Despite regulation, illegal content continues to flourish online. Videos, photos, remarks… More than 80,000 requests for the removal of child pornography or terrorist content were sent to sites by the authorities in 2022, said Tuesday the magistrate responsible for controlling these actions within Arcom. This “very high” level reflects the strong presence of this content online, commented Laurence Pécaut-Rivolier, member of Arcom (the audiovisual regulator), during a press conference.
The content covered by these requests only represents “a tiny part” of the total, since a large part is previously blocked by the “automatic platform detection systems”. The large number of withdrawal requests is therefore “not good news, because it means that we are on mass content”, even if it is often identical content posted several times, continued Laurence. Pecaut-Rivolier.
Child pornography and apology for terrorism
Within Arcom, this adviser to the Court of Cassation is responsible by law for monitoring the action of the judicial police office which manages the Pharos reporting platform. It is this office that sends requests for removal to the sites where the illegal content is found, and the role of Laurence Pécaut-Rivolier is to ensure a posteriori that these requests are not abusive. Of a total of 82,754 withdrawal requests in 2022, 67,000 concerned child pornography content and 15,000 content advocating terrorism.
The former are mainly found on confidential sites known to insiders. Conversely, the authors of terrorist content seek to disseminate it as widely as possible for propaganda purposes. The majority of this content comes from the Islamic State group and Al-Qaeda, according to Laurence Pécaut-Rivolier. These can be scripted “apology films”, which usually contain “absolutely abominable images of beheading”, or even “diaries”, with “reports of actions carried out during the week” and listing “ the number of attacks, the number of deaths”.
“Images that stick in your head”
In another vein, Laurence Pécaut-Rivolier cited the example of “absolutely terrible hatred” provoked by a cartoon in the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in February about the earthquake in Türkiye. According to her, the drawing attracted on social networks “comments [qui relevaient] terrorist content”, with phrases such as “Our mistake was not to kill them all”, in reference to the Islamist attack which decimated the editorial staff in January 2015.
Laurence Pécaut-Rivolier examines the content that is the subject of a withdrawal request each week during a viewing session. Each session makes it possible to examine 5,000 contents. She is assisted by twelve volunteer employees within Arcom, who take turns at the rate of two per session to limit their exposure to this violent content.
All meet every two months under the aegis of a psychologist to talk about what they have seen, an “evacuation system” made necessary by “the hard to describe violence” of this content, according to the magistrate. “We have images that stick in our minds,” she said. “The big difficulty is that we can’t talk about what we saw to anyone” from the entourage. In 2021, the number of withdrawal requests was even higher, around 133,000.