EU lawmakers pass online terrorist content law

The European Parliament’s Home Affairs Committee (LIBE) agreed to a new EU regulation to prevent the dissemination of terrorist content online (TERREG) by 52 votes last week, the regulation has now been deemed approved by the plenary without a vote.

The regulation will allow national authorities to have Internet content removed, even if hosted in another Member State, within one hour, without requiring a court order. The proposal has been criticized by numerous NGOs as well as UN Special Rapporteurs, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights and the International Commission of Jurists.

These “removal orders” must come from the “competent authority” of each EU country and can be addressed to all 27 members of the European Union. Critics, however, say that giving platform hosts such a short deadline encourages them to use algorithms for their moderation. Furthermore, an absence of judicial control and the transnational scope of the removal order threatens freedom of expression and represents a danger to democracy in Europe.

The European Commission first proposed the law in 2018 after it became increasingly worried about the role of terrorist content after a series of attacks by self-radicalized lone-wolf attackers in several European cities. Civil rights groups, which had campaigned to get lawmakers to reject the legislation, criticised the procedure, saying that the legislation had been approved with no final vote by the assembly.

The law will come into force 20 days after it is published in the EU Official Journal. Companies can face fines up to 4% of their global turnover for non-compliance. They have said they shared regulators’ efforts to tackle the issue and keep the content off their platforms.