Recent upset with online content on social media has caused regulations to be once again questioned, and potentially expanded.

We recently published news regarding Donald Trump’s tweet regarding the George Floyd protests, which was hidden by Twitter and left available by Facebook. The EU is now in the midst of discussing a new law that will take effect in France, if passed. This regulation incentivises companies to remove distressing, but not necessarily illegal, content. 14 categories of content-related offences are covered by this proposed regulation, ranging from content which could be perceived as distressing to extremely disturbing content.

The regulation targets large companies and is specified for businesses in France over a certain number of users (the threshold is yet to be determined). Companies that receive an alert to remove content will have either one or 24 hours to remove it. This depends on whether the company is a “host”, “platform” or “website publisher”. Social media companies will be subject to both rules. Fines of up to €1.25m can be served, in addition to GDPR-like administrative fines of up to €20m, or 4% of total annual global revenues, for those who fail to comply with the law’s new internal compliance rules. Directors and employees can also be fined, or even imprisoned.

Opposition parties to this regulation have flagged up the issue of freedom of speech. Stricter surveillance of online content may result in users not being able to voice their opinions or state controversial facts. This has been highlighted already when the French authority ordered Google+ to remove a post last year, which Google refused to do. The post in question depicts the French president and his prime minister as dictators. If the new regulation comes into force, companies will have less time to evaluate content and could face high penalties, therefore their responses could be different to the situation above resulting in more posts being removed.

This new regulation in France is a reflection of countries not trusting the companies who own these platforms to police themselves effectively. Social media companies have improved their responses, shown by Twitter’s reaction to Trump’s controversial tweet, although recent discussion indicates further regulations are warranted.