SUGGESTED TALKING POINTS

Say your name, where you live, and a bit about yourself (eg. you are a parent, a student, an artist, retired, etc.) Tell them you're calling about the Copyright Directive and the upcoming committee vote. Tell them you oppose Article 11 — the plan to charge fees for links that have short snippets and headlines with them — and Article 13, the plan to make websites build mass content filtering programs. (If applicable) Give an example of a way you use links to access news and information. [And/Or] Give an example of how content filtering has had a negative impact on you. Have you had something you made deleted or blocked from posting on the Internet? Has someone taken down content you had permission and the rights to use? Seen comments you made disappear for no reason? (If applicable) tell them you’re one of the 38,000 Europeans who have responded to the consultation, or written to your MEP previously on these issues through the Save the Link campaign. Don't forget to thank the person at the end of the line, and if you are talking to an assistant encourage them to pass on your message to your MEP. Even if you don’t reach your MEP personally, it's important to leave a message.

Use any of these following points in your conversation:

Article 11: This link tax plan is designed to attack search engines and aggregators, and will make it hard to use link-sharing sites to find the content you're looking for online.[4]

There is consensus that this is a bad idea: academics, small businesses, small publishers, librarians, researchers and thousands and thousands of people have already said no to these proposals.[5] A tiny handful of powerful publishing conglomerates are the only group in favour, steamrolling over the interests of the public.

Article 13: Content filtering means that every single website that allows users to interact with it will have to build robots that scan your images, text, videos and other content for potential copyrighted content before it is posted. If mandatory content filtering is introduced it will lead to many of your favourite sites closing if they cannot afford to install costly programs to scan and block content before it is uploaded.[6]

Content filtering puts free speech in the hands of bots and algorithms, which will be set to detect for copyright infringing content — and block your content before you even have a chance to post it. Bots like this are never able to understand context or make fair judgments.

Your creative expression will be blocked from the web — all because a censorship robot has decided that you don't get to share it.

I'm ready to call ↑