Speech: Remarks by Commissioners Avramopoulos and King at the press conference ahead of the EU Internet Forum

Remarks by Commissioner Avramopoulos i

Dear all,

Our global fight against terrorism is more and more happening online. The internet is the most critical battleground.

Daesh is losing territory. There are less fighters travelling to Syria and elsewhere to fight with Daesh.

But their fight is increasingly shifting online, starting with radicalisation. Terrorists are abusing the internet, which is first and foremost a symbol of our fundamental freedoms; a medium of information, of free speech and of connecting people worldwide.

And we all want to keep it that way.

This is why one year ago, I launched the EU i Internet Forum to prevent these abuses of the internet. This is a fight that we cannot fight alone: not governments, or internet companies or civil society alone.

We all need to work together. But trust between all these actors is vital. This is exactly what we established last year, and what we build on today.

There has never been a more critical time for us to focus our minds, efforts, and resources in tackling this online phenomenon.

Our activities, over the past year, demonstrated that a private-public voluntary approach, based on shared values and a joint determination to protect online users, can work. 

The internet referral process that we established through Europol has resulted in a 90% takedown rate terrorist content online. But we have to make sure that what is taken offline stays offline. 

Once something is marked as terrorist material, and taken offline, it shouldn't reappear elsewhere

And that is exactly what we achieve today.

First of all, working with key internet companies such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and Microsoft, we have established a new tool, a sort of database, to make sure that such marked terrorist content never reappears online. And I very much welcome the engagement of these companies.

Secondly, we have to fight ideas with ideas. It is not just about removing terrorist content - it is also about making sure that less terrorist propaganda and narratives appear online in the first place.

This is why we want to empower civil society through an endowment of €10 million to develop effective counter-messages.

Beyond these two major deliverables today, we will also look where this Forum goes next year - because our commitment is long-term. 

Electronic evidence, for example, can be critical in going after terrorists. Getting to that information is extremely difficult when the information is in other countries or even continents.  

I am also worried about cybersecurity. Cyber-attacks are becoming a tool in geopolitics. You have seen the discussion on what happened around the American elections.

I was in the US this week, where I also discussed this issue with our American counterparts. Our cooperation with the US and other strategic partners is crucial to strengthen our systems.

But so is our cooperation with the private sector. If anything is clear, it is that our fight to keep our citizens safe online is a global one, not just across national borders, but also across public and private barriers.

Today, we build and deliver on the trust that we have established between global internet companies, Member States, Europol and civil society.

All of this creates a fertile ground for the future direction of our cooperation - because this is only the beginning.

Remarks by Commissioner King

Dimitri kicked this process off a year ago - and there's been real progress in 12 months.

The fight against radicalisation and hate-fuelled propaganda is one of the defining challenges of our time. And we need to both face up to it and win if we are to avoid descending into some kind of post-truth dark age, or repeating the errors of the past.

We've focused in recent months on radical Islam propaganda - and rightly so considering the attacks on European soil. But there are other equally corrosive forms of propaganda.

A few weeks ago, in the UK, a man was convicted of the brutal murder of someone who used to work here in Brussels in the European Parliament, Jo Cox, an MP. She was murdered by a radicalised far right extremist because of her tolerant, outward looking and, it has to be said, pro-EU views. Her murderer had fed his obsession through far right propaganda available in print and online. The far right nationalists and separatists use the same techniques as the Jihadis of selling a dream to manipulate and instrumentalise those who feel disadvantaged and marginalised in our societies.

There is though not one textbook for extremists - be they Jihadists or right wing extremists. Their online behavior and the methods they use keep changing, eg note the new trend in livestreaming.

This also means our response needs to adapt. And if we don't want to be playing catch-up all the time, we need to work together - across the public sector and with the private sector - and I also want to welcome the hash-sharing project. [We can't stop there though: we need to see how we maximise the number of companies, including small platforms, who use this tool. And how Europol and the project interact so we don't lose important intelligence data.]

More generally, on the "supply side", in terms of take down of extremist and terrorist content, the last 12 months have been pretty successful. The numbers speak for themselves: thanks to Europol's IRU referrals, 20,000 pages taken down in the last year. But that's a drop in the ocean. With more resources, IRU's work could lead to hundreds of thousands of pages removed.

To give you an order of magnitude, only a week ago Europol led a specific 2 day project with a number of Member States to identify material to be referred. Nearly 2,000 pieces were assessed - in a couple days.

That's why I am taking this opportunity to urge Member States once again to deploy more staff to Europol. For example, the IRU needs more langauge experts: those who look at proproganda online usually do so in their own language.

The counterterrorism directive we've just agreed also includes new requirements on Member States. We need to think about complementarity of action here - what the directive requires and what's being done already - so that in the end we have much greater prompt removal of online content and greater blocking of access to such content.

I also want to welcome the automatic text detection and extraction capacity tool that Twitter has been using in recent months and is already having a big impact operationally. It will help protect its users and I hope other companies will soon follow suit.

Reducing the supply of terrorist and extremist online content is one side of the coin: the other is the demand side.

It's tough but we need to develop persuasive counter narratives that offer a clear alternative vision to those tempted by radical extremism. We have to target the people the recruiters are targeting and offer them a different, better path.

There are long-term challenges here: education, employment and inclusion. More immediately, Dimitri has mentioned the €10 million to equip civil society actors with the skills to develop their own positive alternative narratives. I urge the companies present today to actively support that programme.

So we're making progress but let's be clear that we're in for the long haul. All of us.

Extremism in all of its forms must be the target of our action - and tolerance and inclusiveness the key elements of our response.

We'll never rid the internet of all terrorist material. But we can make it harder for terrorists to disseminate their propaganda, we can reduce the number of platforms available to them, and that is well worth the effort.

SPEECH/16/4329