Fighting Cyber Violence or Pushing LGBT Lobby Demands? EU Council Conclusions

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How should cyber violence be countered?

On June 29, the Employment, Social Policy, Health and Consumer Affairs Council (EPSCO)—one of ten possible configurations of the Council of the European Union—adopted a document titled the Council Conclusions on Preventing and Combating Cyber Violence against Girls (document 11254/26). The conclusions were drawn up in the context of a review of the implementation of the UN’s Beijing Platform for Action, adopted back in 1995, with particular attention to the areas concerning violence against women and the situation of girls.

The Council’s conclusions constitute so-called soft law, meaning that although they are formally non-binding (unlike regulations or directives), they set political priorities that influence the implementation and enforcement of law already in force—above all, the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the 2024 directive on combating violence against women.

The DSA and ‘trusted flaggers’

The EU Council’s conclusions address a range of different issues, including the mechanism of so-called trusted flaggers. This mechanism already operates under EU law pursuant to Article 22 of Regulation 2022/2065, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA). Trusted-flagger status is granted by the national Digital Services Coordinator to select entities such as non-governmental organizations, industry associations, or specialized police units and Europol. These entities report content deemed illegal to online platforms, and platforms are required to handle such reports as a priority and without undue delay, regardless of whether they concern, for example, materials depicting the sexual exploitation of children, hate speech, or terrorism-related content.

The significance of this privileged status is difficult to overstate. Given that DSA sanctions can reach as much as 6 percent of global annual revenue, no major platform can afford to disregard reports from an entity holding trusted-flagger status. In practice, this means such entities have a real influence over what users may post and read online—an influence considerably greater than would follow from the literal wording of the DSA’s provisions alone. This mechanism, justified in recital 61 of the DSA by the need for faster and more reliable action against illegal content, is in practice meant only to expedite the handling of reports, not to determine the legality of content. Yet given the platforms’ exposure to severe sanctions, a trusted flagger’s report is in practice sometimes treated almost as a binding legal determination, even though the criteria for granting this status, set out in Article 22(2) of the DSA, rely on evaluative concepts such as ‘diligence,’ ‘accuracy,’ and ‘objectivity,’ leaving national coordinators considerable room for interpretation.

The Council’s conclusions (point 32(b)) call on member states to promote adequate funding for “trusted flaggers,” including in the area of gender-based violence. Furthermore, in point 57 of the document, addressed to the European Commission, the Council recommends that the Commission support the activity of trusted flaggers specializing in gender-based violence, as well as organizations dealing with gender equality and violence against women and girls. This support is to include adequate funding, technical tools, and institutional assistance aimed at speeding up content-reporting mechanisms, especially when the victims are minors. The Council further encourages building the specialized expertise of trusted flaggers in the field of gender-based violence by drawing on the experience of the so-called Safer Internet Centres—other organizations dealing with the safety of children and young people online. In practice, a recommendation framed this way could result in EU-budget funding being directed specifically toward organizations specializing in gender-based violence—that is, toward entities whose profile of activity, by definition, fits within a particular ideological perspective.

The document also addresses other issues related to the Digital Services Act. Point 12 recalls that the regulation requires very large online platforms (VLOPs) and very large online search engines (VLOSEs) to assess and mitigate systemic risks connected, among other things, with the spread of illegal content, gender-based violence, and threats to children’s rights. Point 37 encourages intermediary service providers to identify and mitigate risks arising from recommender systems in search engines and generative artificial intelligence, and to remove content classified as hate speech targeting girls—including girls who identify with the LGBT movement, girls with disabilities, or girls belonging to ethnic or religious minorities. It is stipulated, however, that such measures should fully respect freedom of expression.

In point 55, the Council calls on the European Commission to continue overseeing the enforcement of the DSA in the area of illegal content and gender-based violence, including through measures such as user age verification and parental-control tools. Point 56, meanwhile, encourages the use of data made available by platforms under EU transparency and data-access rules by researchers and civil society organizations, including data broken down by gender.

References to the ‘LGBTIQ Strategy’ and ‘intersectional discrimination’

The Council calls on member states to promote the gender-responsive design and development of digital technologies and AI systems—that is, taking into account their differentiated impact on women and men (point 31(a)). The same demand also appears in point 39, where the Council calls on the European Commission and member states to encourage intermediary service providers to assess, in cooperation with equality bodies and data-protection authorities, potential algorithmic errors and discriminatory effects of automated content-moderation tools and AI systems that could affect the effectiveness of mechanisms for detecting, reporting, and remedying harm to victims of gender-based violence.

