Macron, May and Gentolini address extremist online content in New York

In her speech to the United Nations General Assembly, British Prime Minister Theresa May addressed the dangers of extremist online content. According to May, ‘we need to go further and faster to reduce the time it takes to remove terrorist content online, and to increase significantly their efforts to stop it being uploaded in the first place‘. In a separate event organised by France, Italy and the UK, French President Macron stressed that ‘in one hour, the content must be identified, analyzed and withdrawn to avoid it being broadcast widely’, and Italian Prime Minister Gentolini argued that ‘we can’t reduce our ambition because of the difficulties’. Yet, Kent Walker, general counsel for Google, warned for the ‘enormous technological and scientific challenge’ of timely removing content. On behalf of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, he claimed that ‘The haystacks here are unimaginably large and the needles are both very small and constantly changing.’