EU Warns Tech Giants To Remove Terror Content in 1 Hour -- or Else (bloomberg.com)

The European Union issued internet giants an ultimatum to remove illegal online terrorist content within an hour, or risk facing new EU-wide laws. From a report: The European Commission on Thursday issued a set of recommendations for companies and EU nations that apply to all forms of illegal internet material, "from terrorist content, incitement to hatred and violence, child sexual abuse material, counterfeit products and copyright infringement. Considering that terrorist content is most harmful in the first hours of its appearance online, all companies should remove such content within one hour from its referral as a general rule.â The commission last year called upon social media companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Google owner Alphabet, to develop a common set of tools to detect, block and remove terrorist propaganda and hate speech. Thursday's recommendations aim to "further step up" the work already done by governments and push firms to "redouble their efforts to take illegal content off the web more quickly and efficiently."

Comments

Yay! Slashdot is back!

[BitterOak]

I guess Slashdot was down as administrators were busy scrubbing all its terrorist content before running afoul of EU laws!

Slashdot's Back?

[omnichad]

Ask for the impossible. As long as it's the law, they'll just have to do it...somehow...

Re:Slashdot's Back?

[djinn6]

You said it. It is literally impossible to review all reported content right away. Some of them might be very long, or even contain videos that are more than an hour long. Just reading or watching it all is impossible. Plus the vast majority will be borderline, containing anti-west or anarchist ideas but not outright calling for violence.

Obviously, if this becomes law, the only way to comply is to automatically take down any reported content without review. My only hope is that they take them down just in the EU so those EU politicians can see for themselves what happens when you let their opposition have that kind of power.

That might be tough

[Anonymous Coward]

That's going to be hard for the big tech companies to do, but one site I know of has pioneered an advanced solution to the problem by simply not letting anything get posted. Only time will tell if this strategy pays off.

Not as hard for Google as the small guy

[JoshuaZ]

The end result, like many regulations on content, some watered down approximation will be made that isn't as impossibly difficult. However, it will end up being easy for the larger companies and very difficult to impossible for the very small players. This sort of thing locks in big players. Even if one didn't have a problem with broad, government censorship (or concern about the vague nature of what constitutes terrorist propaganda) from a standpoint of not wanting everything to be run by the large players, this sort of thing should be considered a bad policy.

It Goes Without Saying

[segedunum]

This has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with censorship. The EU is desperately trying to save itself.

Re:It Goes Without Saying

[djinn6]

I assume most of the EU nations have signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or at least do not oppose it?

Article 19.

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

In any case, freedom of speech is an idea and it does not cease to exist when it's not codified in law.

Re:It Goes Without Saying

[tempmpi]

This has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with censorship. The EU is desperately trying to save itself.

Nope. The Brexit mess was already enough to save the EU. Popularity of the EU increased sharply in the EU27 because of that. Trying to censor content to save them, wouldn't work, but instead hurt them badly.

  As a European it is also always funny to see how Americans are screaming "Censoship!!!!!111!" when terrorism promotion or holocaust denial is being removed, but just shrug when content gets removed due to a tiny bit of nudity.

Re:It Goes Without Saying

[Tom]

Russia never applied and never will. Turkey is doing badly, and if it weren't for one senile woman, would be entirely out of the race already.

On the other hand, the exact fact that tens of millions were killed is what made us understand that freedom needs defenses. Hitler came to power exactly because nobody stopped him excercising his right to free speech. If he tried today, his party would be dissolved and he put in jail. That is what is called lessons from history. Americans can't possibly understand that, you don't even have a history. There are cow sheds in Europe that are older than your country.

Re:It Goes Without Saying

[moronoxyd]

But more importantly, since the economic catastrophe that Brussels predicted for the UK didn't happen, and obviously won't happen

The "economic catastrophe" didn't happen, true. It didn't happen yet, because nothing changed yet, as the UK is still a part of the EU. Once the UK leaves the EU in 2019 we'll see what happens.