The document also refers several times to the concept of so-called intersectional discrimination, understood as the overlapping of different grounds of discrimination such as sex, age, disability, or ethnic origin. This concept appears, among other places, in recital 16 of the preamble, in the context of preventing discrimination against women and girls at the stage of designing, developing, and deploying AI systems, and also in point 42, where the Council calls on the European Commission and member states to ensure that research and data collection take into account the specific experiences of groups exposed to multiple forms of discrimination (including “intersectional discrimination”) in order to facilitate the development of inclusive and effective policy responses.

Points 30 and 43 of the document are devoted to the so-called manosphere and communities referred to as incels, which the Council describes as environments that promote misogynistic ideologies and normalize sexism. The conclusions recommend funding long-term research into the motivations, behaviors, and tactics of such communities.

In its education-related section, the document encourages member states to introduce school programs on so-called digital consent, digital self-care, and critical reflection on pornography and sexual behavior online. It is stipulated, however, that all such measures must fully respect member states’ national competence in the field of education, as well as institutional autonomy and academic freedom.

Point 50 of the conclusions, addressed directly to the European Commission, calls on it to pay particular attention to preventing and combating cyber violence against girls when implementing the EU’s LGBTIQ Equality Strategy 2026–2030 (COM(2025) 725 final). This provision links the subject of protecting girls from online violence to a separate EU strategy concerning “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.” The Strategy itself is not discussed in the conclusions but is invoked as the framework within which the Commission is to carry out its actions on behalf of girls.

The conclusions address matters connected with the LGBT movement in another part of the document as well. Point 37 identifies girls who identify with this community as a group particularly exposed to online hate speech, alongside girls with disabilities and girls from ethnic and religious minorities.

The document also touches on a number of other matters extending beyond the topics of the DSA and trusted flaggers. Point 32(d) calls on member states to ensure that parents and legal guardians have access to free, default-enabled parental-control software. In point 45, meanwhile, the Council points to the newly established Special Panel on child safety online, whose findings are to be taken into account in areas including gender equality, algorithmic accountability, and digital rights.

The document further refers to Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, more widely known as the Artificial Intelligence Act, calling in point 41 for the implementation of a requirement to label AI-generated content in order to counter the phenomenon of deepfakes, while point 54 points to the possibility of expanding Eurostat’s EU-wide survey on gender-based violence to cover all forms of cyber violence.

Implications of the Conclusions

The EU Council’s conclusions on preventing and combating cyber violence against girls fall into the category of so-called soft-law acts rather than draft legislation, and as such create no new binding obligations. Despite lacking formal binding force, acts of this kind set concrete political priorities that, in practice, influence how EU law already in force is implemented and enforced. The most significant element of the Council’s conclusions is the call to strengthen the trusted-flaggers mechanism operating under Article 22 of the DSA, including by increasing funding for organizations specializing in gender-based violence. While the phenomenon of cyber violence against girls is itself a real problem, and the EU institutions’ efforts to curb it deserve approval, the way this problem is framed in the conclusions raises concerns. The document links the subject of protecting girls to the implementation of the EU’s LGBTIQ Equality Strategy 2026–2030, which shows that the EU institutions treat the protection of girls and policies on gender identity as interconnected issues. This is especially evident in the recommendations on trusted flaggers, where the criterion of specialization in gender-based violence, combined with the absence of EU-wide harmonized rules for granting this status, creates a risk that an instrument formally designed to speed up the removal of illegal content will in practice be used to promote a particular vision of equality policy. A similar approach can be observed in several other documents adopted by EU institutions in recent years—something worth bearing in mind when assessing the practical effects that the implementation of the conclusions discussed here may bring.

Translated using Claude.ai

See also:

• “Freedom of Speech Under Pressure”: Ordo Iuris Opinion for the European Commission on the Guidelines for Trusted Flaggers
• The EU Democracy Shield Is the End of Freedom
• Not Only the DSA: Systemic Threats to Freedom of Speech and the Integrity of Democratic Elections in the EU
• The EU’s Rule of Law Conditionality Mechanism: A Case for Suppression, Not Reform
• Who Will Check Social Media? Answer: Those on the European Commission’s List of “Trusted Flaggers”

Source of cover photo: iStock