Apparently the dissemination of illegal content refers to the October 7th videos of the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel that galvanized American support for Israel [0].
I personally don't think it's in people's interest to have this kind of thing hidden from them and I really dislike the EU for attempting to censor this.
Musk is really under a lot of financial pressure and it might be a losing battle to try to fight the EU over this in court. To be honest, I hope he is able to pull out from the EU without cratering the company, but he is now being pulled into lawfare with multiple actors across the globe so Twitter might have no choice but to accept is role as a conduit of censorship for state-level actors.
The previous iteration of Twitter under @jack already learned this lesson. Once you say yes to stuff beyond warrants/criminally illegal stuff it's just an ever increasing set of demands until it's borderline automatic between gov requests->deletions. With low level agencies sending lists of a 1000 tweets to be flagged or accounts with tenuous connections to current bad thing (ie Russia) to be banned etc.
You think governments have the ability to combat misinformation without living in some Orwellian-esque regime?
"Misinformation" is probably one of the most abused phrases of our age. If we could even start by labeling misinformation properly, then maybe we could do something about it.
The point of a sovereign government is to serve the people—that's it. Keep them safe, keep things "fair" (to whatever degree that's possible), and to fight for the prolonged existence of said people. "Misinformation" hardly fits into that in its current state.
>You think governments have the ability to combat misinformation without living in some Orwellian-esque regime
yes. Of course it can and has been abused, but if we use that line of thinking we'd have zero government.
>If we could even start by labeling misinformation properly, then maybe we could do something about it.
I agree. It's very case by case, but I'd hope in this case that "flooded with fake images [about war]", i.e. propaganda, is at least one of these cases where you do want governments (emphasis on plural)to intervene. Especially as AI will only hasten the ability to generate such propaganda.
>"Misinformation" hardly fits into that in its current state.
misinformation fit into all 3 aspects you mention, though. misinformation has harmed people, regardless of your political spectrum we should be able to agree with this. And the ability to process the proper facts does keep things fair over who has the "hottest memes" or exploits SEO the best for their goals.
Misinformation has not harmed people. Stupid people have believed stupid things at face value and acted on that information.
Information cannot harm. Only inform. For better or for worse. If you are too stupid and get duped by incorrect information, that's on you. No one else.
By the same logic, drugs and gambling never harmed anyone. Every party agrees and partakers in the activity. At what point is it deemed suitable for the government to step in and say gambling is illegal?
>If you are too stupid and get duped by incorrect information, that's on you. No one else.
You and all your victims apparently. The family that may not be able to escape you, the people you prejudice against or even assault over your zealous beliefs, the town you vote or even assign new policy directly to. Maybe even the planet you impact l. If stupid people kept to themselves a lot of laws and regulations wouldn't need to exist. But my country did need 200 years just to consider a woman a "voting citizen" after all.
> By the same logic, drugs and gambling never harmed anyone. Every party agrees and partakers in the activity. At what point is it deemed suitable for the government to step in and say gambling is illegal?
Not sure how that pertains to the argument at hand?
> You and all your victims apparently. The family that may not be able to escape you, the people you prejudice against or even assault over your zealous beliefs, the town you vote or even assign new policy directly to. Maybe even the planet you impact l. If stupid people kept to themselves a lot of laws and regulations wouldn't need to exist. But my country did need 200 years just to consider a woman a "voting citizen" after all.
Imagine an enemy uses troll farms to cause divisions, spread lies, propaganda and conspiracy theories in plain sight. This leads to people distrusting everything (how can you even know what is truth when there are so many lies out there, etc.), including medical advice from medical professionals, evacuation orders in case of natural disasters, etc. Or even participate in a coup attempt because social media has led them to believe there is some gross injustice, or whatever. Or go and decapitate teachers because social media told them they're offending their holy religion.
Now, the above is factual, not an imaginary scenario. At the very least Russia has been caught directly doing the above, as well as paying actors to cause trouble and stoke divisions (like the guy burning Qurans in Sweden). In some countries there have even been fights between troll farms from different countries (it was somewhere in Central Africa between Russian and French troll farms) online. Same goes for ISIS and similar organisations that had very heavy recruitment online.
So, do you really think combating misinformation such as the above isn't a part of keeping citizens safe? I'd take selective censorship of e.g. ISIS and affiliated groups in exchange for teachers not getting decapitated, thank you very much.
What's causing people to distrust everything is not some troll farms lying to them. It's their own government lying to them, constantly, repeatedly, incessantly - and then claiming only strict control by the same government over all the information can save the citizens from evil trolls that are out to get them. I dgaf what Russians say, but when I see the US government lying constantly and the corporate press parroting these lies and submitting themselves to the partisan propaganda - I will never trust them ever again on anything.
