-regulation first.”

Correction: This article was updated to clarify that the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism is a body made up of technology companies.

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