Dear all,
Our global fight against terrorism is more and more happening online. The internet is the most critical battleground.
Daesh is losing territory. There are less fighters travelling to Syria and elsewhere to fight with Daesh.
But their fight is increasingly shifting online, starting with radicalisation. Terrorists are abusing the internet, which is first and foremost a symbol of our fundamental freedoms; a medium of information, of free speech and of connecting people worldwide.
And we all want to keep it that way.
This is why one year ago, I launched the EU Internet Forum to prevent these abuses of the internet. This is a fight that we cannot fight alone: not governments, or internet companies or civil society alone.
We all need to work together. But trust between all these actors is vital. This is exactly what we established last year, and what we build on today.
There has never been a more critical time for us to focus our minds, efforts, and resources in tackling this online phenomenon.
Our activities, over the past year, demonstrated that a private-public voluntary approach, based on shared values and a joint determination to protect online users, can work.
The internet referral process that we established through Europol has resulted in a 90% takedown rate terrorist content online. But we have to make sure that what is taken offline stays offline.
Once something is marked as terrorist material, and taken offline, it shouldn’t reappear elsewhere
And that is exactly what we achieve today.
First of all, working with key internet companies such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and Microsoft, we have established a new tool, a sort of database, to make sure that such marked terrorist content never reappears online. And I very much welcome the engagement of these companies.
Secondly, we have to fight ideas with ideas. It is not just about removing terrorist content – it is also about making sure that less terrorist propaganda and narratives appear online in the first place.
This is why we want to empower civil society through an endowment of €10 million to develop effective counter-messages.
Beyond these two major deliverables today, we will also look where this Forum goes next year – because our commitment is long-term.
Electronic evidence, for example, can be critical in going after terrorists. Getting to that information is extremely difficult when the information is in other countries or even continents.
I am also worried about cybersecurity. Cyber-attacks are becoming a tool in geopolitics. You have seen the discussion on what happened around the American elections.
I was in the US this week, where I also discussed this issue with our American counterparts. Our cooperation with the US and other strategic partners is crucial to strengthen our systems.
But so is our cooperation with the private sector. If anything is clear, it is that our fight to keep our citizens safe online is a global one, not just across national borders, but also across public and private barriers.
Today, we build and deliver on the trust that we have established between global internet companies, Member States, Europol and civil society.
All of this creates a fertile ground for the future direction of our cooperation – because this is only the beginning.