Terrorism & social mediaEuropean govts. urge U.S. tech companies to remove terrorist-related postings from sites

The terror attacks in Paris have led French and German authorities to call on U.S. tech firms to help identify terrorist communications and remove hate speech from social media sites. The United Kingdom has also, for several months now, pressed Internet firms to be proactive in removing extremist content such as videos of sermons by radical Islamic preachers or recruitment material, from their sites. German interior minister Thomas de Maizière has called on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites to work closely with law enforcement authorities. “The less people take responsibility, the more legislators will be forced to take the initiative,” he said at a recent cybersecurity conference.

U.S. tech firms do not see themselves as digital police forces, but they fear potential laws which may limit their operations in Europe.

“Just because the vast majority of this content is found on American services doesn’t reduce their impact on French people,” said French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve. “We won’t succeed in our fight against terrorism unless Internet actors start taking responsibility.”

The Wall Street Journal notes that these recent requests for more cooperation between U.S. tech firms and European governments contrast with calls from many of the same governments who, following the Edward Snowden leaks, criticized U.S. tech firms for being too close to law enforcement agencies. The Paris attacks certainly have much to do with this shift in rhetoric, one U.S. tech executive points out.

Two week since the attacks, French authorities have flagged and requested the removal of more than 25,000 terrorist-supporting postings on Internet sites. “It’s a major issue,” Cazeneuve said. In response, hackers linked to terror groups, including the Islamic State (ISIS), have launched almost 1,300 cyberattacks aimed to take offline French Web sites or defacing them with pro-jihadi messages. On Tuesday, French newspaper Le Monde, confirmed that hackers linked to ISIS unsuccessfully attempted to take control of its publishing tools.

“This is something we’ve never seen before,” said Vice Adm. Arnaud Coustillière, head of cyberdefense for the French army.

U.S. tech firms object to European governments’ requests for pre-emptive filtering, partly because it is challenging automatically to distinguish hate speech from sarcasm and hyperbole. Facebook’s vice president for messaging products, David Marcus, said this week that the company individually removes content which supports terrorism. “Anything remotely connected to that is generally gone from the platform the minute we see it,” said Marcus. “If there are requests from law enforcement we make sure they are real requests; if not, we fight back.”

U.S. tech firms also note that they already collaborate with foreign law enforcement authorities in matters of emergency. Following the Paris attacks, Microsoft Corp. answered French authorities’ request for e-mail content from two customer accounts within forty-five minutes. The content delivered to the FBI at France’s request is an example of existing relationships with foreign governments, said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s general counsel. “There are times, especially in emergency situations, when existing international legal processes work well.”

The next few weeks will reveal how tech companies decide to respond to European requests. One U.S. tech executive suggested that the United Kingdom, France, and Germany are pushing for faster responses “just to appear tough on terrorism.”