BRUSSELS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd August, 2018) The plans of the European Union to adopt a harder line with major internet platforms and oblige them to remove extremist content within an hour under a threat of fine are barely feasible and it will be much easier for tech companies to pay the penalty rather than cover the costs of compliance with the new rule, experts said in their comments to Sputnik on Wednesday.
On Sunday, EU Security Commissioner Julian King told The Financial Times newspaper that the European Commission was adopting a tougher stance on countering dissemination of terrorist materials and pledged to take "serious action" in order to better protect the EU citizens. The relevant EU draft regulation is set to be released in September.
According to the news outlet, citing a senior EU official, the proposed legislation is likely to introduce a limit of an hour for such companies as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to delete extremist content. The failure to meet the new requirement would be punishable by fines.
According to experts, it would be less costly for the tech companies to pay a fine set by Brussels rather then to bear the expenses of abiding by the new legislation.
"Facebook and Twitter had better pay the fine that the European Commissioner has announced. By the way, the Commission has not given amounts or details, so it has the perfume of a political announcement," Maximilien Delpire, a webmaster at the Delpire & Partners consulting, told Sputnik.
He added that it would be extremely difficult to implement the new measure, suggesting that the police forces should organize themselves to centralize their tagging of messages with extremist content.
DRAFT LEGISLATION'S FEASIBILITY
Aram Hovsepyan, an expert from Belgium's Codific computer research company, told Sputnik that despite the fact that from a technical standpoint the new regulation was feasible, the main obstacle to its implementation would be the potential high costs.
"There are quite some censorship studies of Twitter during the Turkey coup and the Weibo affair in China that have demonstrated that this should be feasible and scalable ... However, it will have an impact on budgets and tech giants are most likely not really excited about this," Hovsepyan said.
He stressed that even if the technical aspect of the project was fine-tuned, there would always be a percentage of legitimate messages identified as "terrorist messages" as well as "terrorist messages" identified as legitimate ones.
Gilles Lebreton, a member of the European Parliament from France's National Rally party, in turn, suggested in his comments to Sputnik that a limit of one hour for the terrorist content's removal was too strict.
"The one-hour delay in removing terrorist content is totally unrealistic and needs to be relaxed. I have also great doubts about the unification of the policing notifications. This could take ages to organize," Lebreton argued.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS MAY SERVE AS OBSTACLE
Lebreton stated that it would be better to oblige the tech companies to remove not just terrorist content but more specifically Islamist terrorist materials.
"The project must be strictly limited to the 'fight against terrorism.' Specifying 'Islamist terrorism' would be ideal but we lets not dream. Political correctness forbids to say realities," Lebreton indicated.
He stressed that the tech companies should only remove publications containing terrorist propaganda and warned that if the new regulation expanded the new rules to content with hate speech, we would have to deal with another means of political censorship.
UNIFICATION OF NATIONAL LEGISLATION
Pierre Henrot, a Belgian expert on the fight against terrorism, noted that the another challenge in the EU project's realization was the absence of concrete criteria for "terrorist content."
"Who will decide, judge that such message is a message of hate, a terrorist message? Police forces in the member states will each apply their own criteria and in any case will not have the power to summon the majors such as Google and Co to delete such and such a message," Henrot stated.
He believed that a universal European code of justice was needed to translate King's plans into reality.
"King says that the draft regulation, which would need to be approved by the European Parliament and the majority of EU members states to come into force, would help create legal certainty and would apply to all websites, regardless of their size. It will therefore be necessary to 'unify' national legislations. Good luck, Mr. King! It will only need a few decades," Henrot said ironically.
Steven Woolfe, an independent member of the European Parliament from the United Kingdom, expressed his doubts whether King gave serious consideration to the initiative's implementation at all due to the fact that the commissioner's political career in Europe was nearing its end.
Since European Commissioner King is a UK citizen, he is in his last months at the European Commission, without any hope of remaining active in European politics, with the United Kingdom planning to conclude the Brexit negotiations in March next year and leave the EU.
"All in all, the announcement by Julian King is above all � just an announcement by somebody who will not see his �decision applied, since he will disappear from the stage next year, after Brexit becomes reality," Woolfe indicated.
He suggested that King, making such a proposal, aimed to get some limelight in the United Kingdom for his future national career as a politician.
