Introduction

Pages2-3
2
Illegal content online
June2018
Report
Flash Eurobarometer469
INTRODUCTION
The European Commission has taken a series of targeted and horizontal measures to curb the
spread of illegal contentonline, including onsuch as hate speech, child sexual abuse material,
incitement to terrorism, consumer scams and content that infringes intellectual property rights. On
28thSeptember 2017 t he Commission adopte d a Communic ation on tackling illegal content online,
towards enhancing responsibility of online platforms1. Following on from this, on March 1 2018, the
Commission issued a Recommendation on measures to effectively tackle illegal content online2.
This Recommendation emphasises the need for online platforms to take greater responsibility when
it comes to the governance of online content. It clearly sets out the processes online platforms
shouldput in place to enhance the detection and removal of illegal content. These include clearer
rules for notifying illegal content, more proactive tools and technologies to identify and remove
illegal content, and, importantly, stronger safeguards to ensure decisions to remove content are
accurate and well-founded3.
To explore Europeans’ experience of illegal content online, and their opinions about the role and
responsibility of online platforms, this surveyexploresthe following areas:
!!The use of various types of online hosting services;
!!Views about the safety of the Internetand addressing illegal content online;
!!The types of illegal content encountered online, the actions taken as a result, and satisfaction
with the hosting service’s response;
!!Respondents’ experiences of having legal content wrongfully blocked, the reasons given for
this and including the actions taken as a result;
!!Opinions about the actions Internethosting services should take to address illegal content
online, including content removal and the right of appeal.
This survey was carried out by the TNS Political & Social network in all 28 Member States of the
European Union, between 18and 26 June2018.Some 33,244respondentsfrom different social
and demographic groups were interviewed via telephone intheir mother tongue on behalf of the
DirectorateGeneral for Communications Network s, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT).
The methodology used is that of Flash Eurobarometer surveys as carried out by the Directorate-
General for Communication “Media monitoring, media analysisand Eurobarometer” Unit)4 .. A
technical note on the manner in which interviews were conducted by the Institutes within the TNS
Political & Social network is appended as an annex to this report. Also included are the interview
methods and confidence intervals5.
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1https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52017DC0555
2https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/commission-recommendation-measures-effectively-tackle-illegal-content-online
3https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/illegal-content-online-platforms
4http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/index_en.htm
5The results tables are included in the annex. It should be noted that the total of the percentages in the tables of this report may exceed
100% when th e respondent has the possibility of giving several an swers to the quest ion.

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