European Commissioner Thierry Breton declared that social media sites will face bans if they do not remove “calls for revolt” or content that shows riots under new censorship measures set to be imposed next month by Brussels.
The EU’s Commissioner for the Internal Market, the architect of the Digital Services Act (DSA), which will be fully implemented on August 25th, said that “social networks have not done enough” to censor content during the recent waves of unrest and rioting in France following the police shooting of an Algerian-heritage teenager last month.
Appearing on FranceInfo radio on Monday, Mr Breton said that content such as hate speech and “calls for revolt” will “no longer be possible from August 25th.”
“When there is hateful content, content that calls for revolt, for example, that also calls for killing or burning cars, they will have the obligation in the moment to erase them. If they do not do so, they will be immediately sanctioned.”
The Digital Services Act states that platforms with at least 45 million users within the EU will come under more regulatory scrutiny next month, with those that fail to comply face fines of up to six per cent of their global revenue and a potential ban from the 27-nation bloc entirely.
The censorship measures, supposedly intended to prevent so-called ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’, are so onerous that even Mark Zuckerberg’s new Twitter rival, Threads, has refrained from launching in Europe out of concern about complying with the law.
Breton, the former French Finance Minister, said that platforms must “demonstrate to us [to the European Union] that they have taken steps to enforce the law”.
The Frenchman continued to blame the social media algorithms “that push, as we know, these highly viral content [images of urban violence] because it brings advertising”.
Breton said that “all this will be strictly forbidden,” suggesting that videos documenting unrest could be blocked throughout the EU in a similar fashion to what occurs in countries such as Communist China.
While Brussels is set to demand that social media companies enforce its censorship demands, French President Emmanuel Macron went a step further last week during a meeting with 300 mayors in Paris. The besieged president suggested that the government could impose a blackout to “cut off social networks” when “things get carried away” during riots.
The government has argued that rioters often use social media to locate each other in the madness, thereby increasing their effectiveness in causing mayhem and evading law enforcement.
Yet, even for the French, this was apparently a step too far, with the leaders of most major parties — outside of the actual Communist Party of France — condemning Macron’s censorship scheme as akin to communist dictatorships.
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