- Significant increase in reports of illegal Internet content
- Spam emails are the most common cause for complaint
- Less child pornographic content
- Self-regulation of the Internet industry functioning well
The number of reports of illegal Internet content is increasing significantly. In the year 2014, around 140,000 reports in total were submitted to the eco Internet Complaints Hotline regarding illegal Internet content. This is more than a 50 percent increase from the previous year, in which around 91,000 reports were made. By far the most reports dealt with emails with illegal content and spam (130,000). This was also the area with the greatest increase in complaints. In contrast, justified reports of child and youth-pornographic content are reducing. In 2014 there were one quarter fewer justified complaints about representations of sexual abuse than in 2013. The number of justified complaints about racially motivated and extremist content also fell slightly. On the other hand, justified complaints regarding adult pornography have risen considerably.
Despite dramatic rise in reports in 2014, hardly any reduction in efficiency
“The increasing numbers of complaints show that users are reacting increasingly sensitively to problematic Internet content, and that the Internet complaints hotlines continue to play an important role in the fight against illegal Internet content,” says Oliver Süme, Director of Policy and Law at eco – Association of the German Internet Industry e.V.
Despite the increase in work through the dramatic rise in reports in 2014, there was hardly any reduction in the speed with which child-pornographic content could be deleted from the Internet from the time of the initial report being submitted to the eco Complaints Hotline: it took on average 2.95 day for content hosted in Germany, and 5.32 days world-wide.
Self-regulatory measures of the Internet industry function well and make state-based initiatives superfluous
“We see here confirmation that the self-regulatory mechanisms of the Internet industry in the fight against undesirable or illegal online content function exceptionally well,” Süme explains. He sees state-based initiatives such as the recent call by the European Minister of the Interior and Justice for a code of conduct for Internet companies for the deletion of online terrorist content as superfluous, as companies have already been active in this regard for many years.
Current statistics for the eco Internet Complaints Hotline can be found here.
