France issues 'remove terror content or else' warning

France has approved a new law that will force tech giants to delete terrorism and paedophilia-related content from sites in as little as an hour or be exposed to fines that could total up to four per cent of global revenue.

Global news outlet Reuters has reported that, under the law, platforms will have 24 hours to purge other forms of prohibited, ‘manifestly illicit’ content before they risk a massive fine.

France’s Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet said she believes that the move will force people to ‘think twice before crossing the red line if they know that there is a high likelihood that they will be held to account’.

La Quadrature du Net, a civil liberties group in France, has protested the new rules as setting an unrealistic standard, suggesting the law will enable the police to ‘hound platforms off the web for failing to act within an arbitrary timeline’.

Facebook recently announced it would be launching a machine learning-assisted tool to identify and take down hateful memes and recently reported the removal of 88.8 per cent of hate speech via automated systems in Q1 2020, up from 80.2 per cent the previous quarter.