EXTREMIST CONTENT
World’s largest economic bloc will tell tech companies they must help combat terrorism
Spurred by terrorism, EU leaders tell tech companies they must do more to police social media,
BRUSSELS— European leaders struck by a wave of terror attacks are putting added pressure on technology companies including Facebook Inc., Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to weed out extremist content spread via social media.
According to draft conclusions of a summit of European Union leaders underway in Brussels, technology companies will be told to develop methods that automatically detect and remove content that may incite violence. “Industry has its own responsibility to help combat terrorism and crime online,” the bloc’s 28 governments will say, according to the draft statement obtained by Bloomberg.
Heads of state and government from the world’s largest economic bloc are gathering in the Belgian capital on Thursday and Friday to discuss, among other topics, ways to fight terrorism. The region is facing an increasing frequency of attacks.
Earlier this week, Belgian police shot and killed a suspect attempting to trigger a major explosion at Brussels’ central train station. The U.K. has been struck several times, including a bombing in Manchester last month that killed 22 people.
There have also been deadly incidents in Germany and France.
The plots have led to calls for more restrictions of social media and increased government surveillance powers, adding to the ongoing global debate about balancing security and privacy. British Prime Minister Theresa May called for restrictive measures against terrorist propaganda online after the latest attacks in London. The U.K. government has also sought more power to monitor online communication, including textmessaging platforms.
Responding to the criticism, global technology companies have begun to act more aggressively to censor extremist content. Google said this week that it’s creating new policies to suppress terrorism-related content on platforms including YouTube. Facebook, which had previously announced it was hiring more people to manually filter questionable content, said it will use artificial intelligence that can understand language and analyze images to try to keep terrorists from using the site for recruitment and propaganda.
European leaders believe the technology companies have the ability to more effectively keep the material off the internet. In its draft statement, the EU said it “expects industry to develop new technology and tools to improve the automatic detection and removal of content that incites to violence. It calls for addressing the challenges posed by systems that allow terrorists to communicate in ways that competent authorities cannot access.”