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[Music]
I'm very happy to have these guests here
we have too much learning off from
epicenter works and Chloe from Adri and
they are talking about content takedowns
who cleans cleans the Internet
the you EU plans to swipe of our freedom
of expression under the carpet and I'm
very happy to announce them and that
they're here give a big applause to
Chloe and too much learning ah thanks
thank you and welcome to everybody let's
get started we're gonna talk about
content takedowns and content moderation
but a wider debate
you can call platform regulation the
next 40 minutes will be about in in my
prediction I would say after doing this
rights for 10 years probably the biggest
little rights debate it will have in the
European Union but before we get into
that we have to start with the basics
and the basic in this case is weird
complicated word called intermediary
liability and what are intermediaries
you can think of that if you go back to
dead trees to classical media if you
publish a newspaper you are liable for
every article that somebody writes in
there so a publisher has to take
responsibility for the content and that
they are putting in their paper for
classical media that works and media and
liability law around these things has
developed over decades and centuries for
radio for television four types of media
but that logic of course did not work if
the internet came about and there have
been several cases in the EU in the 90s
where the police thought an ISP is just
like a newspaper they have to be hold
liable and responsible for the contents
of their users on their service and so
several ISPs in France in actually not
France you know Italy to the left in
Austria to the right were raided and
servus were confiscated thousands of
websites of companies were offline
because the police thought okay we have
to arrest the Internet and to hold the
servers away there was even a famous
case in Germany around CompuServe where
a CEO of an ISP and host was actually
charged with criminal charges about
pornography because one of their
customers made content available that
was illegal but all of these cases of
course created a huge uproar in Austria
the internet was even shut down for a
day and then that you reacted to that
and as a result of this legal
uncertainty rules were adopted at
European level and they were formalized
into what now we call the e-commerce
directive which was adopted in 2000 and
it gave basically Internet companies
legal protection against illegal
activities that are taking place on
their system and the rationale at the
time was that it was to ensure that
there was a unified digital market that
would improve up and expand in Europe
and at a time where very few people had
access to the Internet and the digital
global corporation that we know nowadays
didn't exist and one of the key
provision of this directive article 14
says that company are not responsible
for illegal content that their users are
generating unless unless they obtain
knowledge of it in such cases they have
to act as quickly as possible to remove
it and that was until now the European
model yeah and you can also think about
individual liability as a sword in the
shield that analogy mostly holds true
for the US and Europe it's a little bit
come more complicated but a basic
principle still holds true
so intermediary liability protections
the safe harbors the joke just explained
in the e-commerce directive act as a
shield you are not liable your users can
do whatever they want and and when a
problem comes up you have to deal with
it of course but you don't have to go
through every eventualities of bad thing
that could happen if you start a new
service so that shield was very
influential and important for creating
the diversity
innovative capacity that we have
witnessed over the past decades in the
open Internet
but intermediate liability also gives
companies a sort they can moderate on
their own they can proactively moderate
they can moderate based on laws or terms
of services and they can do that to
their own choosing in the US the debate
right now is a little bit if you don't
use your sword more often then we'll go
after your shield now we also want to
give you a brief video that also
summarizes that concept of interview
liability by the most famous and most
painful example that we had in Europe
the copyright directive that was the
video recreated with Alexander Lehman
for page 20 19 campaign the open
Internet we all know and love where
everyone can participate will soon no
longer exist you politicians are about
to pass a law which they say is supposed
to combat another arrest copies in
pursuit of that goal they're about to
make a fundamental change that would
affect all of us it all comes down to
the main question who is liable for
files illegally uploaded on the internet
so far the person uploading illegal
copies is also the one responsible and
liable for the content the app or
website they do this on is innocent
unless they are made aware of the copy
and do nothing about it it's like when a
crime is planned over the phone
that doesn't make the phone company
responsible today's legislation makes
sense
nowadays everyone can communicate and
share with the whole world it's simply
impossible for websites to manually
review each one of the billions of
images videos texts audio files we post
online but that's exactly what the
politicians want to change in the future
as soon as something goes online the
site would be just as liable as the
person who posted it so what you may be
