As we feared last Monday, European Parliament has just adopted a Report pushing for the outsourcing of Web censorship to Facebook and Google, using the pretext of the fight against terrorism.



This Report suggests, among numerous others recommendations, that it would be necessary to “achieve automatic detection and systematic, fast, permanent and full removal of terrorist content online” and to prevent “the re-upload of already removed content”. The text specifies that it “welcomes the Commission’s legislative proposal on preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online”, “calls on the co-legislators to urgently work on the proposal” and “invites the Member States to put in place national measures if the adoption of legislation is delayed” (§47).

Three amendments would have allowed the European Parliament to stand out from the willingness of Emmanuel Macron and the European Commission to submit the whole Web to the surveillance and automated censorship tools provided by Facebook and Google, as we have denounced it with 58 others organisations.

A first amendment proposed that the censorship of “terrorist content” could not be “automatic” ; this amendment has been rejected by 311 votes against 269 (77 abstentions). A second amendment proposed that this censorship could not imply an active “detection” of content, nor a “systematic and fast” removal ; it has been rejected by 533 votes against 119 (4 abstentions). A third amendment proposed that platforms should not have an obligation “to remove [the content] fully” ; it has been rejected by 534 votes against 105 (14 abstentions).

The majority of the Members of Parliament therefore echoes the decision adopted last week by European governments to impose a mass, automated and private censorship of the Web (read our article).

The Report adopted today provides for mere “recommendations”: it is only a declaration of principle with no legal effect. However, it suggests that the European Parliament has already given up all ambitions to defend our freedoms against the security arguments that motivated the European Commission to propose its Antiterrorism Censorship Regulation, which will be debated by the European Parliament in the coming weeks.

Today’s vote is all the more worrying as it comes after yesterday’s shooting in Strasbourg, in the city where the European Parliament sits. Rather than postponing this vote the Members of European Parliaments (MEPs) decided to adopt the text immediately . Some have even pointed yesterday’s attack to justify their willingness of more security . They invoke a “risk of islamist terrorism” while the perpetrator has not been arrested yet and the investigation has only just begun.

As usual, and unfortunately, the time for appeasement and reflexion, even mourning, has been neglected to carry on the forced march to security measures that our governments have been pursuing for years, by pretending to defend democracy against totalitarianism. While doing the opposite.

From now on, debates at the European Parliament will be directly about the Antiterrorism Censorship Regulation. You can read our last analysis about this text, which will be our main subject in the next months.