AMENDMENT TO ACT NO. 264/2022 COLL. - ACT ON MEDIA SERVICES AND ON AMENDMENTS AND ADDITIONS TO CERTAIN ACTS

#77Amendment to Act No. 264/2022 Coll. - Act on Media Services and on Amendments and Additions to Certain Acts

In the intent of the Slovak Republic, we can speak about the establishment of a new body, namely the Media Services Council, which was established on 01.08.2022. On the official website of this Council for Media Services, citizens can make complaints in cases where they have reported so-called "hate speech" on platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, etc., and the platform in question has not removed the content from the online space.

Complaints regarding illegal content are submitted to the regulator in writing or by an electronic company, on the basis of Article 151 of Act No 264/2022. Such a complaint must contain a justification as to why the content in question may constitute illegal content and must make it clear what the specific content is. A complaint concerning illegal content must also include the date on which the content was provided and the name of the content-sharing platform or content service not requiring authorisation under the Media Services Act, in particular an electronic periodical publication, a news website or an agency service, on which the illegal content was provided.

The monitoring of online hate comments, posts, content, and the subsequent efforts to remove them on various platforms should become more widely known to the population. The seriousness of individual material is not easy to decide. We may notice subtle comments that do not directly contain insults, but indirectly attack and label a certain group of people, while such comments or content, once reported, are usually not deleted. On the other hand, there is content that directly attacks individuals or a group and often incites and encourages violence. There is no doubt that for the latter group, the platform should always respond by deleting the content in question after it has been reported by users. If we are talking about large platforms such as Instagram, it has often happened that, when reporting, people receive a response from the platform that they do not have the capacity to check the individual comment and so it is not even deleted. We can also mention cases where one comment is reported repeatedly, and each time the reporter receives a response that the comment does not violate the community rules and therefore will not be deleted.

From the remit of the Media Services Council, to which all the competences once held by the Broadcasting and Retransmission Council have been transferred, this means a number of practical possibilities. More specifically, to highlight the issue- comments that are reported by a user but not deleted by the platform can be a suggestion for a complaint to this Council, as we have already mentioned above. ROMAntici, a group of volunteers who work on hate speech and racial tolerance on the internet, chose serious comments that involved hate speech directed against the Roma community and contained violence or a call to violence. For the first time since the beginning of the Media Services Council, a situation occurred where administrative proceedings were initiated against Google on 25.01.2023. This was a comment that was reported on the YouTube platform, its verbatim wording was as follows: "shoot it all down". The comment was directed at the Roma minority and contained so-called anti-Roma racism. As another example, a comment that was reported on the Facebook platform read as follows: "Burn down the whole settlement and there will be peace from them". After these comments were brought to the attention of the Media Services Council, which took action, Google informed the Council on 31.01.2023 that it had deleted the racist comment on YouTube. After our many unsuccessful reports of individual comments that were not deleted, we have finally seen the desired partial end at least in these two cases. It is very important to note that in order to file a complaint, you should have a screenshot of the original illegal content that was posted, and you should also keep a record of how the platform responded to your report and why it refused to delete it.