France has filed a legal complaint against three social media platforms namely Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This is due to the homophobic content that the platforms have failed to remove.
The legal complaint has been filed by three French anti-racism associations on Sunday. The content is said to be hateful comments and posts geared towards the LGBTQ community, Fortune reported. As per the French law, websites are required to take down racists, homophobic or anti-semitic materials.
The three anti-racism associations have been identified as the French Jewish students union called UEJF, anti-racism campaigners SOS Racisme, and anti-homophobia campaigner SOS Homophobie. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter reportedly only removed a fraction of the 586 examples they have submitted, which had hateful content from the end of March until May 10, RFI reported.
Accordingly, Twitter removed only 4 percent, YouTube removed only 7 percent, and Facebook removed only 34 percent. UEJF president Sacha Reingewirtz said in a statement that the three companies have huge profits and pay little taxes making their "refusal to invest in the fight against hate is unacceptable." As per the figures itself, Twitter removed only eight of 205 hate messages while YouTube took down 16 out of 225 items.
Facebook, on the other hand, deleted 53 out of 156 items. However, the three groups were not satisfied with the results as they pointed out that the platform manifests a "rigorous application of its rules on pornography." The groups said that this outcome raises questions regarding the consistency of the community's standards between America and France.
SOS Racisme chairman, Dominique Sopo, also released a statement saying that the three platforms are more shocked by bare breasts as they are quickly censored than by "incitements to hate people or groups of people," The Telegraph reported.
Germany was able to get Facebook, Google, and Twitter to agree last December to delete hate speeches from their websites in a span of 24 hours.
