Last week MEP Yana Toom participated in Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) community online discussion answering users' questions on Article 13 of the Copyright Directive.
'I am a Member of the European Parliament from Estonia. I represent the Estonian Centre Party, part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. I’m here today to answer your questions on Article 13 of the Copyright Directive. This is a controversial proposal for a legislation that aims to monitor copyright infringement online,' Yana Toom said in the introduction.
Mostly the questions concerned the aforementioned Directive, including the peculiarities of MEPs' voting and the process of the possible implementation of Directive in the future. According to Yana Toom, '[the controversial Articles 11 and 13] are impossible to fix, the only solution is to delete. Without these Articles of course the Directive can be adopted. And if the negotiations are now blocked on 11 and 13, it is also possible to adopt the Directive without these Articles and continue the discussions later.'
The question from Danemark: 'If you had to convince someone to take action against article 13 with one sentence/paragraph, what would you say?' Yana Toom answers: 'Coming from former Soviet Union, I know what censorship means and what distrust it creates between decision makers and society. If we value the European project, we should never do the same.'
Some questions were not in line with the topic. For instance, Yana Toom revealed her favourite meme, in English translation 'I pressed something on the keyboard and everything disappeared' (see the picture).