EU Censorship News

Irish President Higgins has signed the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill into law.

The OSMR Act 2022 amends the Broadcasting Act 2009 to establish Coimisiún na Meán (a multi-person Media Commission), dissolve the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, establish a regulatory framework for online safety, update the regulation of television broadcasting and video on-demand services, and transpose the revised Audiovisual Media Services Directive into Irish law.

The regulatory framework for online safety will be overseen by an Online Safety Commissioner, who will be empowered to make binding Online Safety Codes to hold designated online services to account for how they tackle the availability of some of the most serious forms of harmful online content. The Commissioner is also empowered under the Act to introduce an individual complaints mechanism on a phased basis, focusing initially on children and to order the removal or limitation of availability of specific items of harmful online content, either on foot of a complaint or on its own initiative.

Updates to the regulation of television broadcasting and video on-demand services will bring video on-demand services under statutory regulation for the first time. Providers of such services will, as broadcasters currently are, be subject to binding codes and rules, including in relation to advertising, accessibility and impartiality in news and current affairs.

Coimisiún na Meán will have a modern suite of robust compliance and enforcement powers, including the powers to appoint authorised officers to conduct investigations of suspected non-compliance, to require the provision of information and to seek administrative financial sanctions of up to 20 million euros or 10% of turnover. Ultimately, providers of regulated services under the Act who remain in breach of the rules may be subject to criminal prosecution.

The French government has announced a global initiative for online child safety.

The purpose of the Children Online Protection Laboratory is to incentivize researchers, campaigners, and tech giants to come up with measures to best protect children online.

Tech giants Google , Amazon, Meta, and TikTok , as well as Dailymotion said they will sign a charter.

In the first year, the participants of the Child Protection Laboratory will focus on developing systems for detecting sexual predators posing as minors and a shared database to detect and remove explicit images shared non-consensually. However, the other aspects of the proposal include looking into online age verification, a move that could restrict online privacy for all users.

In the past few years, Macron's government has pushed for reforms in online child safety. However, some of the efforts have not been successful. For instance, the legislation requiring adult websites to verify age has not been enforced, yet it was passed over two years ago. The highest court in the country, the Cour de Cassation has until January to rule on whether the Constitutional Council should review if the age verification rules violate the Constitution and if they are a major threat to privacy in the country.

France has passed laws requiring age verification for porn websites and moralist campaign groups are clamouring for the implementation and enforcement of said age verification.

However the law does not specify how age verification should work. The country's data protection authorities have proposed a privacy preserving solution that seems way too complex to be practical.

Now MPs are getting frustrated by the impasse leading to a suggestion that using a bank payment card could be a pragmatic solution to the dilemma.

France's Secretary of State for Children Charlotte Caubel has been speaking in the National Assembly and has suggested that the use of a bank card to watch porn online could act as a filter to guarantee the prohibition of access to pornography for minors.

We are going to make things happen quite seriously , assured Charlotte Caubel before the Delegation for the Rights of the Child. She notably mentioned the use of a bank card as a filter, for zero or one euro in order to allow access to pornographic sites. She added that

It would not be a perfect filter, but already if we can protect 30 or 40% (of minors), let's be pragmatic. My child, when he uses his credit card, I have an alert, I'll see if it's on Youporn or on McDonald s,

Germany has fined the messaging app Telegram $5 million for refusing to comply with German censorship orders.

The Federal Office of Justice claimed that the messaging platform has refused to create a way for users to report illegal content or established a physical office where complaints can be filed, as required by German laws governing social media platforms.

German authorities added that their attempts to contact Telegram executives in the United Arab Emirates have failed.

Telegram can appeal the fine.

In September 2021, France's Ministry of Economics and Finance requested access to the account balances and number of monthly transactions for all individual and business bank accounts in France. Not only did the Ministry of Economics and Finance want access to this sensitive personal data but it also wanted to be able to collect this data in real-time.

This is an extension to the current database of bank accounts that records the existence and ownership of all personal and business accounts but does not currently record balances and transactions.

French news outlet BFMTV reported that the request was ultimately denied by France's Interministerial Directorate of Digital (DINUM).

But this attempt to harvest highly sensitive bank account data from French citizens in real-time reflects a growing push by governments around the world to scoop up increased amounts of financial data from their citizens.