Online content filtering in EU law – A coherent framework or jigsaw puzzle?

Abstract

With the spread of global digital services, the need to establish effective barriers to the dissemination of illegal content has also grown. Online services, instead of supporting the building of social relationships and allowing the free exchange of ideas, are increasingly becoming platforms for spreading hate speech or promoting extremist behaviour. The commitment to respect fundamental rights on which the Union has been built also requires those rights to be protected in cyberspace. Increasingly, one measure implemented to achieve this goal is filtering or blocking illegal content.In recent years, as a result of both the jurisprudence of European courts and the activity of the EU legislature, content filtering measures are increasingly used in an automatic and often also preventive manner. The freedom to use them on the part of digital service providers raises obvious concerns about compliance with human rights standards, often leading to allegations of implementing a new form of ``digital censorship''.Assuming that content filtering will be a measure that will be increasingly used in an automatic manner, it is particularly important to establish adequate standards of legal safeguards to protect against the risk of their abuse.The purpose of this article is to explain why the regulations currently being introduced do not create a coherent regulatory model and de facto hamper the effective protection of end-user rights and public security objectives, by introducing a series of often overlapping legal requirements. In this respect, the mosaic of various regulations does not facilitate the definition of a coherent standard of legal safeguards, which in turn delimits the boundaries of the application of automatic content filtering measures.