> Now, the above is factual, not an imaginary scenario
It's an imaginary scenario. You know that the whole Russiagate multi-year farce turned out to be nothing but lies from our own governments, right? It's been proven many times over.
The idea that we have to be kept safe from "division" is especially hilarious given that the whole point of democracy is to allow people to work out their naturally occurring divisions peacefully.
Who's talking about Russiagate? It's one of millions of scandals where Russian influence is there for all to see. It might be hard to quantify exactly in some cases, but it's undeniably there. Take a look at the Quran burning guy. Or the Austrian scandal.
Also, Russia was but one of the examples. Is it imaginary that 2 teachers have been murdered by Islamic nutjobs in France off of social media?
> The idea that we have to be kept safe from "division" is especially hilarious given that the whole point of democracy is to allow people to work out their naturally occurring divisions peacefully.
That's hard in countries with broken political systems like the unbelievably stupid American dual party one. And is it actually working nowadays? To me from the outside it definitely seems like everything, even basic science and common sense, are immediately partisan. If one party is for something, the other is immediately against it regardless of merits. Maybe except Israel and army spending? And even in non broken systems, stuff like Covid was extremely politicised. You can't debate with a pigeon shitting everywhere.
> Russiagate? It's one of millions of scandals where Russian influence is there for all to see
Ah I see, you never became aware of how that story ended.
Russiagate ended with the discovery that it had all been a lie, that there was no Trump/Russia collusion and the US media had spent years knowingly propagandizing the population. There was no scandal, except the scandal of how the media could have done that. Eventually some American journalists even admitted what had happened.
Why are you still focusing on one simple example? Why are you ignoring the forrest for one funky tree? One that doesn't even disprove what I said, because Russiagate is specifically about collusion between Trump and Russia, not about the presence or absence of Russian propaganda in support of Trump. Of which undeniably there was a lot of.
And once you start picking apart any of those examples, you'll find out that random trolls may post some stupid and false stuff, but a coordinated disinformation campaign usually has either governmental or quasi-governmental entity behind it. You don't like Russians? Take covid origins. We had a campaign of suppressing the idea that Wuhan virology labs had anything to do with it. Who did that? Random trolls? No, it was (part of) scientific establishment and governmental entities. Why did they do it? Because they had in their interests that that theory was not being explored, and they had the resources to suppress dissent. Fortunately, this time they (mostly) failed, but it is the same set of entities that demands control over the information now, and if that control is given to them, next time they decide to do the same, they will succeed.
The big problem is not that Russian propaganda exists. The problem is that hiding behind the need to "rescue" citizens from Russian propaganda, other governments want to institute an information control regime that is very similar to what Russia has. If that happens in Russia, I feel their pain, but fortunately in my country I can still speak freely. But if this goes away and I also don't have freedom of speech, then it's not Russia that is doing that to me, it's my own government. And that's what I should be afraid of - not that Russian propaganda will take my freedoms, but that my on government, hiding behind the fact that Russian propaganda exists, will take away my rights - "for my own good", of course.
It wasn't "one tree" was it, it was years and years of interlocking stories and scams, all of which were fake. The whole claim that Russia was promoting Trump was a part of that lie, but you don't seem able to let go of it.
The fact that foreign state actors employ disinformation tactics (and employ people to that end) is not a lie - it was known during Soviet Union times and is known today.
The details of the Russian influence operation are irrelevant to the broader point - malicious actors will weaponize the medium, and non curated spaces quickly devolve into a toxic cesspool.
Clearly you have never been a moderator of any community.
> "Misinformation" is probably one of the most abused phrases of our age.
Politifact is a good case study. Academics have repeatedly published data since 2011 [1] and most recently 2023 [2] showing an overt bias yet it's still used as a reputable source to fact check things in many places on the internet.
That "PolitiFact Rates Republican Statements as False at 3 Times the Rate of Democrats" could also be explained by Republicans making false statements 3 times as often. I don't want to start a huge partisan pissing match here, but that possibility wasn't considered and is merely hand-waved away. It also doesn't even attempt to look at the ratings themselves to see if they're about accurate. That second article is more or less the same with more words.
Neither are convincing for claims of "overt bias", and even IF there was a huge bias in the selection of statements to rate, then this only means ... a bias in the selection of statement to rate, and doesn't actually say anything about the truthfulness (or lack thereof) of the actual fact-checks. A partisan "we-rate-republicans.com" and "we-rate-democrats.com" could be 100% accurate in their ratings. "Biased" does not equal "false".
