President Macron Wants To Establish Social Media Rules That Must Be Responsible For Content On Their Platforms

French President Emmanuel Macron (right) leads the European Union against Big Tech. (photo: instagram)

JAKARTA - The European Union will work towards an unprecedented regulation of social media platforms. French President Emmanuel Macron, stated on Thursday, December 9, that this new regulation will establish responsibility for hateful content.

France took over the rotating presidency of the 27-member European Council in January at a time when the EU was discussing a new law that stipulates what can and can't be done for global technology companies.

"This is an unprecedented European regulation to fight online hate, to determine the responsibility of these big platforms for their content," Macron said at a news conference in Paris.

"Every day, we have to deal with issues like anti-Semitism, racism, hate speech, and online harassment. There is no international regulation on this today, strictly speaking," Macron said.

EU Competition Chair, Margrethe Vestager, has proposed two sets of rules known as the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act targeting Amazon, Apple, Google's Alphabet unit, and Facebook (Meta Platform Inc).

The special Digital Services Act will force tech giants to do more to tackle illegal content on their platforms, with fines of up to 6% of global turnover for such non-compliance.

The European Commission will start negotiations with EU countries and EU lawmakers next year, with the new rules likely to be adopted in 2023.

This new rule will force the giant social media platforms to hire more employees to select the content that appears on their platforms. In addition, it must also update the algorithm to filter out sentences and words that are suspected of being hateful.

On the other hand, the EU will also force them to be more open to developers or third parties in business participation in online media, especially e-commerce.