At its plenary session on Thursday 30 April, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling for “targeted criminal provisions and platforms’ responsibility” to combat cyberbullying more effectively in the EU.
The adopted text stresses that current tools, such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) - defended by the European Commission during the previous day’s debates (see EUROPE 13859/14) - “may not be sufficient to address the full scale and severity of the problem”..
Given the persistent legal fragmentation between Member States, the European Parliament calls on the Commission to examine whether cyberbullying should be recognised as a “particularly serious crime with a cross-border dimension”..
The MEPs also supported the inclusion of hate crime, “which could cover the most severe forms of cyberbullying”, in the list of EU crimes defined in Article 83 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).
The resolution stresses the responsibility of digital platforms in the scourge of cyberbullying. Parliament deplores the fact that the business model of certain web giants ”incentivises the spread of hateful content” thanks to hyper-personalised recommendation systems. MEPs therefore advocate strict application of Article 28 of the DSA, which requires risk mitigation measures for minors - including a ban on advertising based on the profiling of their personal data.
In addition, the text reiterates the need to ban “nudifier applications” (see EUROPE 13837/6) and requires AI-generated content to be clearly marked to limit the devastating impact of deepfakes. (Original version in French by Justine Manaud)