I do think that "politicians from one side are rated much more frequently" is a good reason to take a close and skeptical look by the way, but that needs to start with "are politicians from that side actually untruthful significantly more often" as a baseline.
So I would rate your post as "false" for 1) making a claim that's completely unsupported by your evidence because your evidence actually makes a different claim, and 2) being weak evidence in the first place.
If a sovereign government wants to combat misinformation. Then they should write a law that makes "misinformation" illegal. Then Twatter will ban it. Easy peasy. Why give governments power to illegally enforce it's will. Duke it out in the courts.
"Apparently" means some guy on Twitter says he seems to remember that those videos were the reason? Would be great to see a real source for the footage of the attacks themselves being the problem.
The press release itself says that the formal proceeding concern "the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel" and the person you refer to as "some guy" is a adjunct professor of law at a few institutions, as well as a legal fellow of the Adam Smith Institute where his research interests have focused on free speech and related technology regulation.
He might have relevant research interests, but he's still not pointing to a source that shows that "illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel" refers to all footage of those attacks. Presumably, such a source exists? If so, it would still be great to see a link to it.
The EU's Digital Services Act permits the gathering of evidence and enforcement activities to be conducted confidentially behind closed doors. It does not require the EU to make their evidence available to the public, particularly when information is considered to be sensitive. This approach aims to preserve the integrity of the investigation and to protect the rights of involved parties.
Once such a law is passed there is no right to public scrutiny. While certain aspects of the process may not be open to public scrutiny, this does not entirely preclude the public's right to some level of transparency as it is stipulated that any decisions taken will be widely publicised (paragraph 101). That is, once they've made their judgement the matter will be settled and a superficial amount of information will be released to the public.
This is exactly why I think it's so important for us to speak openly about the speech rights we expect on the platforms we use and the level of policing of speech we're happy for there to be. If we don't do so, lawmakers can and do pass draconian laws that take these considerations away from us, and at this point we have little recourse to rollback our loss of freedom.
I'm not a free speech absolutist but believe that it's incredibly wrongheaded to try to argue away conversation about this as being without evidence particularly after lawmakers passed laws that denied us this same evidence. Blithely allowing lawmakers to pass laws that enable confidential evaluation of evidence limiting public scrutiny, but then afterwards criticising public discourse for lacking evidence without acknowledging that access to such evidence has been restricted by the same laws -- what a manipulative argument/framing!
The whole conversation on speech rights is also incorrectly centered in my opinion, as freedom of speech rights are centered on the speaker instead of the audience/public. I personally find myself advocating the following approach to speech rights:
> "It’s not just the right of the person who speaks to
> be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience
> to listen and to hear."
Absolutely, more transparency there would be great. But you said:
> Apparently the dissemination of illegal content refers to the October 7th videos of the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel that galvanized American support for Israel
...which does not to me seem to be a conclusion you can draw from a lack of evidence.
I think they intend for their tactics to cause damage, but I do not think that they have set forwards reasonable evidence for their proceedings, or even been clear what they consider illegal or whether it's merely a case of them disallowing automated moderation tools.
When they said "dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel" I can only assume that it refers to the October 7th attack by Hamas upon Israel and not to another attack.
Of course, it could refer to a specific video posted during this time period that they consider to be disinformation, however, taking action against a singular video would be quite over-the-top which is why I believe they're referring to the overall dissemination of videos around this time.
Oh, I think it's absolutely clear that they're referring to those attacks. However, you said that they didn't want footage of those attacks in general to be spread, rather than misinformation about those attacks.
So as far as I know, it would probably have been fine to share videos showing eg the damage to a hospital, but not to post a deepfake showing Oprah planning the destruction of a hospital.
1. His credentials are literally relevant to the evaluation that he is "some guy" and therefore not able to weigh in on free speech and related technology regulation. Specifically, this is his area of interest and he is capable of giving expert opinions on this.
2. The claim in question was within the EU's press release itself, however, the EU haven't made their specific evidence publicly available. It's quite likely that others also aren't allowed to divulge specifics but this doesn't mean that they haven't seen evidence or that the EU hasn't provided any evidence.
Some guy isn't just giving his opinion, "If memory serves" implies that he has knowledge of an unreleased EU government report but his credentials seem to be of an american or maybe uk corporate lawyer and barely a professor at an american university. No reason to believe he has privileged access to the report. Though there is reason to believe he's practiced in the arts of online propaganda wars.
Sooo, what's the "illegal content" here? Because I saw quite a few people calling for various forms of genocide against either party, and that's pretty illegal too.
While actual factual videos about the attack are undoubtedly newsworthy and should not be banned, claiming that promoting genocide is be in the people's interest would be a bit of a stretch, would it not?
