News
Martim Bouza Serrano, Partner, and Coordinator of the Technology, Media and Telecommunications department of CCA Law Firm, in a major interview with Jornal de Negócios, explains the recent legislative amendment to the law of E-commerce which provides for fines of up to 50,000 euros for companies that provide network services, in the event of appeals to hatred and violence on the platforms they manage.
Companies providing network services "are required to inform the authorities whenever they know that there is content on the Internet that relates to child pornography or that may constitute a crime of discrimination and incitement to hatred and to violence. The law also obliges providers to block sites identified as containing child pornography or related content and to inform users of the reasons for this blocking", explains Martim Bouza Serrano, further adding that "the way the process will work is unknown and the law is not at all enlightening".
"It is not defined what criteria should be applied to identify what should be considered 'hate speech', 'incitement to violence', or even what is legally protected by freedom of expression. The way in which the legislator tried to regulate these concepts online was not very clear and contains numerous sources of uncertainty. In this specific case, we clearly were not on the right track", underlines Martim Bouza Serrano.
On the transposition of Directive 2011/93 / EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 2011, on combatting the sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children and child pornography, Martim Bouza Serrano states that "inexplicably, the legislator took advantage of the transposition of a directive focused solely and exclusively on the need to create mechanisms to combat child pornography, to include mechanisms aimed at identifying the content made available on the Internet which could be considered as an incitement to hatred or violence, a matter that was not included in that directive".
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- Jornal de Negócios