Europe to Penalize Websites for not removing “Illegal Content” Within One Hour

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Technology and terrorism are nowadays like linked terms. With the rise in technology the ways of terrorising people are increasing. We live in a world where terrorism is taking help of social advancement to spread negativity all around. In a recent survey, the terrorist group ISIS uploaded 1348 videos on YouTube, generating 163,391 views and although the video was taken down, at least 24% of the content was still there for more than two hours.

The European Union which is the political union of 28 member states located in Europe is planning to impose regulation all over social platforms like Facebook, Twitter for the publishing of violent content that involves terrorist propaganda.  They have created a set of guidelines for the removal of violent and illegal content. The rule will be applicable for websites in Europe.

When earlier introduced the rule was voluntary but now European council has decided to impose the fines if somebody fails to comply with it. The regulation will be published next month. Although, the main rule will consist of the removal of illegal content within one hour of publishing. EU is now looking forward to tackle the social platform of tech companies like Facebook and Twitter for not removing violent content.

The draft of the regulation will be approved by the European Parliament and then the majority of European Union member states, it will be imposed on all the websites despite of its traffic and reach. Julian King, the EU’s commissioner for security said legal regulation will help in creating boundaries towards content on all social and online platforms.

In social media platform like Telegram is coined as “safe heaven” for terror content and in their defence, the companies have tried using methods like artificial intelligence to automatically detect radical content online and remove it. They have been working to build a shared database of violent images, videos so that they can be at once be removed.

Final Thoughts

For the big social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, the king made it clear that the regulation will be imposed on every website big or small. Also, he said that the difference in size and reach of the platform means that the platforms have a different capability to deal with the violent content but their methods are not transparent and that’s why the content once appeared to keep on circulating on different platforms.

Even other countries have started to work in this direction, Germany has introduced fines of up to 50 million dollars on the companies who fails to comply with the regulation.

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