Forcing internet companies to take down hate speech and other harmful content within 24 hours would create "perverse incentives" and could be dangerous, Facebook has warned regulators. In a white paper laying out its vision for internet regulation, the social media giant said that hard deadlines for the removal of dangerous material would give companies a "strong incentive to turn a blind eye" to older content even if it was "causing harm". It also warned that making social networks legally responsible for users" posts by classifying them as publishers would "seriously curtail" freedom of expression and “could lead to the end of these services altogether”. The paper comes as the both Britain and the European Union prepare to impose new rules on social media firms which could include just such deadlines, similar to those already in place in Germany. It was part of a lobbying broadside by Facebook which included an op-ed by its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, in the Financial Times, urging ministers to be wary of "unintended consequences", as well as meetings with EU officials in Brussels. The paper said: "If designed well, new frameworks for regulating harmful content can contribute to the internet’s continued success by articulating clear, predictable, and balanced ways for government, companies, and civil society to share responsibilities and work together. "Designed poorly, these efforts may stifle expression, slow innovation, and create the wrong incentives for platforms... "Unfortunately, some of the laws passed so far do not always strike the appropriate balance between speech and harm, unintentionally pushing platforms to err too much on the side of removing content." But Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner who oversees digital policies, immediately rejected Facebook"s vision, saying that it was "not enough" and "too slow, too low in terms of responsibility and regulation". Facebook"s qualified embrace of regulation comes in response to a global wave of new attempts to rein in tech giants. Germany already requires that obviously illegal posts be removed within 24 hours, while the EU has pushed a voluntary code of conduct on hate speech which greatly reduced the time it took for tech companies to respond to reports. Describing her meeting with Mr Zuckerberg on Monday, Věra Jourová, the European Commission"s vice president for values and transparency, said that she had warned him that the EU"s "gentleman"s agreement" on hate speech would soon expire, to be replaced with or supplemented by hard regulation. In Britain, while officials have not made clear whether they will impose such deadlines, the Government"s white paper repeatedly refers to social networks removing illegal content "quickly", "rapidly" and within an "expedient timeframe". Facebook"s own paper offered support to many of Britain"s proposals, such as requiring companies to have proper processes for user complaints and appeals and requiring them to publish annual reports, which Facebook, Google and Twitter already do voluntarily. But it also argued that regulating response times could force companies to prioritise content that was close to the deadline at the expense of more viral and urgent cases, as well as neglect the search for older, unremoved content whose removal might artificially inflate their response times. "Companies focused on average speed of assessment would end up prioritising review of posts unlikely to violate or unlikely to reach many viewers, simply because those posts are closer to the 24-hour deadline, even while other posts are going viral and reaching millions," it said. The paper cited Facebook"s own efforts to find and remove lingering terrorist propaganda using AI, which caused its average removal time to rise suddenly. "If Facebook would have faced consequences for an increase in its "time-to-action," it would have been discouraged from ever creating such a tool," the company argued. A spokesman said that Facebook did not oppose content deadlines in principle but wanted to make their potential problems clear to regulators. It also issued an implicit rebuke to an EU court decision in October which found that European member states could force Facebook to take down content across the world even if it is not illegal in other countries. The company said: "Governments should not impose their standards onto other countries’ citizens through the courts or any other means." The paper made no mention of Facebook"s algorithms, which determine what billions of users across the world see in their feeds each day. Ms Jourová said that the EU was considering further oversight of such algorithms, which critics often refer to as "black boxes".