France to get tougher on social media hate speech: PM
France to get tougher on social media hate speech: PM
Reuters March 19, 2018
PARIS (Reuters) - France will toughen rules on hate
speech to ensure social media giants do more to remove racist and anti-Semitic
content from internet, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said on Monday.
The announcement comes as the 28 European Union countries
work on rules that would compel Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Google to be
more proactive in filtering and weeding out hate speech on their platforms.
"These days a newspaper director is criminally
responsible if hateful comments are posted on its website but if you run a
social network anything goes," Philippe said in a speech on France's
policy on racism.
"Nobody is going to convince me that the social
networks live in space. What gets published and circulated in France is
published and circulated in France and must answer to the laws of the French
republic."
Philippe said France would tighten up its own rules
pending progress at EU level, but did not elaborate on when or how.
The man credited with inventing the worldwide web,
British computer scientists, Tim Berners-Lee, called in a public letter last
week for powerful internet platforms and social media companies to be regulated
to prevent the internet from being "weaponized" on a massive scale.
"In recent years, we've seen conspiracy theories
trend on social media platforms, fake Twitter and Facebook accounts stoke
social tensions, external actors interfere in elections and criminals steal
troves of personal data," he said in an open letter published on the 29th
anniversary of the creation of the web, (http://bit.ly/2FDx8XO)
(Reporting By Brian Love and Jean-Baptiste Vey; Editing
by Richard Lough)
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