(1) The 1st Criminal Court of Peace in Istanbul issued a content removal and blocking order against Twitter, Facebook and YouTube according to a request of the Chief Public Prosecutor of the Terror and Organized Crime Investigation Bureau. The Prosecutor Office demanded that the images of the public prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz held hostage at gunpoint will not be used anywhere on electronic platforms. Mr. Mehmet Selim Kiraz later died of the injuries he suffered during an attempt of the Turkish special forces to rescue him from the kidnappers. Possibly, 166 website were affected by the court order, including international newspaper websites such as The Independent, The Mirror, and Tgcom24 and major Turkish news channels and newspapers. (2) The decision demanded the removal of the content and ordered the website...
Issuing a blocking order releted to the display of acts of violence and terrorism. The blocking order involved 67 videos depicting terrorist propaganda and attacks by PKK, and the order triggered URL based access ban to YouTube pages as such actions are criminalized under articles 6 and 7 of the Turkish Anti-Terror Law No. 3713.1
This is a UK government White Paper, setting out the plans to provide for a major reform of the obligations of various online services towards illegal content and user safety. It is under consultation until the 1st of July 2019. The core of the new proposals is a novel, statutory duty of care, tied to tackling illegal content in an adequate and efficient manner, as well ensuring the safety of the service's users. This duty is to be placed on a wide category of entities - “companies that allow users to share or discover user-generated content or interact with each other online”. The exact content of the duty in question is not specified yet - this is to occur through a series of corresponding codes of practice. For now, the possible obligations include: operating specific notice & takedown procedures, with corresponding...
This is one of several cases seeking to hold Internet platforms civilly liable under US statutes barring material support of terrorism. The first instance court rejected plaintiff’s claim on several grounds, including Twitter’s intermediary immunity under Communications Decency Act Section 230 (CDA 230). On appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal rejected plaintiff’s claims without reaching the CDA 230 issues. It based its analysis on the causation requirement of the civil material support statute. Material support claims raise a few questions under CDA 230 -- none entirely novel, but all important. One is whether the existence of a federal criminal statute on material support means that plaintiffs’ federal civil claims -- which would otherwise be barred by CDA 230 -- somehow fit in under the statute’s exemption for...