On illegal hate speech, EU lawmakers eye binding transparency for platforms – By Natasha Lomas (Techcrunch) / June 23 2020
It’s more than four years since major tech platforms signed up to a voluntary pan-EU Code of Conduct on illegal hate speech removals. Yesterday the European Commission’s latest assessment of the non-legally binding agreement lauds “overall positive” results — with 90% of flagged content assessed within 24 hours and 71% of the content deemed to be illegal hate speech removed. The latter is up from just 28% in 2016.
However the report cards finds platforms are still lacking in transparency. Nor are they providing users with adequate feedback on the issue of hate speech removals, in the Commission’s view.
Platforms responded and gave feedback to 67.1% of the notifications received, per the report card — up from 65.4% in the previous monitoring exercise. Only Facebook informs users systematically — with the Commission noting: “All the other platforms have to make improvements.”
In another criticism, its assessment of platforms’ performance in dealing with hate speech reports found inconsistencies in their evaluation processes — with “separate and comparable” assessments of flagged content that were carried out over different time periods showing “divergences” in how they were handled.
Signatories to the EU online hate speech code are: Dailymotion, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Jeuxvideo.com, Microsoft, Snapchat, Twitter and YouTube.
Continue to article: https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/23/on-illegal-hate-speech-eu-lawmakers-eye-binding-transparency-for-platforms/
