The European Commission has proposed a new rule that if passed will mean companies such as Google LLC, Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. could face serious financial penalties if they don’t manage to take down terrorist propaganda within one hour.

The plan was announced by commission president Jean-Claude Juncker Wednesday during his state of the union address to the European Parliament. He said such platforms have a duty to keep the internet free of terrorist propaganda.

“One hour is the decisive time window in which the greatest damage takes place,” said Juncker. The content will be anything that “incites or advocates committing terrorist offences, promotes the activities of a terrorist group or provides instruction in techniques for committing terrorist offences.”

The fines are no joke, either. The commission is asking for “strong and deterrent” penalties, which could mean as much as 4 percent of a company’s annual revenue.

Although companies such as Facebook and YouTube already employ ever-evolving artificial intelligence to flag such content, the commission wants firms to get more proactive. The commission has been working with tech companies on the issue, but it seems too much extremist content is still getting through.

“Terrorist content continues to survive and circulate online, representing a very real risk to European society – in January 2018 alone, almost 700 new pieces of official Da’esh propaganda were disseminated online,” the European Commission said in a press release published Wednesday.

“You wouldn’t get away with handing out fliers inciting terrorism on the streets of our cities – and it shouldn’t be possible to do it on the internet, either,” said Julian King, commissioner for the Security Union. “While we have made progress on removing terrorist content online through voluntary efforts, it has not been enough.”

In response, Facebook said it had made great efforts already to tackle the problem but understood that more could be done. “There is no place for terrorism on Facebook, and we share the goal of the European Commission to fight it, and believe that it is only through a common effort across companies, civil society and institutions that results can be achieved,” the company said in a statement.

YouTube said it has invested heavily in technology and people to try weed out extremist content, adding that it “shared the European Commission’s desire to react rapidly to terrorist content and keep violent extremism off our platforms.”

Image: ewvasquez2001 via Flickr