IT Companies Remove up to 99% of Reported Homophobic Hate Speech in Lithuania

The third evaluation of the European Commission’s Code of Conduct on countering illegal online hate speech carried out by NGOs and public bodies shows that IT companies remove on average 70% of illegal hate speech notified to them across Europe. In the course of the current monitoring exercise, which took place in November-December, 2017, the National LGBT* Rights Organization LGL reported 105 instances of homophobic and transphobic hate speech on FaceBook and YouTube. 99% of these cases resulted in removal of illegal content.

Draft factsheet-hatespeech_3rd monitoring1-page-001Tomas Vytautas Raskevičius, LGL‘s Policy Coordinator (Human Rights), welcomed these results: “The response by the law enforcement agencies in Lithuania in relation to the extreme homophobic and transphobic hate speech online could be described as ineffective. Therefore we are very happy to see that social platforms, namely – FaceBook and YouTube – are maintaining very efficient user-friendly systems to remove the illegal content online. As a result, our next task will be to improve the capacities of various stakeholders, namely – civil society organizations, public institutions and the members of our own community, to track down and report violent comments online.”

To respond to the proliferation of racist and xenophobic hate speech online, the European Commission and four major IT companies (Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube) presented a “Code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online” in May 2016. This third evaluation was carried out by NGOs and public bodies in 27 Member States, which issued the notifications. The National LGBT* Rights Organization LGL participated in both the second and the third monitoring exercises, notifying homophobic and transphobic hate speech in Lithuanian.

 >>> Factsheet on the Code of Conduct – 3 round of monitoring <<<