Terrorism & social mediaEU develops legislation to tackle online terrorism-promoting content

The EU is planning to take legal measures to control online content which supports and promotes terrorism.

The EU Security Commissioner, Julian King, said voluntary agreements, which are currently in place, had not provided European citizens enough protection against exposure to terrorist-promoting content.

King is now developing a legislative proposal which will be presented in September to make Internet companies such as Facebook and Google identify terrorist content on their platforms and remove it immediately.

King told Germany’s Welt newspaper on Thursday that “Despite the positive results from previous voluntary agreements, we have not seen enough progress, and in order to better protect our citizens, we must now take stronger action on terrorist content.”

The aim of the legislation now being developed is “to create a clear, transparent framework and minimum requirements for every Internet platform that wants to offer its services to Europeans,” King said.

In a response to DW’s query on the subject, the Commission wrote: “The work on the proposal is currently ongoing and we cannot pre-empt the details at this stage.”

The commissioner has previously urged EU member states to work together to address the problem of online contents which supports and promotes terrorism. Last month he said that over the previous year, every terrorist attack in Europe “had a link with online terrorist content.”

King noted that there was a need for EU member states to coordinate their actions so content could be prevented from being shifted from one country to another. The terror threat remained “very high,” he said in July, and it was not “going away anytime soon.”