META Meta Platforms Inc

By Sam Schechner 

PARIS -- A team of French regulators will spend six months monitoring how Facebook Inc. removes certain kinds of illicit content as part of a pilot program to establish a new model for regulating global technology companies.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced the project Monday as part of a call for tighter regulation of Silicon Valley companies, in areas including copyright, terrorism and competition law.

The partnership, which is slated to begin in January, would represent broader and deeper access to Facebook's moderation efforts than previously offered to outside officials around the world, according to a person familiar with the matter. Still, it stops short -- at least for now -- of allowing French regulators any say in how Facebook polices specific pieces of content.

Government officials, instead, would be invited onto company premises, to understand how Facebook monitors, and then takes down, content deemed hate speech. Facebook likely won't allow regulators to peer over moderators' shoulders as they review actual content because of user-privacy concerns, the person added. Officials will likely visit Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and Dublin, where the company has based its European operations, Facebook said.

In a nearly hourlong speech before the Internet Governance Forum, a yearly policy meeting organized by the United Nations, Mr. Macron added his support for several bills already under consideration in the European Union, including one mandating deletion of terrorist propaganda under threat of fines. He also issued new proposals, including the Facebook-partnership experiment, saying companies must take greater responsibility for their behavior.

The question of how to regulate tech superpowers has gained traction over the past year as part of a broader backlash against big tech companies. Detractors accuse technology giants of a litany of offenses, including addicting a generation to smartphones, overwhelming competitors with their scale and undermining democratic discourse with social media tools. Legislators on both sides of the Atlantic have hauled in tech CEOs to testify.

The backlash has put big tech companies on the defensive. In some cases, they have tried to get ahead of governments by promoting some level of regulation themselves. They have also defended themselves aggressively along diverse fronts. Executives have said they strive to balance the demands of regulators with their ability to provide services for their customers. They also say they worry about various countries implementing conflicting rules that apply globally in areas ranging from taxes to the "right to be forgotten."

The French government's goal for the pilot program is to monitor how Facebook identifies and removes hate speech to make sure the company's processes are robust, rather than to set strict rules about what is and isn't permissible. After the six-month trial, Facebook and the regulators will issue a joint report suggesting any new regulation the partnership may have determined to be possible or necessary. Any new rule making may include continued -- or deeper -- access to Facebook's internal processes, government officials said.

Mr. Macron has painted himself as an interlocutor between Europe and Silicon Valley. He has, on one hand, wooed tech companies' investments with tax cuts and business-friendly reforms of labor law. But over the last year, France has also led calls for new taxes aimed at tech giants and joined in demanding financial penalties for failure to quickly remove terrorist content. He now also is taking on a leading role calling for more government oversight of these companies' core business decisions.

Many of the proposals to rein in tech giants remain hotly contested. The U.S. has accused France and the U.K. of unfairly targeting U.S. companies with their proposals to levy new taxes on tech giants. Internet advocates also argue that new regulations tend to be too rigid to solve their intended problems, while inadvertently helping reinforce the market position of big companies.

"You can create a circumstance where only these large companies can comply with the regulation," said Andrew Sullivan, chief executive officer of the Internet Society, a nonprofit focused on internet technology and policy, on the sidelines of the Internet Governance Forum in Paris.

Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 12, 2018 14:13 ET (19:13 GMT)

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