The European Commission is abandoning its stance on a voluntary approach by tech companies to remove terrorist propaganda from their platforms, reports the Financial Times. As Julian King, the EU’s commissioner for security told the publication, the EU has “not seen enough progress” on the removal of terrorist materials from online platforms, so it would “take stronger action in order to better protect our citizens.”
While details of the new legislation are still being drawn up, a senior EU official said the new rules would likely impose a one-hour time limit for tech companies to remove terrorist material from their platforms once they have been notified by the police or other law enforcement agencies about it. Further, the new law would not only apply to giants such as Google and Facebook but to all websites of any size. As King noted:
“The difference in size and resources means platforms have differing capabilities to act against terrorist content and their policies for doing so are not always transparent. All this leads to such content continuing to proliferate across the internet, reappearing once deleted and spreading from platform to platform.”
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