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The law on online hate passes the course of the national assembly. What to remember?


The AVIA law was passed Tuesday in the National Assembly by a majority with 433 votes in favor, 33 against and 69 abstentions. 

"  What is not tolerated in the street should no longer be on the Internet,  " are the words of Laetitia Avia, MP LREM who had tabled the bill last March.

AVIA law: the proposal to fight hatred on the internet


The AVIA law was tabled last March by La RÃ © sion en Marche, Laetitia Avia. The purpose of his bill was to require online services of certain importance to withdraw their illegal content within 24 hours or, in the event of repeated non-reactivity, to be fined by the CSA. 

This pecuniary sanction could represent at most 4% of the turnover of the Internet actor concerned. 

The fight against cyber-hate is therefore committed and the text voted on Tuesday by the deputies, in the first reading, which aims to empower the platforms and search engines by giving them the burden of deleting and dereferencing prohibited content.

Mission impossible for the giants of the net?


De-publishing illegal content in less than 24 hours is a major challenge for Internet players. 

Platforms can not currently manage content posted by their users. Identifying these offenses in less than 24 hours is, therefore, a major issue for which some platforms have begun to take action. 

Instagram, for example, has already set up an automatic detection of abusive language: Restrict. 

Artificial intelligence will allow, during a publication, to detect offensive messages, thanks to the recognition of a lexical field correspondingAs we explained to you a few days ago, the social network will, thanks to Restrict, invite the author of the publication to moderate his remarks on pain of seeing his account suspended. 

In this trend, Twitter also planned to act: a tweet reported as hateful will be deleted directly by site administrators.

A proposal deemed "too vague" by several organizations


In response to this bill, six organizations sent an open letter a few days ago to the ministers and parliamentarians concerned by this bill. 

Thus, Internet Society France, Digital Renaissance, Internet Foundation new generation, Internet without borders or the League of Human Rights and the National Council of Digital have decided to denounce this proposal, and possible future law, judging it "  too vague  ". 

Among the criticisms made, are denounced the complexity of the definition of hate content online as well as the strict framework of the "  manifestly illicit  " character of contents considered as "discriminatory insults". 

At present, the contents covered by the bill are those "  making the apology of crimes against humanity , causing the commission of acts of terrorism, glorifying such acts or with a breach the dignity of the human person , incitement to hatred , violence , discrimination or insult to a person or a group of persons on the basis of origin, alleged race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or true disability or supposed  ". To this list are added pimping, sexual harassment or child pornography. 

The different organizations, therefore, highlight that beyond hatred, violent content is also taken into account in this law. According to their open letter, it makes it difficult to judge and establish content as hateful, especially without the intervention of justice.

The voted proposal includes provisions prohibited by law


As La Quadrature du Net presents, the most dangerous obligation lies in the restriction of content reposts deemed prohibited. Indeed, when a platform will remove hateful content, it will have to monitor all the posts of its users to ensure that the deleted content is not rebroadcast. 

However, this surveillance is strictly prohibited by the European Union. 

In addition, another provision remains sensitive: that which wants the giants of the web to share the banned information having a hateful character via a database. It would be fed by the giants of the web whenever illegal content would be detected.

This type of database already exists for terrorist content, based on a system of algorithms. This makes it possible to reference the deleted content so that it is not re-posted on another platform. 

That's the whole problem: what can be likened to a judge's decision in a court is here replaced by the sole judgment of the platforms. This can then denote a decline in injustice for the benefit of Internet platforms and the CSA. The latter is indeed given an additional authority, especially in the ability to force actors to comply with the lists established by the giants of the web. 

As stated by the Secretary of State for Digital, " this bill is a base, a step, not a final standard. We are only at the beginning of the regulatory process. 

Now remains that this bill will be considered by the Senate, in September! 

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