A secretly approved Senate plan requiring e-mail providers, social media sites, and other Internet companies to report online terrorist activity has been scrapped.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) had invoked a procedural hold on the Intelligence Authorization Act until the removal of the provision requiring companies like Twitter and Facebook to report suspicious online activities. The language was secretly and unanimously adopted by the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 24, and now it has been removed, Wyden said.

"Going after terrorist recruitment and activity online is a serious mission that demands a serious response from our law enforcement and intelligence agencies," Wyden said. "Social media companies aren’t qualified to judge which posts amount to 'terrorist activity,' and they shouldn’t be forced against their will to create a Facebook Bureau of Investigations to police their users’ speech."

Wyden's move frees up a Senate vote on 2016 funding for the CIA, FBI, and NSA. The House passed funding legislation in June without the terrorist reporting requirement. Ars first reported on the once-secret reporting requirement in July.

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Several companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, complained that the reporting provision was vaguely written and would amount to "an impossible compliance problem."

They said uncertainty over the provision's meaning would result in "massive reporting of items that are not likely to be of material concern to public safety."

The legislation did not require them to remove content. Instead, it demanded Internet companies with knowledge of terrorist activity to provide to the appropriate authorities the "facts or circumstances" of the alleged terrorist activity.

The scrapped language, authored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), comes at a time when the Islamic State and other terror groups have taken to the Internet to gain converts across the globe, including in the United States.

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The FBI issued a public warning in March about American teens being susceptible to the Islamic State's online recruitment tactics. And the Brookings Institute estimated in March that there were as many as 70,000 pro-Islamic State Twitter accounts. Twitter has removed tens of thousands of these terror propaganda accounts, which violate its terms of service.

Feinstein's proposal was modeled after the Protect Our Children Act of 2008, which demands that Internet companies report child porn images, and information identifying who trades it, to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. That quasi-government agency then alerts either the FBI or local law enforcement about the identities of online child pornographers.