Terror propaganda on the net: BKA has sent 6000 deletion requests to platforms

Politicians around the world are calling for stricter action against terrorist content on the Internet. The proposed EU Regulation on Terrorist Content on the Internet, which was recently voted on by the EU Parliament, stipulates that platforms will have to delete terrorist material within one hour in the future, after receiving a request from Europol or national law enforcement agencies.

Deletion requests are, however, already sent. The Federal Criminal Police Office set up a new reporting center for terrorist content online last autumn - and has since sent thousands of requests to extinguish fires.

From October 2018 to March 2019, 5,895 messages were sent to providers, as shown by the Ministry of Interior's response to a previously unpublished request from the Left Group.

"These are links to propaganda publications (videos, audio files, documents, etc.) known and classified in Germany as a terrorist group abroad groups," said a spokeswoman for the Federal Criminal Police Office on SPIEGEL inquiry.

Not only terrorist content is reported

The "national reporting center for the removal of Internet content" of the Federal Criminal Police Office is an offshoot of Europol's Internet content reporting unit, the EU Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU). This registration office, located at Europol's Terrorist Defense Center ECTC, has been in existence since 2015 and was co-developed by the BKA.

The Europol reporting system had been built by jihadists in response to the increasing digital terrorist campaigns. "Since this is a problem that involves multiple linguistic target groups and jurisdictions, a common EU response was needed, which is why the EU IRU was set up in 2015," reads the website of the Hotline.

In addition to terrorist content, Europol claims to "also remove Internet content used by smuggling networks to attract migrants and refugees from the Internet". This could be, for example, ads by smugglers promoting their services on social networks.

Whether content is deleted is checked automatically

Europol operates the "Internet Referral Management Application" (IRMa) for the management of deletion reports, referred to as "referrals", on platforms. The database should provide an overview of which online accounts or terrorist content have already been reported to the platforms, so that deletion requests are not sent multiple times. It also automatically checks whether content reported to the platforms has already been deleted. The so-called "Check the Web" portal archives videos, images and PDF documents classified as terrorist material.

Since 1 January 2019, the Federal Criminal Police Office is directly connected to the IRMa application and has read and write access. "Since then, the BKA has been importing links to jihadist propaganda into the IRMa and reporting it to the online service providers, so that they voluntarily check the compatibility of the referenced content with their own terms and conditions," said the Ministry of the Interior.

Nearly 100,000 deletion requests from Europol - without legal control

Since its foundation in 2015 until 1 March 2019, 96,166 reports have already been sent to Internet service providers via Europol's system. They went to 212 companies, not just to the big platforms. Since Europol is classified by corporations such as YouTube and Google as a so-called "Trusted Flagger", content that is classified as problematic from there, prioritized and checked faster.

Intransparent is how the investigators come to assess terrorist content. The reports "are based exclusively on the legal assessment of the BKA", it says in the statement of the Ministry of Interior on the small request.

"This is a fundamentally wrong presumption of competence, because a judicial review of these messages has never existed," says the European political spokesman for the left-wing group in the Bundestag Andrej Hunko, who initiated the Small request, the SPIEGEL.

At the Federal Criminal Police Office, the search, the protection of jihadist content on the Internet and the transmission of links to propaganda publications on the IRMa application by several Islamic scholars and translators at the Federal Criminal Police Office, as the BKA told SPIEGEL.

"All content that jihadist groups distribute on the Internet (videos, audio files, documents such as invitations to make attacks, fundraising, recruitment, bomb construction instructions) are considered terrorist online content," said the Federal Criminal Police Office. "The dissemination of such propaganda publications is done through jihadist forums and media outlets that distribute links to download this content on the Internet."

"The technical backbone for police internet control"

The classification by law enforcement agencies can also lead to misjudgments, as the online archivists of Archive.org reported in early April in a blog post. For example, through the Europol system, they received requests from the French national intelligence office to remove 550 links that had been erroneously classified as terrorist. The links led to cartoons and animations, reports by the US government or texts about vegan nutrition.

The Europol hotline later told Archive.org operators that it was "not involved in the scoring criteria for terrorist content". Each state defines itself which contents are problematic.

"Formally, the removal notifications are not binding, but with the new EU regulation, this should change," warns Hunko. With the reporting systems, the authorities had already set up "the technical backbone for police Internet control".

Also, the legal expert Martin Scheinin, who teaches as a professor at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, in the context of the proposed EU Regulation on the containment of Internet content warned the SPIEGEL opposite, the law enforcement authorities of the individual EU states are too much power if they can directly affect online service providers in other countries.

"Authoritarian EU countries such as Hungary could for political reasons delete content on online platforms from countries like Germany," Scheinin said. Spain is also very sensitive to Basque independence and quickly calls support for Basque self-determination terrorism, according to Scheinin. "This is a very serious problem, coupled with the lack of effective processes and the time limit of just one hour to remove reported content."

If the cancellation deadline of one hour was already mandatory, they would have to remove reported links directly and could check them afterwards, write also the Archive.org operators.

In 84% of cases, the online platforms have complied with the Europol requests, although they are not yet required to do so.

According to the Federal Criminal Police Office, the deletion rate for the deletion requests sent via the national registration office is 47.5 percent - thus, almost half of the platforms are currently removing voluntarily reported content. "The deletion of jihadist content by the online service providers is very different and is not uniform," said Federal Criminal Police Office. "Some delete the content in a few hours, others sometimes take several days to delete the links submitted, and there are online service providers who do not implement the deletion suggestions."

So far, the Federal Intelligence Agency's German registration office is running as a pilot project, but the BKA also wants to participate in the later regular operation: "The BKA does not intend to end the use of IRMa," according to the Ministry of the Interior.