Lawmakers in France this week passed a controversial new law that could impose billions in fines on social media companies that fail to delete certain kinds of content quickly enough—within an hour, in some cases.

The new legislation (page in French) gives online platforms 24 hours from notification to remove certain kinds of content or else face fines.

Content subject to enforcement under the law includes: sexual harassment; child pornography; anything that promotes certain crimes; anything that promotes discrimination, hate, or violence; anything that denies crimes against humanity; and promotion of terrorism. The window for removing content related to child pornography or terrorism is shorter, only one hour.

A company that fails to remove such content within the correct time limit after being notified of it can be fined €1.25 million ($1.35 million). If a regulatory board finds a company is not meeting its obligations, it can impose a maximum fine equal to 4 percent of that company’s annual global revenue.

For a sense of scale, Facebook’s total revenue for calendar year 2019 was about $70.6 billion, so 4 percent of that would be about $2.8 billion. Alphabet’s global revenue for the same time period was about $162 billion, 4 percent of which would be around $6.5 billion.

The measure was broadly popular in the National Assembly, passing by a vote of 355 to 150 (47 members did not vote). Critics, however, argue it stifles free speech, which is not a constitutional guarantee in many other nations as it is in the United States.

La Quadrature du Net, a French organization that advocates for digital privacy rights, warned in a statement that the new law could provide “a new tool to abuse… power and censor the internet for political ends.”

Facebook in a statement said that “fighting online hate has been a top priority” for the company for many years, adding, “We have clear rules against it and have invested in people and technology to better identify and remove it.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1675828