(TECHCRUNCH) France’s lower chamber of the parliament has voted in favor of a controversial law against hate speech on social networks and online platforms. As I described last year, online platforms will have to remove within 24 hours illicit content that has been flagged. Otherwise, companies will have to pay hefty fines every time they infringe the law.
What do they mean by illicit content? Essentially, anything that would be considered as an offense or a crime in the offline world is now considered as illicit content when it’s an online platform. Among other things, you could think about death threats, discrimination, Holocaust denial…
For the most extreme categories, terrorist content and child pornography, online platforms must react within an hour.