BRUSSELS — The European Parliament on Thursday voted down rules that would allow technology companies to scan for child abuse online — and immediately drew the ire of top-level officials.

Lawmakers voted not to extend a temporary law that allows platforms to scan their services for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The law will expire next Friday, at which point scanning for the content will become illegal in Europe.

In rejecting the rules, lawmakers resisted pressure from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, four European Commissioners, tech giants Meta, Google and Microsoft and numerous children’s charities in past weeks.

“As a parent, lawmaker and European, I find today‘s vote in the European Parliament hard to understand,” Home affairs Commissioner Magnus Brunner told POLITICO after the vote. The decision will leave “countless victims without visibility or protection,” he said, noting that Europe hosts the most child sexual abuse material in the world. 

A total of 311 lawmakers rejected the European Commission’s proposal to extend the law, with 228 voting in favor and 92 abstaining.

The vote followed weeks of clashes, as national governments pushed Parliament to drop its privacy objections in order to secure a swift deal to extend the scanning rules. Negotiators for the Parliament, Council of the EU and Commission this month failed twice to reach a political deal.

The center-right European People’s Party (EPP) mounted a last-ditch attempt to keep the scanning rules alive by filing an amendment to Thursday’s vote that would have aligned Parliament’s position with that of capitals. But lawmakers voted against the EPP’s suggested fix, deepening the rift between privacy proponents and child rights defenders.

Leaders of Parliament’s political groups got a letter from four European commissioners on Wednesday, urging them to solve the issue and allow their members to break ranks in the crucial vote, POLITICO first reported. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, speaking in the country’s Parliament on Wednesday, also called for the law to be extended.

Large platforms Meta (which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram), TikTok, Snapchat, Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) said in a joint statement last week that the EU’s inability to reach a deal was “irresponsible.”

“Failure to act will reduce the legal clarity that has enabled companies for nearly 20 years to voluntarily detect and report known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in interpersonal communication services,” the tech giants said, pushing for a solution ahead of Parliament’s vote.

Child rights groups and tech companies have also long pressed lawmakers to allow scanning to continue.

A spokesperson for the Cypriot Presidency of the Council of the EU, representing EU national governments, said it was “regrettably not possible” to reach an agreement. It “remains committed” to getting an agreement on a long-term policy to combat child abuse online, the spokesperson said. 

The temporary law that was voted down this week was a workaround to allow platforms to find CSAM content. The European Union is negotiating another, permanent law to fight child sexual abuse online, but those negotiations have also hit disagreements and deadlocks in past years.