Europe pats US internet giants on the head for being good censors

In just the third year of the EU’s Orwellian online speech purge it looks like the major platforms are largely submitting to its will.

The EU Code of Conduct on countering illegal hatespeech online has been going since 2016 as “an effort to respond to the proliferation of racist and xenophobic hatespeech online.” The EU seemed to have decided that if you stop people saying horrid things online then you’ll also stop them having horrid thoughts and doing horrid things.

To implement this theory the EU needed the cooperation of the major platforms run by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Google. It will have done the usual thing of threatening vindictive regulatory action if they didn’t comply so sensibly they have. They are now assessing 89% of content flagged as hatespeech within 24 hours and removing 72% of it.

Definitions of hatespeech seem to be pretty consistent across the EU, which is presumably no coincidence. Here’s the European Commission’s one:

Certain forms of conduct as outlined below, are punishable as criminal offences:

Instigating, aiding or abetting in the commission of the above offences is also punishable.

With regard to these offences listed, EU countries must ensure that they are punishable by:

With regard to legal persons, the penalties must be effective, proportionate and dissuasive and must consist of criminal or non-criminal fines. In addition, legal persons may be punished by:

The initiation of investigations or prosecutions of racist and xenophobic offences must not depend on a victim’s report or accusation.

Hate crime

In all cases, racist or xenophobic motivation shall be considered to be an aggravating circumstance or, alternatively, the courts must be empowered to take such motivation into consideration when determining the penalties to be applied.

If you couldn’t be bothered to read all that, the TL;DR is that you can’t say horrid things online if race, nationality, belief, etc comes into it, or even join in if someone else does. If you do all sorts of punishments will be inflicted on you, including a year in prison (a maximum of at least one year? That doesn’t make sense). The victim of such hatespeech doesn’t even need to have accused you of anything and the court reserves the right to unilaterally determine your motivation for doing stuff.

“Today’s evaluation shows that cooperation with companies and civil society brings results,” said Andrus Ansip, Vice-President for the Digital Single Market. “Companies are now assessing 89% of flagged content within 24 hours, and promptly act to remove it when necessary. This is more than twice as much as compared to 2016. More importantly, the Code works because it respects freedom of expression. The internet is a place people go to share their views and find out information at the click of a button. Nobody should feel unsafe or threatened due to illegal hateful content remaining online.”

“Illegal hate speech online is not only a crime, it represents a threat to free speech and democratic engagement,” said Vĕra Jourová, Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality. “In May 2016, I initiated the Code of conduct on online hatespeech, because we urgently needed to do something about this phenomenon. Today, after two and a half years, we can say that we found the right approach and established a standard throughout Europe on how to tackle this serious issue, while fully protecting freedom of speech.”

Those statements are perfectly Orwellian, insisting as they do that censorship is free speech. The really chilling thing is that they clearly believe that imposing broad and vague restrictions on online speech is vital to protect the freedom of nice, compliant non-hateful people. The EC even had the gall to berate the platforms for not offering enough feedback to those it censors. This could easily be resolved with a blanket statement along the lines of “We’re just following orders.”

As you can see from the tweet below extracted from the full report, the number of things that qualify as hatespeech has increased since the above definition was written. This kind of mission creep is made all the more inevitable by the complicity of Silicon Valley and complete absence of dissenting media, so there’s every reason to assume the definition of hatespeech will continue to expand indefinitely.