Welcome to the European Parliamentary Research Service podcast on tackling online terrorist

propaganda.

The European Union is determined to clamp down on the dissemination of terrorist content

online, to prevent radicalisation and keep European citizens safe online as much as offline.

But this is a sensitive area, and with a thin line to tread, let's look into some of the

finer details of the proposed measures. Stay with us.

The Internet is a double-edged sword. It creates millions of new opportunities, some are good,

some not so much. It is a powerful communication tool and endless source of information,

but is also widely used to spread hatred, violence and terrorist propaganda. Terrorist organizations

use the internet to spread their ideas more

effectively, recruit new terrorists and even to train them online. According to the European

Commission, between 200 and 400 online platforms are currently hosting content that could lead

to terrorist radicalisation. In this context and seeing that voluntary measures have proved to be largely insufficient,

the European Commission presented in 2018 a packet of new obligatory legal measures

aimed at preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online.

Based on the principle that what is illegal offline is illegal online,

the measures aimed at obliging hosting services to detect, identify and remove terrorist content

within one hour of reporting or face fines of up to 4% of their global turnover. But what is

terrorist content? Illegal terrorist content is defined as

information that is used to incite and glorify terrorist acts, encourage the contribution to

and provide instructions for committing terrorist offences or promote participation in terrorist groups.

The problem of such measures is that they are close to the limit when it comes to the respect

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