thinking why is that a problem
because then the only way for websites
to operate legally would be to verify
every single post by every single user
assuring that it doesn't infringe any
copyright worldwide if they cannot
guarantee that it cannot go online
but it gets worse this new law is not
only demanding something technically
impossible it's also threatening one of
our fundamental rights namely freedom of
expression without unjustified
censorship but no program can tell for
sure whether a parody commentary or
remix is legal or infringing on
copyright making these decisions today
takes lawyers judges and long trials and
yet websites will be expected to somehow
make them automatically millions of
times a day to avoid massive fines the
platforms will have to filter extremely
strictly and a lot of perfectly legal
content will get caught up in these
filters but unfortunately technical
feasibility and censorship are not the
only problems before this bill has even
passed the EU Commission has already
presented an even further reaching law
this one would require filters for
so-called extremist content with each
post having to be checked with law
enforcement agencies we're talking about
nothing less than EU wide internet
censorship machines what could possibly
go wrong if we don't act now we could
find the internet in Europe scrubbed
clean of anything challenging surprising
weird or enlightening the big winners of
this new law would be multi-billion
dollar companies like Google or Facebook
as their budgets would still allow them
to implement the new guidelines all
smaller platforms would only be able to
further offer their services if they use
the filter systems provided by the big
corporations the smaller companies will
have to trade in their data which would
make the big players even more powerful
all of us would be the losers of this
new legislation because structures that
make the internet so diverse today would
die tomorrow as a result of this law if
you want to stop this dull and miserable
filter net you have to take action now
these websites tell you how call your
representatives in the European
Parliament
today and tell them that you will only
vote for them in the 2019 European
elections if they vote against upload
filters yeah that vote of course we
sadly lost by five votes so 500 PS we
could not convince and henceforth the
copyright directive was adopted and is
now on the way to be transposed by EU
Member States but it the discussion
doesn't stop there but before we come to
that first today just to kind of
summarize again what is being said like
there is some problems now in the
ecosystem in the online ecosystem that
makes certain people believe that the
ancient rule the the rules from the
e-commerce directive needs to be fixed
why does that today's intermediaries are
very different from the ones from the
90s obviously we now are witnessing what
what we call the platform economy which
is a centralization of the net around a
few players and and most of what peoples
do online today is mediated through
intermediaries and those intermediaries
those are a few giant corporation that
dominate the ecosystem and the reality
is there is very few possibilities for
credible challengers to enter this
market the second problem is there are
many many more people online today than
it used to be everybody can post content
24/7 online and and can possibly reach a
global audience even that for free and
this is quite overwhelming I mean this
is how it translates into numbers and
this is how the online communications
landscape looks like today so million
even billions user whose online
activities are mediated by a few
platforms and they post an enormous
amount of content per day which makes it
impossible even for those powerful
companies to control and assess each
piece of content that is posted and and
that's a big problem this billion users
subject the entire communication under
monolithic speech regulation
policies and this is impossible for a
single set of rules to encompass and to
accommodate the diversity of cultural
norms in the world what's more because
those platform not only hosts content
but they actually curated they push it
the deleted demoted they decide for the
entire user based which voice gets heard
which viewpoints get gets visibility and
which does not and because they are most
of our communication their content
regulation rules so-called Community
Guidelines becomes some sort of
constitutions that actually regulate a
quarter of the world's population speech
and that's a huge problem and they start
behaving like they were actually the
ones making the law recently Facebook
created an oversight board which is
supposed to kind of make decision on
content moderation cases and and in this
way they are acting more or less like a
Supreme Court that decides and interpret
Facebook terms and services yeah and on
that point it is important to understand
this really cool concept here the laws
that we are accustomed to which regulate
which see speech is acceptable or not
they are always contagious I mean the
case law of Europe's highest courts even
says fundamental rights protection
funeral speech protections are
particularly for challenging speech for
still legal but you know like these very
hateful statements even statements that
are creating an uproar that might even
spark a demonstration these are exactly
the act cases that we need to protect
with freedom of expression yet most of
the condom iteration decisions that
happen today are not even based on law
it's its right to assume that around 80
90 percent of the content variation