If you follow the news about the Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU it is clear that the UK has no plan and is risking a hard Brexit.
And while that will hurt the EU some, it will hurt the UK a lot. Unfortunately, the British politicians still treat this mostly as an internal power game instead of concentrating on preparing their country for what is coming.

Re:It Goes Without Saying

[thegarbz]

What an asshole statement from a continent that killed tens of millions in living memory largely due to lack of things like a first amendment. How's Turkey doing on their application? And Russia?

Wow. Ignorant much?

No one is being killed and definitely not in the millions for something like a first amendment violation.
Turkey has had their ascention process frozen precisely because of the attacks on their people and wouldn't have made it without changing in the first place.
Russia not only is a never-was or a never-will-be, but sharing its borders with the likes of the Ukraine also struggle to become part of the EU simply because it is sharing a border with Russia.

Get a clue man. This is the age of the internet, you don't even need to pay to go to school to learn something.

Re:It Goes Without Saying

[serviscope_minor]

But more importantly, since the economic catastrophe that Brussels predicted for the UK didn't happen

What the fuck? Of course it didn't happen BECAUSE WE ARE STILL IN THE EU. You've brought intop the brexit fantasist argument that if everything bad didn't happen on day 1 after the vote then everything was fine.

Your argument is particularly stupid because no one even know yes under what terms the UK is leaving.

Oh, and nudity doesn't have much to do with freedom of expression. What freedom of expression must protect is the expression of ideas (even those you don't like), and there's not much idea in a nipple.

I see: it's free speech I don't like, so it doesn't need protection.

WTF Slashdot.

[0100010001010011]

As a Slashdot reader since ~2001, this is just unacceptable.

On days I was on the internet I think I've checked them at least once a day. Even if it was just to scan headlines.

After deleting Facebook and trying to migrate away from Reddit I've been commenting daily. That is until the problems started.

https://meta.slashdot.org/stor...

I actually had high hopes for the new ownership. I liked a lot of changes and whiplash actually engaged the community.

But this is just unacceptable. Slashdot is how I survived 9/11 when CNN couldn't handle the traffic. Slashdot defined 'slashdotting' long before "going viral" was a thing. I think Coral Cache was created just for Slashdotting.

While the comments have shifted a bit more right (politically) than I did. And the owners shifted left. (Leading to entertaining comments). And while it's not exactly the same type of news like it used to be. The moderation format and the ability to just plain hide low rated comments mean it's still one of the best places on the internet to have any sort of discussion.

And I can't ever remember this sort of outage. Or the plethora of 5xx errors I was getting before the outage started.

My guess is all the young guns don't know Perl like the old ones and something broke. But of all sites on the internet Slashdot is the one that should be able to handle anything.

I know the DevOps exists to scale from a few hundred hits an hour to a few thousand a second. /0100010001010011

So...

[helpfulcorn]

It's: EU warns tech giants to learn to do fucking magic. I imagine this will be just as effective as their cookie law, which doesn't actually ask if you want cookies, just reminds you they're there, i.e. they'll quickly realise it isn't feasible, sort of forget about it.

Though they'll remind people to follow the law because it's the law after all, go out of your way, though we won't punish you if you don't... but it's the law. Unless they think Facebook, Twitter, et al are going to manually check everything posted, ... maybe they should send an invoice to the EU for all the hires.

EU.

[NormanHaga2580]

The EU might be a tad out of line. Just what is online terrorist speech. Much political content in the United States could be classified as online terrorist speech.

Perhaps the EU should create its own internet.

Re:One of these things...

[iamhassi]

And "hate speech", which seems to be any "offensive" post in the U.K., with over 2,500 people arrested for "offensive comments" on twitter and Facebook http://www.independent.co.uk/n...

Re:Yay! Slashdot is back!

[MrL0G1C]

Nah, somebody copied someone else's post and copyright infringement claim was lodged.

Seriously though, lumping in copyright infringement in at the same level as terrorist content and child abuse, WTF? Copyright is starting to be a dirty word and it sickens me to see how corporations have even managed to twist public opinion of it, I even saw a dictionary refer to copyright infringement as theft fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. It makes my blood boil.