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On 6 February 2020, the audiovisual regulator of the French-speaking community of Belgium (Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel – CSA) published a guidance note on the fight against certain forms of illegal Internet content, in particular hate speech. This note is designed to open a public debate on the measures that could be taken at national level to lay the foundation for co-regulation with online content-sharing platforms and cooperation with the other Belgian authorities concerned.  In the note, the CSA begins by summarising the current situation, highlighting the...

On 10 January 2020, the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment, Richard Bruton TD, published the general scheme of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill 2019 (hereinafter ‘the Bill’). The purpose of the Bill is to create new online safety laws to bring legislation up to date with the EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) which governs the EU-wide coordination of national legislation on all audiovisual media, which concerns both traditional TV broadcasts and on-demand services. The proposed Bill will establish an Online Safety Commissioner as...

The Kommission für Jugendmedienschutz (Committee for the protection of minors in the media – KJM) has adopted a revised version of its criteria for evaluating age verification systems. The KJM is an organ of the German regional media authorities and comprises experts from national government and the Länder. It is Germany’s central supervisory body for the protection of minors in private broadcasting and on the Internet.  According to Article 4(2) of the Jugendmedienschutzstaatsvertrag (Inter-State Agreement on the protection of minors in the media – JMStV), content...

At the end of last year, the Medienanstalt Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein (Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein Media Authority – MA HSH), one of the 14 media regulators of the German Bundesländer, announced that it had instigated proceedings against social networking platform Twitter on account of breaches of provisions on the protection of minors in the media. According to the MA HSH, the US-based company, whose European headquarters are in Ireland, had already been asked to improve its youth protection procedures and the MA HSH had threatened further measures, possibly involving the Irish regulator,...

Just a few months before its 100^th anniversary, the Belgian Law prohibiting minors under the age of 16 from accessing the cinema will be abolished. This law, which was adopted on 1 September 1920, had been the subject of criticism for quite some time. A long revision procedure was hampered by questions related to the division of competences between the federal State and the communities. This issue was solved in 2014, through the sixth state reform, which transferred the competence for film classification to the communities (the Flemish, French-speaking and German-speaking Communities,...