July 2016

Europol’s Internet Referral Unit (IRU) has been up and running since July 2015 as part of the European Counter Terrorism Centre (ECTC) in the Hague. The unit is charged with monitoring the Internet for extremist propaganda and referring “relevant online content towards concerned Internet service providers” in particular social media.

Much was made of how the IRU could "contact social network service provider Facebook directly to ask it to delete a Web page run by ISIS or request details of other pages that might be run by the same user." Although companies are not required to take down the content, European Commission figures from April 2016 show that the IRU had an effective removal rate of 91 percent. At that time it had assessed more than 4,700 posts across 45 platforms and sent over 3,200 referrals for Internet companies to remove content. The totals now are closer to 8,000 and 7,000, and Europol told Ars it will publish full details in the coming days. In May the European Parliament gave the IRU new powers, and in April it combined forces with the UK National Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) on a 36-hour operation to secure the removal of worrying material as quickly as possible. The content was identified by asking users to report “harmful extremist and terrorist material” via a short, anonymous, online form.

The Cyberspace Administration of China has further tightened its grip on online news reports by warning all news or social network websites against publishing news without proper verification. The cyberspace watchdog said online media could not report any news taken from social media websites without approval.

“All websites should bear the key responsibility to further streamline the course of reporting and publishing of news, and set up a sound internal monitoring mechanism among all mobile news portals [and the social media chat websites] Weibo or WeChat,” Xinhua reported the directive as saying. “It is forbidden to use hearsay to create news or use conjecture and imagination to distort the facts,” it said.

The instruction came only a few days after Xu Lin, formerly the deputy head of the organisation, replaced his boss, Lu Wei, as the top gatekeeper of Chinese Internet affairs.

The United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning countries that prevent or disrupt access to the Internet. The 47-member UN council has passed two resolutions since 2012 affirming people’s digital rights, but the section on Internet blackouts appears to be a first. The resolution passed by consensus “Condemns unequivocally measures to intentionally prevent or disrupt access to or dissemination of information online in violation of international human rights law and calls on all States to refrain from and cease such measure.” The digital rights group Access Now has counted at least 15 Internet shutdowns around the globe in 2015, and 20 in the first half of this year.