Today the European Commission released the results of its fifth evaluation of the 2016 Code of Conduct on countering illegal hate speech online. The results are overall positive with IT companies assessing 90% of flagged content within 24 hours and removing 71% of the content deemed to be illegal hate speech. However, the platforms need to further improve transparency and feedback to users. They also have to ensure that flagged content is evaluated consistently over time; separate and comparable evaluations carried out over different time periods showed divergences in performance.
The fifth evaluation shows that on average:
– 90% of flagged content was assessed by the platforms within 24 hours, whereas it was only 40% of contents in 2016.
– 71% of the content deemed to be illegal hate speech was removed in 2020, whereas only 28% of content were removed in 2016.
– The average removal rate, similar to the one recorded in the previous evaluations, shows that platforms continue to respect freedom of expression and avoid removing content that may not qualify as illegal hate speech.
– Platforms responded and gave feedback to 67.1 % of the notifications received. This is higher than in the previous monitoring exercise (65.4%). However, only Facebook informs users systematically; all the other platforms have to make improvements.
Next steps
The results obtained in the context of the implementation of the Code of Conduct over the last four years will feed into the ongoing reflections on how to strengthen measures whose objectives are to address illegal content online in the future Digital Services Act Package on which the Commission recently launched a public consultation. The Commission will consider ways to prompt all platforms dealing with illegal hate speech, to set up effective notice-and-action systems. In addition, the Commission will continue in 2020 and 2021 to facilitate the dialogue between IT companies and civil society organisations working on the ground to tackle illegal hate speech, in particular to foster the engagement with content moderation teams, and mutual understanding on local legal specificities of hate speech.
Source: The Commission
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