EU set to impose tough new rules on social media companies

The European Commission is reportedly planning to bring in new laws that will punish social media companies if they don’t remove terrorist content within an hour of it being flagged.

The news comes courtesy of the FT, which spoke to the EU commissioner for security, Julian King, on the matter of terrorists spreading their message over social media. “We cannot afford to relax or become complacent in the face of such a shadowy and destructive phenomenon,” he said, after reflecting that he doesn’t think enough progress had been made in this area.

Earlier this year the EU took the somewhat self-contradictory step of imposing some voluntary guidelines on social media companies to take down material that promotes terrorism within an hour of it being flagged. In hindsight that move seems to have been made in order to lay the ground for full legislation, with Europe now being able to claim its hand has been reluctantly forced by the failure of social media companies to do the job themselves.

So long as the legal stipulation if for content to be taken down when explicitly flagged as terrorist by police authorities it should be pretty easy to enforce – indeed it could probably be automated. But legislation such as this does pose broader questions around censorship. How is ‘terrorist’ defined? Will there be a right of appeal? Will other organisations be given the power to demand content be taken down? Will this law be extended to other types of contentious content?

At the end of the FT piece it is noted that, while the EU still allows self-regulation on more subjective areas like ‘hate speech’ and ‘fake news’, Germany is a lot more authoritarian on the matter. Given the considerable influence Germany has over the European bureaucracy it’s not unreasonable to anticipate a time when the EU follows Germany’s lead on this matter.

Meanwhile US President Donald Trump – avid user of Twitter but loather of much of the mainstream media – got involved in the social media censorship debate via his favoured medium. You can see the tweets in question below and, while he appears to be motivated by concern that his own supporters are being selectively censored, his broader point is that censorship is bad, full stop.

Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others…….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

…..Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police. If you are weeding out Fake News, there is nothing so Fake as CNN & MSNBC, & yet I do not ask that their sick behavior be removed. I get used to it and watch with a grain of salt, or don’t watch at all..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

….Too many voices are being destroyed, some good & some bad, and that cannot be allowed to happen. Who is making the choices, because I can already tell you that too many mistakes are being made. Let everybody participate, good & bad, and we will all just have to figure it out!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2018

Lastly Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey continues to publicly agonise about the topic of censorship and specifically how, if at all, he should apply it to his own platform. In an interview with CNN he conceded Twitter as a company has a left-leaning bias, but stressed the platform is policed according to user behaviour rather than perceived ideology. He also noted that transparency is the only answer to allegations of bias.