Tech Giants Face Terror Law in EU Crackdown on Internet Hate

Google, Twitter and Facebook have taken significant steps to expunge Islamic State propaganda and other terrorist content from their platforms, according to Bloomberg.

But taking no chances, the European Union is set to propose a tough new law anyway, threatening internet platforms, big and small, with fines if they fail to take down terrorist material, according to people familiar with the proposals that could be unveiled as soon as September. While the details of the measures are still being thrashed out, they would likely be based on the EU guidance from earlier this year, said the people, who asked not to be identified.

"It’s true that the positive role that some of the big companies are playing today is incomparable to the situation three years ago,“ said Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s anti-terrorism czar. “But so is the scale, breadth and complexity of the problem." An additional step in the response is "essential," he said, given the diverse online aspects of the recent attacks in Europe.

Large tech firms say they’ve been making big strides in the fight to wipe terror propaganda, partly thanks to automated tools that in some cases can detect such content before users even see it. For companies, detecting harmful content is a constant battle as some groups continue to try to game their systems to spread their messages online as widely as possible. One tool that’s helped: a shared industry database, among Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies, of known terrorist videos and images.

Europol has said the cooperation with the big internet platforms on taking down terror content that they flag is "excellent." The agency works with more than 70 internet and media companies and on average they remove more than 90 percent of the content that’s flagged to them within two to three hours.

Still, some critics say the big internet giants need to do more. The non-profit organization Counter Extremism Project, which aims to combat the threat of extremist ideologies, said in April that gaps remained in Facebook and others companies’ approaches to combating extremism. The group said Facebook has only emphasized the removal of Islamic State and al-Qaeda content and has provided insufficient transparency about its progress in removing content from other extremist groups.