decisions are actually about the terms
of services of every platform and those
are not lost fundamental rights
protections do not apply to these texts
that companies have written themselves
and probably change every week and
that's so
important because that also changes the
dynamic of any legislation that comes
further down the road but there is an
ample amount of cases where platforms
have acted really irresponsible
tick-tock the Chinese social network for
four short videos that's particularly
popular in the younger generation The
Guardian and netzpolitik.org recently
leaked content moderation guidelines for
humans that are moderating the content
on tick tock and what they found is that
this platform intentionally corrupts the
reach of people with disabilities with
autism or Down syndrome or people that
are not finding that have a normal
regular or fat body size all of these
people are curved in their reach so dead
they are posts and their videos are
actually never reaching a critical
audience and what platforms actually
rely on automatic tools on filters to
the content moderation it doesn't get
better actually one that even when they
try to do the right thing which is for
example fighting hate speech against
people of color it end up in black
people are the ones being the most
censored rather than the violent racist
speech that is targeting them and that's
because the technology is unable to
understand the nuance in every language
and that's the case of Twitter here
before going presenting to you what's
coming up at European level let's have a
quick look in what happened in the past
years because both the EU and its member
states I've started to lead a true
crusade to clean the internet and they
were adopting very quickly legislation
to tackle all sorts of problematic
content yeah and of course copyright
directive is first and foremost there we
really wanted to win this fight not just
because of article 11 and 13 now 15 and
17 upload filters and ancillary
copyright for news publishers but also
because we knew that in the upcoming
fight around digital service Act about
the intermedia liability debate it would
be a bad start if the copyright
directive went down and it did the other
father was mentioned in the video
the regulation on terrorists content
online that still up for grabs and will
probably be adopted next year the
audiovisual media service directive is a
particularly nasty piece of legislation
because it is a law that doesn't say
companies should do XYZ it is a law that
say companies should have terms of
services that you expose that so it is
kind of outsourcing or privatizing
things like the moral development of
young people and then we also have two
pieces of soft not a code of practice of
disinformation and a code of conduct an
illegal hate speech there are not even
legislative acts it's basically the
Commission sitting down with Facebook
Twitter and Google and saying we don't
want us to regulate you do you so just
follow this law and come up with the
self regulatory scheme and then we'll
like Yolo and actually members that have
not been resting on their laurels either
they've been very prolific and the first
one to adopt if it's on anti hate speech
law West Germany and it was actually
copy pasted by a lot of its European
counterparts and all those law are
currently under debate in their national
parliaments and governments but
basically there is copycats law in
France UK is talking about it
Ireland and also Croatia one of the
common denominator of those laws is that
they are shifting the responsibility is
to decide what to block are not online
to onto the shoulders of companies and
and that's very convenient for European
governments to do that because companies
do not have to respect human rights law
like the EU Charter of Fundamental
Rights contrary to the very same
governments who have to abide by these
laws a very very convenient way for them
to shrug off the difficult task to
balance fundamental rights at stake and
what is actually the PlayBook of these
laws so again they are pushing tech they
are pushing content takedowns to be
based on terms and condition so
contractual rules rather than the state
law so that's a very big problem for the
principle of the law and then for some
of those laws it goes even beyond actual
we'll content under the law it also
covers harmful content more or less
undesirable what is undesirable in the
eyes of the legislature but they don't
give a legal definition obviously what
else
they also incentivize companies to act
very quickly to make the decision on the
content and for that it leads company to
obviously use if they can automated
means
so-called upload filters to the job very
fast and how do they incentivize
companies with high fines if you don't
comply with the rules and then you find
yeah again summarize that nicely
platforms are put in a really difficult
position with a strong incentive of over
blocking some piece of content is
notified to a platform they could either
just delete it and be done with it or
start a quite complicated expensive
legal assessment is this within the
rules or not and if they decide it wrong
then they could even face the risk of
penalties or even liability for that
content and hence you have a strong
incentive for over blocking and is not
really a level assessment that what he
do but to increase complexity further it
is not just about content moderation so
this whole debate about platform
regulation will also include ecommerce
so there's a famous case when L'Oreal
counterfeit products were sold on eBay
L'Oreal sued ultimately lost that case
