Deputy Laetitia Avia was inspired by the German law Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, known as "NetzDG", adopted on 1 September 2017, as a starting point for her work and claimed to propose a different system.
[3] In March 2018, during the dinner of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), President Emmanuel Macron announced that he would entrust a mission to combat hate, racism, and antisemitism more effectively on the internet[4] to Franco-Algerian writer Karim Amellal, Gil Taïeb, vice-president of the CRIF, and Laetitia Avia, deputy of Paris (LREM).
They submitted their report[5] to Prime Minister Édouard Philippe on 20 September 2018, containing twenty operational proposals to curb online hate and further regulate platforms in this area.
In February 2019, Emmanuel Macron announced that the report and proposals co-written by Karim Amellal, Laetitia Avia, and Gil Taïeb would lead to a law to combat online hate.
It reiterated the terms of the decree-law of Justice Minister Paul Marchandeau of 21 April 1939, which stated that the Public Prosecutor's Office should prosecute, of its own accord (without a complaint), the defamation or insult directed at a group of people belonging, by their origin, to a specific race or religion, [when it] was intended to incite hatred between citizens or inhabitants.
Several dozen people were heard by reporters Laetitia Avia and Fabienne Colboc, including twelve associations,[14] nine independent administrative authorities and public bodies,[15] and twenty-two digital players,[16] along with specialized lawyers and magistrates.
The majority (LREM and MoDem) and UDI-Agir deputies voted in favor despite some abstentions, while the communists and socialists mostly abstained, and The Republicans, Liberties and Territories, La France Insoumise, and the National Rally opposed it.
[31] In its decision rendered on 18 June 2020,[32] the Constitutional Council ruled that the text was largely unconstitutional, finding that it imposed restrictions on freedom of expression that were not appropriate, necessary, or proportionate to the intended purpose.
Once hidden, illegal content must be retained "for the purposes of research, establishing and prosecuting criminal offenses, and only to provide information to the judicial authority."
As with the law against the manipulation of information, Article 4 assigned the responsibility of monitoring the obligations imposed on websites to the Higher Audiovisual Council (CSA).
The CSA was entrusted, in place of the CNIL, with the oversight of requests from the OCLCTIC for blocking by Internet service providers of websites with pedopornographic or terrorist content.
Article 6 bis A only provided for the establishment of a specialized digital prosecutor's office within a high court designated by decree to prosecute and judge, under a principle of "concurrent jurisdiction," the authors of illegal hateful content online.
[48] This jurisdiction could be located in Nanterre, due to its geographical proximity to the premises of Pharos, the public platform for reporting illegal content.
In an open letter to the Prime Minister and the presidents of parliamentary groups, Memory of Jewish Resistance Fighters of the MOI (MRJ-MOI) and the Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid (UJRE) lamented the delegation to websites of the removal of hateful content under the pretext of the slowness of the judicial system and were not convinced by the ex-post surveillance planned by the CSA.
[69] The National Digital Council (CNNum) made the same observation: "the PPL implies a significant delegation of powers to platforms in the field of regulating hateful content, which could give the impression of a certain privatization of missions historically devolved to the State".
[81] Socialist deputy Hervé Saulignac reminded that "extremely important financial and human resources will be needed, for justice, for the police, for education".