Say No to Online Censorship in Europe!

March 6, 2018

The EU is finalising a new censorship proposal. If it becomes law, the content you try to upload and share with your friends will be filtered out and banned by bots, all in the name of copyright protection. 

HRMI together with partners is joining the campaign “Say No to Online Censorship in Europe!” urging  European parliamentarians to vote against this proposal that would restrict freedom of expression online. If the new EU copyright proposal is passed, YouTube, Facebook and other file-sharing platforms would be forced to implement new algorithms to check whether the content you upload has any copyrighted elements. Bots would judge what you can share – and what can be shared with you. They would filter out and ban anything that might cause a problem. Any problem.

Disproportionate content filtering

Copyright protection is important for everyone. But with this proposal, the EU has developed the wrong tool for the job. They want online companies like YouTube and Facebook to check everything that ordinary people put on the internet and filter out any upload that contains copyrighted material. For example, that video of your friends having at a music festival that you wanted to post to Facebook? It could be banned because there’s copyrighted music in the background. That hilarious meme you wanted to tweet? Banned because it uses an image from a film.

In the face of the threat of censorship on the Internet and limitation of freedom of expression, the initiators of the campaign call on all to address MEPs and write a letter calling on them to vote against this initiative.

Source: https://www.liberties.eu/en/campaigns/protect-free-speech-campaign-online-censorship/249