was in 2010 and the European High Court
went with us went with interview
liability protections back then but as
you've seen with the years of the
previous dossiers both on the member
level as well as on a rural level it is
actually more or less difficult for us
now to hold that line the C dude
European High Court recently decided in
2017 that yes uber is a taxi company and
does not benefit from the protections of
liability in the u.s. we had cesta to
stop enabling sex trafficking at which
was a lord it was adopted bipartisanly
in the middle of the Trump
administration in 2018 both Democrats
and Republicans could agree on that law
and it again removed liability
protections for hostess tumblr deleted
around 7:00
millions x+ of sex educational blocks
because of that because they could not
bear the cost that was not willing to
actually go through that content on
their platform so they just masley
deleted millions of blocks with a lot of
content and that is a kind of sign which
internet we could end up with if
suddenly every platform has to take
responsibility before stuff even appears
online and this is not just a Western
debate also in India the regulators are
looking at that and try launch the
consultation and they are also proposing
new rules on intermediary liability and
that whole debate is global in nature
it's important to understand that every
rule that we make here will have
repercussions in the rest of the world
next eg the German long content
moderation was copied by 17 countries
already the first of which was Russia
when we call for Facebook to respect the
decisions of a court people in
Azerbaijan he okayed that same court it
blocks a hundred opposition website
every month now should also decide about
my Facebook posts so it is quite
complicated to get it right here but yet
I've believed that Europe has the best
cards to come up with a fundamental
rights based solution to this intricate
problem now about this reform what is
coming up since 2000 it was quite
silence around the e-commerce directive
but in the last decade there are a lot
of movement
Tomasz already explained to you there
were several case law but there were
also several calls at European level to
reopen the text or to complement it with
another more specific piece of really of
legislation but nothing really concrete
came out of it but now with the new
Commission in place since first December
this year and with its new president
it is quite confirmed that the review of
the old e-commerce directive will happen
and it will take the name of the digital
Services Act and to be honest what will
this future legislation say or contain
we don't know exactly yet but there are
several ideas on the table among them
there is a possibility that the reform
look at the current definition of what
is an intermediary what do we call an
intermediary and how we categorize them
trying to update the old definition
trying to take into account the new
internet companies that emerge in the
2010s like Airbnb for example it will
look at one of our other core principle
of the e-commerce directive article 15
which prohibits member states to put an
obligation on platforms to monitor all
their content to look actively for
illegally and this is a big question
mark for us because will this principle
be upheld or not that's a big question
because the copyright directive already
kind of start going against that very
principle and then it will also look at
some obligations for platforms or for
intermediaries in terms of how they
regulate their content their practices
and how they do content moderation on
their services another thing which is
actually very welcome from outside this
whole list here is based on the leak
from the Commission on the working level
we actually have good people they are
working on that file they've been doing
that for over a decade and they have a
really good understanding of the issue
the question is how the political site
will deal with these good ideas that are
being discussed but yeah rules on online
advertisement are good because we have
to talk about the business model most of
these problems are symptoms of the
strong concentration in the market and a
few very dominant platforms that we have
need internet today and so actually
tackling the attention economy and the
attention merchants is Tim who put it is
the right thing to do also because the
full scope of this phenomena called
targeted online advertisement I would
say has not been completely understood
and we need more science and for that we
need more data and not a thing which is
actually really hopeful I think for the
people in the room here is
interoperability yesterday Moxie
Marlinspike he could talk where he
basically bashed IT of decentralization
what he is missing is really that is not
about decentralization in the 90 cents
it's about interoperability
it's about making dominant platforms
open again forcing whatsapp to establish
a protocol we're competing competing
messaging services like signal FEMA can
communicate with people on these other
networks so that competition can happen
even in an economy that is strongly
based on the network effect and
interoperability is not a swiss knife
that can solve all problems but if it is
applied in a case-by-case way to also
solve the privacy and security problems
that come with it I think it would be
really a visionary thing for a European
internet that is decentraland open and
not concentrated between China and the
US another finger of course many people
in government wanna see is accessibility
of data many local governments and
