The European Commission presented on Wednesday May 11 a draft regulation imposing obligations on online service providers to detect, report and remove child pornography images, worrying about their increasing distribution.
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Brussels also proposes the establishment of a European center for the fight against sexual abuse committed against children, an independent agency which will be based in The Hague and will share resources with Europol.
In particular, it will be responsible for collecting reports from platforms.
“
Our society today is failing to protect children
,” said EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson.
The Covid-19 pandemic with its lockdowns has made the problem worse, with a 64% increase in reports between 2020 and 2021, according to the British observatory Internet Watch Foundation (IWF).
She pointed out that in 2021, 85 million sex videos and photos involving minors were reported, according to data from the US Center for Missing and Exploited Children, NCMEC.
"
And that's just the tip of the iceberg
," said the Swedish official.
Up to 95% of reports of such illegal content in 2020 came from Facebook,
“, notes the Commission.
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Designation of an independent authority
Until now, service providers and messaging services on the Internet proceed voluntarily to the detection of these illegal contents.
Brussels now wants to force them to be proactive, under penalty of sanctions.
This legislation, which is part of a strategy announced in 2020, is part of the more general framework of the EU regulation on digital services ("
Digital Services Act
», DSA) aimed at regulating digital platforms, which provides for fines of up to 6% of their annual turnover in the event of an infringement.
The new regulation provides for the obligation for platforms to assess the risks of their services being used to disseminate child pornography, or for the solicitation of children by paedophiles, and to put in place preventive measures.
Member States must designate an independent authority responsible for monitoring that the platform fulfills these obligations, empowered to request, if necessary, a court or an administrative authority to issue a detection order, targeted and limited in time.
The Commission expects providers to “
use detection technologies that are the least privacy intrusive possible
”.
