Online terrorist content must be removed within the hour: 60 minutes maximum to remove such content for Google, Twitter, Facebook and other Internet platforms, after being notified. Suffice to say that the giants of the Net will have to adapt.
It is the ARCOM, the new authority born from the rapprochement between the CSA and the HADOPI which will decide, or not, to issue a withdrawal injunction, after having been alerted. And it is upon receipt of this injunction by the platforms that the famous stopwatch will be triggered, with penalties at stake: 250,000 euros fine and one year in prison.
But in the event of repeated breaches, the text provides for up to 4% of global turnover, which would represent, for example, more than 1 billion dollars for Twitter, almost 10 billion dollars for Facebook and… 64 billion dollars for Google, based on their financial results in 2021.
The purpose of this one-hour delay is to prevent terrorist content from being seen massively. Sixty human rights associations nevertheless consider this European regulation as a threat to freedom of expression and a danger to democracy.
According to these NGOs from all over Europe, including Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, this one-hour deadline is so short that it risks pushing platforms to use excessive artificial intelligence and robots to moderate the contained, with the risk of falling into excess.
The danger is that these automatisms do not make the difference between terrorism and activism, which is a matter of freedom of thought, between propaganda content and the satire of terrorism. This is what happened to YouTube whose algorithms removed videos that could have served as evidence of war crimes in Syria. Legal content, informative journalistic articles could also fall by the wayside.
Another problem: it is not the courts but the States that will order the removal of terrorist content. Finally, all Member States will be able to report content that they consider to be terrorist in other States of the Union, with a risk of opportunism and intentional confusion between opponents of certain regimes and terrorists.
Each Member State is therefore in the process of transposing the European regulation relating to the fight against the dissemination of terrorist content online. In France, in June 2020, the Constitutional Council has already rejected the idea of a one-hour deadline: it was within the framework of the Avia law on online hatred. The sages had deemed this obligation to withdraw excessive, essentially because the injunction did not come from a judge.
We find ourselves in the same configuration, except that the transposition of the European regulation is an obligation for France. The examination of constitutionality will therefore be limited. Therefore, even if the Constitution has not changed, there is no risk of non-compliance. By June 7, everything now depends on the Senate.
✅ Preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online | The National Assembly adopted the bill containing various provisions for adaptation to EU law, at first reading.
Learn more ➡ https://t.co/N2aVgDgXWD#DirectAN pic.twitter.com/jn442nvMrY– National Assembly (@AssembleeNat) February 16, 2022