Combating terrorism: BKA has significantly more online content deleted

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Last year, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) made significantly greater use of its powers under the controversial EU regulation "on combating the dissemination of terrorist content online". This is revealed in the transparency report for 2024, which has now been published and which the authority is obliged to publish. According to the report, the BKA ordered the removal of terrorist online content by hosting service providers in 482 cases last year. This is almost twice as many as in 2023, when the office reported 249 removal orders.

Fight against terrorism

The regulation came into force in 2021 and has been in effect since June 2022, requiring operators of online platforms to remove terrorist content such as propaganda or bomb-making instructions within one hour if ordered to do so by any authority in a member state. There is no provision for a judicial reservation. The initiative is intended to make it more difficult for terrorists to misuse the internet to spread radical views, recruit supporters and incite them to violence. Following the adoption of the law, civil society organizations warned of a "serious blow to freedom of opinion and freedom of the press". There was a lack of basic mechanisms to safeguard the measures against misuse or mere application errors.

In 2022, local legislators declared the BKA to be the competent authority for issuing its own removal orders and reviewing foreign removal orders to local hosters. According to the latest statistics, the 482 deletion orders sent in 2024 were all addressed to service providers abroad. 462 of these were implemented, which corresponds to a success rate of 95.9%. No serious breaches of the one-hour deadline were identified. "In two case constellations with 20 removal orders", the persons concerned had not complied. The BKA does not give a reason for this.

Cooperation with the industry is going well

Foreign authorities are apparently more cautious: the BKA only had to review removal orders together with the North Rhine-Westphalia Media Authority in eleven cases, which were sent to German service providers by authorities in other EU countries. This was nine more removal orders than in the previous year. The Federal Network Agency, which acts as a supervisory authority in Germany, attributes the increase to the fact that other European authorities became active in implementing the regulation in 2024. The BKA did not see any reason to complain about the foreign submissions.

If an obliged party does not comply with the order to delete terrorist online content or does not do so within the statutory period, the Federal Network Agency can initiate fine proceedings. However, this was not necessary in any cases last year, as can be seen from the regulatory authority's separate transparency report . According to the report, the Federal Network Agency was only forced to continue administrative proceedings against a German hoster in 2024. In this country, non-compliance and administrative offenses generally result in fines in the millions.

Both reports also reveal that the BKA has sent 17,045 more or less voluntary deletion requests to hosters to remove or block criminally relevant online content. This instrument is considered a preliminary stage of the mandatory removal order. The implementation rate here was 87.4%, compared to 78.6% for 7240 requests in 2023. If the reported content is terrorist content, the BKA reviews the response after two working days and issues an official order if necessary.

Content was restored in 20 cases

The regulation does not oblige online platforms to monitor all data traffic. However, if terrorist content has already been published on them, they must take special measures to protect their services from further dissemination. There is no explicit requirement to use "automated tools". The EU Parliament was able to push this through in order to avoid making upload filters mandatory.

The Federal Network Agency is also investigating whether the measures taken are "effective and suitable". It considers it a success that a total of 16,771 pieces of content were removed from German hosting services in 2024 as a result of the actions taken. During the same period, 141 complaints were received from users against the removal of their content. In a total of 20 cases, the content was restored thanks to this review process. Europol has developed an "EU platform for combating illegal online content" (Perci) for the transmission of orders and requests at a cost of around six million euros and put it into operation in July 2023. According to the regulator, this process is running "smoothly overall".

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