A number of civil society organisations have urged the European Fee to designate main porn web sites as “very massive on-line platforms” that need to observe a strict regime beneath the Digital Providers Act (DSA), based on a letter seen by Euractiv.
The DSA goals to make clear the task of accountability for actors working on-line, together with methods to cope with unlawful content material, like harmful items, and dangerous however authorized content material, like hate speech.
For the DSA, on-line platforms with greater than 45 million customers month-to-month within the European Union entail a ‘systemic danger’ for society; therefore they need to observe a particular regime, together with transparency and danger administration obligations.
In April, the European Fee introduced the primary batch of very massive on-line platforms, together with social media like Instagram and TikTok, engines like google like Google Search and Bing, and retailers like AliExpress and Zalando.
Nevertheless, conspicuously absent from the listing of ‘systemic danger’ platforms had been porn web sites, a number of the hottest platforms on the earth.
The European Fee is predicted to launch a second batch of systemic platforms earlier than the top of the 12 months, however the first batch has already heralded bother for the EU government, with Zalando and Amazon contesting the designation.
On this context, NGOs have a transparent message for the Fee: Don’t forget about porn web sites once more.
Whereas on-line platforms had till February to publish the info on the consumer base within the EU, most porn websites didn’t meet the deadline, together with Xvideos, which ranks among the many most visited web sites on the earth.
Final week, nonetheless, Xvideos admitted that each month they’ve greater than 160 million customers within the EU.
This determine wouldn’t solely put it method above the edge however would additionally forged vital doubts on the figures reported by its major rivals, Pornhub and XHamster, which each declared 33 million month-to-month customers. One other standard web site, YouPorn, declared simply seven million guests each month.
For civil society organisations, these figures are laborious to consider.
A coalition of 30 NGOs together with AccessNow, Middle for Democracy and Know-how, European Digital Rights, and the European Intercourse Employees’ Rights Alliance have penned a letter to the Fee stating that a number of platforms’ figures are “surprisingly small numbers which have allowed them to briefly elude the designation as VLOPs”.
The organisations consider that the numbers “appear to be a misinterpretation” and point out that “these platforms are actively trying to dodge their tasks and never be held accountable for the systemic dangers present on their platforms.”
AccessNow additionally stated in Might that, in comparison with the reported 33 million month-to-month customers by Pornhub, “in March 2023 alone, [the] international web site visits reached 2.5 billion” and, subsequently, this quantity “appears unlikely”.
The letter calls on the Fee to designate all systemic platforms that meet the edge, maintain them by the identical requirements, and be extra clear and open to session with stakeholders within the subsequent spherical of designation.
Alessandro Polidoro, the lawyer who coordinated the open letter, informed Euractiv that the initiative’s purpose is to “present to the European Fee that within the upcoming spherical of designations for very massive on-line platforms, they can not go away these platforms out of the image”.
He defined that whereas there are points current on these platforms corresponding to image-based sexual abuse or deepfake, all systemic dangers should be assessed with out stigmatising the customers or intercourse employees concerned.
Euractiv contacted XHamster, Pornhub, and Youporn for feedback however didn’t obtain a reply by the point of publication.
[Edited by Luca Bertuzzi/Zoran Radosavljevic]
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