EU Censorship News

The GDPR is a reprehensible and bureaucratic law that is impossible to fully comply with, and dictates an onerous process of risk assessments that are enforced by inspection and audits. It is not the sort of thing that you would wish on your grandmother. So the law makers built in an important exclusion such that the law does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the exercise of a purely personal or household activity.

But now a Dutch court has weighed in and decided that this important exclusion does not applying to posting family pictures on the likes of Twitter.

The court got involved in a family dispute between a grandmother who wanted to post pictures of her grand children on social against the wishes of the mother.

The court decided that the posting of pictures for public consumption on social media went beyond 'purely personal or household activity'. The details weren't fully worked out, but the court judgement suggested that they may have taken a different view had the pictures been posted to a more restricted audience, say to Facebook friends only. But saying that such nuance doesn't apply to Twitter where posts are by default public.

The outcome of the case was that the grandmother was therefore in the wrong and has been ordered to remove the pictures from her social media accounts.

But the horrible outcome of this court judgement is that anyone posting pictures of private individuals to Twitter must now register as a data controller, so requiring submission to the full bureaucratic nightmare that is the GDPR.

Polish public radio has censored an anti-government song that topped the charts and was then removed from the station's website.

Kazik's Your Pain is Better than Mine is widely seen as criticising the head of Poland's ruling nationalist party.

The station director has claimed the chart was fixed, but MPs from the ruling party as well as the opposition have condemned the song's removal. ?

The song's theme is grieving and the lockdown of the nation's cemeteries during the coronavirus outbreak. Kazik Staszewski's song doesn't mention Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the head of Law and Justice, by name, but his target is pretty clear.

When cemeteries were closed, Kaczynski still visited the Warsaw grave of his mother and the graves of victims of a Russian air disaster in Smolensk in which his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, was killed. By Friday, Kazik's song had topped Poland's renowned chart on Radio Three, highlighting a sense of one law for ordinary Poles and another for the ruling party's leader.

Shortly after the chart show was broadcast, internet links and news about the veteran singer's hit were disabled on the website of Radio Three, known as Trojka.The chart is voted on by Trojka listeners and station boss Tomasz Kowalczewski insisted it had been manipulated: We already know for sure that this song did not win. It was manually moved to number one. In other words, it was fixed for sure, he claimed.

France has adopted a new censorship law forcing internet companies to take down content that that the government doesn't like at breakneck speed.

After months of debate, the lower house of Parliament adopted the legislation, which will require platforms such as Google, Twitter and Facebook to remove flagged hateful content within 24 hours and flagged terrorist propaganda within one hour. Failure to do so could result in fines of up to 1.25 million euro.

The new rules apply to all websites, whether large or small. But there are concerns that only internet giants such as Facebook and Google actually have the resources to remove content as quickly as required.

Digital rights group La Quadrature du Net said the requirement to take down content that the police considered terrorism in just one hour was impractical.

The worrying outcome maybe that small companies are forced to present their content via larger US companies that can offer the capability that content will be censored automatically on receiving a complaint. This will of course result in the likes of Google taking even more control of the internet.

The law, which echoes similar rules already in place in Germany, piles more pressure on Silicon Valley firms to police millions of daily posts in Europe's two most populous countries.

The censorship law targets search engines as well as social media companies, has been the source of plenty of controversy. Online digital rights groups, tech companies, opposition parties have all criticized the initiative, and the Senate has led an effort to water it down by deleting the systematic deadline for removing content.

Opponents argued in particular that the law would lead to lawful content being taken down and would hand too much power to the companies charged with making decisions on what content is considered obviously unlawful.

The European Commission has also voiced criticism , writing to the French government in November to ask for the legislation to be postponed. The EU executive argued that Paris should wait for its own planned rules on platforms, the Digital Services Act, to pass to set a common EU-wide standard on policing illegal content online.