Facebook to Give Special Access to French Regulators
November 12 2018 - 2:28PM
Dow Jones News
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)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Aug 2024 to Sep 2024
Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META)
Historical Stock Chart
From Sep 2023 to Sep 2024