cities have problems with taxation from
Airbnb for example enter refusing to
cooperate to allow for these types of
taxation forcing them to hand over this
data I think in general is something to
look at and lastly all of these rules
will most likely be informed by a new
entity by a platform regulator on a
European level again that's still up for
debate people want to see media
regulators to more or telecom regulators
but I would think that we'll see a new
regulator for these tasks in the EU in
the near future and that all is why the
digital service sector D is a is often
dubbed the constitution of the internet
and that is actually a quote from
somebody in the Commission working on
that file and to complement a picture
why is this important let's look at more
mechanical thing like the the lobby side
what Chloe and I are working on on a
daily basis the stakeholders that will
be part to that debate is of course all
of the US Internet giant's in Silicon
Valley it will be a whole of the
European internet industry every telco
hosts a content delivery network
provider ever so basically all of the
actors of the general data protection
regulation will be on the table with a
stark business interest on that file
that's not over you are also a big
opportunity for a big copyright by
battle revival with
all the classical actors in this debate
like the classical media think about
newspapers but cat broadcasters
publisher aka the return of Axel
Springer then you will have the
entertainment and industry which is
representing more or less all the rights
holders from the music cinema etc and
represented actually by an army of
lobbyists and then obviously the world
but yeah there you are and more but
anyway and then obviously the providers
of upload filters like audible magic
Facebook Google who have really big
financial interest in this das here and
it doesn't stop there
so brick-and-mortar stores taxi drivers
hotel owners so everybody who is
attacked or affected with the sharing
economy with the gig economy the of
course will have a say and particularly
in national debates those are strong
lobby organizations then it's us it's a
digital rights community and I think we
have to be essential in this debate
because in a way it is about the soul of
the internet or that question about
interoperability and liability could
easily change the landscape of the
internet that we have today so I think
that's why we should care then of course
human rights Amnesty International is
waking up to do rights those actors have
a different mindset but I think we have
to see them as allies and lastly awesome
every type of marginalized group every
anti racism organization feminist
organization we heard about people with
disabilities so all of the things where
we our society currently disagree if
this should be shown or somebody should
be allowed to say that mixed in a big
buckets tiered and then you global
private profit oriented company please
solve that for us so if you aggregate
all those stakeholders I would double
not the constitution of the internet but
definitely the murder of all digital
rights debates just because the
interests are so big and that's why we
will definitely not have an easy time
with that okay what's next when should
you be ready to act more or less this is
all super blurry but rumors hold that
the first public
rotation will be learners early next
year in 2022 which all of you can
participate gladly we would be very glad
about that
and the proposal of the Commission to
the first draft will be released
probably at the end of 2020 by the
Commission then serious big business
begins when the text reached the to
colleges leaders the Council of Member
States and the Parliament which to be
free are going to take probably more
years to find their own positions on the
text their own version of the text and
so we expect the negotiation between all
the parties after in 2022 and probably
the adoption in some years later to
summarize so the 90s have shown us that
we needed to adopted rules because the
internet is not a paper printed on dead
trees then for a decade it was mostly
silent for the last decade we had to
fight off attempts to open up this law
and now it's gonna happen so we have to
deal with the reality and the good
lesson to learn is that in European
legends of processes the earlier you
come to the table the more effective you
are the same letter that you could send
one day before the final vote will mean
nothing but if you send it months before
the dossiers actually will you so the
consultation has launched you can really
bring at least to the table that will
it'll end up in the law that's what we
have done is every Center works with
platform regulation to you which is an
attempt to actually solve that problem
in the form of requests for comments
it's an RFC based website and you can
please comment on that and we'll of
course continuously increase these ideas
and hopefully we will see some of them
are later than in the law and the
legislation that will be released then
lastly every Center works is a donation
funded organization we have very strict
rules on our fundraising and the work we
do which is a public watchdog is also
not welcomed by many people because we
can't be bought we actually always try
to speak truth to power and that means
we are even more dependent on the
support of many individuals and a
diverse group of supporting members
what makes this work possible and you
can become one if you go to support
epicenter of works my time fried bit
Mason
fellow artwork if you want to be updated
on this file if you want to take part in
