Introduction

• Pages: 2-3

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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

DirectorateｌGeneral 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.