This week Europol’s EU Internet Referral Unit (IRU) launched a pilot project with the Internet Referral Units of Belgium, France and the Netherlands. The project aims to improve the detection, analysis and referral of online terrorist content.



The partners involved now benefit from a Europol-hosted centralised platform which improves the speed of detecting terrorist content, streamlining the referral process and standardising the reporting and communication with the Online Service Providers (OSPs). As a result, this platform facilitates cooperation between European law enforcement authorities and OSPs in their shared fight against online terrorism in the context of the EU Internet Forum.



The project is developed under Europol’s EU IRU mandate to coordinate and share detection tasks (flagging) of online terrorist content with relevant partners, and to carry out and support referrals quickly, efficiently and effectively in close cooperation with the industry. Furthermore the initiative is in line with the latest Recommendation of the European Commission of 1 March 2018 to reinforce the EU’s response to illegal content online.



This pilot project is expected to pave the way for an EU Referral Platform with the aim to increase EU operational capability in its fight against terrorist content online.