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concerns all of you you follow our work
you follow the best newsletter in Europe
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have thank you thanks for questions
[Music]
thank you so much thank you so much
again the contact details are here and
we have questions from the internet and
we have questions here in the room clock
and I would like to start with number
two please thank you so when lobbying
against some of the things that we will
be lobbying against in the coming years
one thing I hear is the threat speech is
a human right but threat of reach never
has been so how how do i how do you
react to that how do i best tracks that
sorry could you repeat the question like
yes yes so what what people say is the
threat of speech is obviously human
right but the right of reach that is
using the platforms is not yeah yeah I
mean it's it is actually touching on the
complicated thing because it's actually
a very simplistic view to just think
that it's about content just being
published or being taken down or deleted
in in many cases it is about algorithmic
curation what actually ends up in the
newsfeed it is also about which content
gets monetized when gets a user
suspended if content gets the leader
does it also get notified to no
authorities but often that content is
also evidence for for a crime if we
speak about the stuff witnessed on
August working on in Syria or the
documentation of child abusers all of
these things actually deletion could not
be the most viable step to take and we
wanted to talk about that but because of
time we didn't go into the detail but
the policy proposals are all tackling
that and when it comes to the question
of responsibility and algorithms there
will be a separate dossier that we don't
know much about but there are rumors the
AI regulation which also might be mixed
together both the DSA come in
conjunction we don't know it yet because
those decisions haven't been taken yet
but you surely will see these questions
also being addressed in the ongoing
letters of term of to you thank you
okay we're gone we're never question
from the internet please signal angel
hello so one of the questions from the
Internet is does the law require
Facebook and Google to snoop data that
is not pleasant it to the public to
snoop data in the sense of monitoring it
monitor yes it's actually a good
question I mean if we talk about a
private whatsapp group or private
Facebook group it all depends on the
under national legislation if there I'd
only know it from Austria if you have
more than a certain number of people in
that group you have a public forum and
for example if you would deny the
Holocaust and in such a closed for
whatsapp or Facebook group that would
still be an illegal offense but then the
question is are or where's the judge so
like if that gets notified to the
platform they should take action and for
a facebook group Facebook could do that
and would probably also do it if they
would do their job on and to end
encrypted
what's up channel they simply cannot
technically if they are not party to
that communication I hope that answers
the question okay thank you we have
another question at microphone one
please
hello I'm from the United States I run a
non-profit transit Internet service
provider by running about 6% of Tor
network exit capacity so I facilitate
quite a bit of onion circuits which are
decentralized and end-to-end encrypted
so we can't see what's in them how does
this affect me and what how can I get
involved and can I get involved
via Condit yeah I think where you would
fall actually nowadays would be the
definition of mere conduit
intermediaries which have less
responsibilities than hosting providers
and because you're just providing like
the network like not really hosting it
on your own servers if I understand
correctly this that the rules that I
mentioned with the knowledge and like
the responsibility and the liability
exemption doesn't even imply to you
you're more protected and neither as for
the digital services like what's gonna
be coming up I'm not sure but I don't
think there is it intent to actually
modify the rules that apply to Aamir
Khan do it it's more for like the
hosting providers like the big ones the
forums the blogs and so on yeah okay
thank you
microphone two please
so given how we again how with this
question for example we see how where
the responsibility falls is also a bit
part of the negotiation as well so we
have given you have given an
interpretation now of how this law
effects the current way that publishing
works in the internet but don't you
think that this change can also
incentivize innovation in the way that
we do publishing on the internet and
maybe incentivize more decentralized
approaches to publishing nearly in order
to escape responsibility of course I
mean one reason would be that platforms
just die off yeah everybody has to all
have their own website again but you
where would the discussion then happen
you know like in the RSS feeds that we
all have on our desktop PCs even
something like mastodons would be
directly in scope of legislation like
this so every type of application every
type of news feed every type of
interaction even would fall within the
scope of that law and that's why
interoperability I think is nice
synthesis of this central
the central debate okay thank you I'm
very sorry I see we have more questions
but unfortunately time is up please give
another expert applause for Chloe and
tamo-guna thank you so much
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