EU fine for social media which allows terror to linger

A crackdown by the European Commission will order social media websites to delete extremist content on their platforms within an hour to avoid the risk of being fined.

Affecting Twitter, Facebook and YouTube among other, the plan marks a change in direction by the EU from allowing sites to self police to enforcing explicit rules.

Speaking to the Financial Times, EU commissioner for security Julian King stressed that the EU will ‘take stronger action in order to protect our citizens’, following a number of high-profile terror attacks across Europe over the past few years. According to King, the law would apply to small social media apps and the largest companies, such as Google, Twitter and Facebook.

The EU’s civil service noting that ‘terrorist content is most harmful in the first hours of its appearance online’, with reports claiming that draft regulation is set to be published next month.

Google states that over half of the videos removed from YouTube for containing violent extremism have had fewer than 10 views, while Twitter says that of the 274,460 accounts that were permanently suspended for violations related to the promotion of terrorism between July and December 2017, 74 per cent were suspended before their first tweet.