 Hello everyone. Thanks for joining this quick talk on not a very cheerful topic. My name is Anna Masgal. I am Senior EU Policy Advisor for Wikimedia. I am based in Brussels and I take care of representing our positions and following the procedures on acts of law that are relevant to our movement and that may possibly shape how we work and what we do in Europe. Today I want to talk about regulation on addressing the dissemination of terrorist content online. It is an act of law that has been adopted in April this year. It actually applies from June this year which means that the law is actionable in a sense that governments and also platforms can prepare to implement it and it will be enforced in June 2022. It is important because we are also in the scope of this law of this regulation and it remains to be seen what are exactly the steps of compliance to be taken by the foundation mostly but this is now the time to prepare it. I don't want to talk about those preparations as I'm not the right person to give any information on that but I would like to tell you about how this law came to be and also what is the learnings from our participation or our oversight over this happened for future regulations of that type. The short story of this is that an ill-fated law with WS evidence base targeting an important modern problem with poorly chosen measures went through an exhausting legislative process to be adopted without proper democratic scrutiny due to a procedural peculiarity. I'm going to unpack all this but this is basically the shortest I could come up with in terms of describing how it started and how it's going. We get to the point where I guess we can sum up why it is ill-fated but I think one of the important points is to address the WS evidence base. So basically the European population the citizens were surveyed a few years ago by Eurostat which is the European statistical office about whether they encountered the terrorist content online and only 6% of them actually said that they did which also is very hard to say what exactly they saw because for some people of course it may have been the gruesome videos that are placed by terrorists in different parts of the world that are super violent and obviously we don't want anybody to be exposed to this but also you know for some people it is basically looking at something that is vaguely from another part of the world and that maybe you know it's in the language they don't understand so again this is very hard to describe. Then the European Commission said that because they don't see any apparent connection coming from research between what people see online and how they get radicalized as one official told us at the meeting in the European Parliament they had to make an educated guess and they actually kind of decided that there is a connection between those two things and therefore they designed this law. Obviously this law addresses an important modern problem but addresses it in a way that is still very murky for example it's very hard to say what is this thing that is called terrorist content so I mentioned the violent videos but also since Europol wants to target so-called soft terrorist propaganda for example for them depictions or videos of brown people swimming are also considered to be terrorists so this is obviously a very racist take on what could that be and the legislation does not really you know frame it very well. Then who is a terrorist right depending on where we ask this question we can come up with different answers and different people will come up with different answers so this question can be answered very differently in Middle East but also you know who can be considered terrorists in Europe in countries such as Hungary or Poland for example and also one of the MEPs actually said or tweeted when we proceeded through this whole discussion that you know there are eco-terrorists in Europe and they should be also tackled with this law so so many ideas on how to use it and abuse it. The measures that have been taken have been poor because on top of those murky definitions the administrative powers which is basically governments not only judges can release orders to act upon in one hour to remove content also there is the law is formulated in a way that points out that actually the most effective way to not be liable for such content by a platform is to actually filter the content which is of course very complicated because how an algorithm would know if a given piece of content is part of news cycle or is used for educational purposes or for any other purpose that is not illegal in itself because it doesn't try to convince people to support terrorism. As to legislative process it was a standard one we went through the EU parliament the law went through the EU parliament European parliament then through the discussions that are called trilogues which is between the parliament and the council of the EU which is the gathering of all member states of the EU with participation of European commission and people were to the end very divided over what is the best course of action with this law and finally it happened the finale happened without proper democratic scrutiny because there was actually no vote over the final law due to a procedural problem. So what do we learn from this very quickly? First of all it's very difficult to engage with so-called radioactive topics as the sometimes name them because of course people hear terrorism and everybody says well of course we don't want to support that. In the end when things are not properly defined then we actually are talking about political speech very often and also I think that we should be able to discuss difficult topics when we have an occasion and not just sanitize internet from them. There was a little popular mobilization around it probably because of the topics that's another learning and also because then during the procedures the pandemics happened and of course people had other things to worry about but we also have to think about how to get people more involved in actually understanding this and how can we be better informed because again these important acts shape our future and our work and how the internet will look like. The lack of the vote also caused that some politicians who actually supported our positions were sympathetic to them gave up on opposing this law because of political calculations well they said there will not be a better version of it so we just should vote vote it and get on with it. We also believe that the quality of regulation deteriorated by adopting this law because it established a firm precedent of how the control over speech on internet is actually enforced by private platforms and there is very little oversight on behalf of judges of the judiciary system that actually should be responsible for it and there's little redress for people whose content is actually being removed and also over-removed based on these laws. If you want to know more about this we have a blog it's called wikimedia.brussells that's the URL you can check our recording of what happened and how the process went and also about other laws that that we look into also please look me up and and I will also check the etherpad if you have any questions later on and try to answer them there so thank you very much for being with me and I hope to see you soon in wikimedia in RIMO. Thank you.