YouTube, Facebook and Twitter vowed today to ramp up their fight against illegal online hate speech after the Commission published a third evaluation of its voluntary code of conduct dealing with the issue.
“We are opposed to hate speech in all its forms, and don’t allow it on our platform,” said Thomas Myrup Kristensen, Facebook’s managing director of EU affairs.
“There is always more we can do to tackle hate speech and we are delighted that Instagram is signing up to the Code of Conduct and will take part in the next round of testing.”
Google, on behalf of YouTube, said it would continue boosting its automated tools to fight illegal hate speech. Google+ will also taking part in the efforts.
“There is still more we can do. That’s why we’re now training machine learning models to flag hateful content at scale. We’re committed to being part of the solution on these challenging and complex issues,” said Nicklas Lundblad, Google’s vice president of public policy for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
“These latest results and the success of the Code of Conduct are further evidence that the Commission’s current self-regulatory approach is effective and the correct path forward,” said Stephen Turner, who works on public policy for Twitter.
The Commission has threatened to legislate against internet giants if they fail to remove illegal content ranging from terrorist propaganda to hate speech more quickly.