This is what bugs me the most: "preventing" stuff by censoring it. Let people call for whatever they want on the "other" side and punish only those that perpetrate such acts that are illegal in a country or another. But let people speak their minds without any repercussion. I wager that will let a lot of people blow off some steam and then go on with their lives.
Well, if Thierry Bretton (French business executive, politician, writer and the current Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union) will link to the document that describes the reason for the formal infringement proceedings rather than post a meaningless screenshot of the front page that includes redactions, we can all have a more meaningful debate.
Right, just seems a bit premature to be drawing conclusions about how wide-ranging censorship is going on? (I agree that getting that full document would be great.)
One can think anything about the particular line-drawing about what is and what isn't something X should moderate. By operating in the EU they do agree to the DSA though. And no one is saying that the content in question is or isn't something that twitter has handled incorrectly. All that's happening is that there is an investigation into it. There really isn't much to talk about (yet).
Even though we don't know everything about what is happening in this particular instance, I do think there should be a global conversation on the ability for state-level actors to directly or indirectly pull strings in order to coerce Twitter into censoring information on their behalf.
I think this should be of particular importance to the US which has fudamental rights protecting freedom of expression.
I'm very worried about co-ordinated lawfare against Musk-operated companies being used as a tool to force his compliance with systems that exist to get around laws against the US government's direct involvement in censorship. I'm also worried about the EU's lurch towards Chinese-style censorship of social media. And, I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.
> I think this should be of particular importance to the US which has fudamental rights protecting freedom of expression.
It is important for everyone in the world and most nations have already wrestled with this problem. The US is not special. The only reason the US is starting to wonder about the influence of other states on such a critical piece of infrastructure is because they are not dominating it anymore and only now are beginning to find out that there are other nations present that have different cultural norms.
Laws like the DSA are exactly created to address this problem. If you want to operate in the EU, you have to adhere to European laws and values.
> I'm very worried about co-ordinated lawfare against Musk-operated companies being used as a tool to force his compliance with systems that exist to get around laws against the US government's direct involvement in censorship. I'm also worried about the EU's lurch towards Chinese-style censorship of social media. And, I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.
Well, other people are very worried about companies exploiting exploiting every technique they can think of to fuck their users and make more money. Trying to prevent that is not even remotely close to Chinese-style censorship.
> If you want to operate in the EU, you have to adhere to European laws and values.
The EU institutions don't represent European values. The Commission doesn't run elections to find out what they are, can't even define what it thinks they are and routinely claims that the results of actual democratic elections in Europe are somehow contrary to those same European values.
> The US is not special
It is in fact special, in that it has systematically kicked the ass of the European economy for decades in everything tech related. The EU doesn't even have second place also-ran companies that compete with Twitter, Instagram, Threads, TikTok etc. It has nothing.
So, fundamentally, Musk can and maybe should tell the Commission that in fact they don't operate in Europe and do not recognize EU laws or what they think European "values" are. I wonder how long the current state can hold for. If US tech firms just state that they will ignore EU regulation whilst continuing to serve requests from EU IP ranges, then what? The Commission would have to impose trade sanctions on the USA (i.e. ban European companies from purchasing services from them), which would invite retaliatory sanctions from Washington.
> If US tech firms just state that they will ignore EU regulation whilst continuing to serve requests from EU IP ranges, then what?
Then they are unable to take money from EU businesses to show ads to EU users.
Social media companies don't develop their products out of altruism. Their goal is to make money. (and increasingly the ability to manipulate public opinion/ban wrongthink) What's the point of letting millions of EU users hammer your servers if you can't make money from them?
That would only be the case if the EU imposed financial sanctions on the USA (forbidden transactions with US banks), which the US would retaliate against.
Additionally, even if enforced, it just means European visitors would see ads for American products (which they can still import) instead of local products. An own goal for sure.
We're very fortunate in the USA to have a written Constitution that limits government censorship. But I doubt that most EU countries will ever adopt that approach. That conversation has been going on for literally centuries with no international consensus.
Tbh anyone growing up in (democratic) Europe would consider the US to be extremely censored compared to Europe simply because most obviously censored media is TV and that's very censored in the US and mostly uncensored in Europe. From an outside perspective that censorship is hard to square with the 1st amendment but I think americans just grew used to that.
Some European countries have written constitutions and some don't. But within the EU, the EU charter article 11 has the role of the US 1st amendment as being a written consitution regulating free speech https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/11-freedom-expre...
What are you talking about? People can subscribe to Playboy Channel or whatever and watch that on TV with no censorship. The only real restrictions were applied to broadcast (OTA) channels due to limited spectrum. Even that is now effectively moot as broadcast TV is dying off.
Yes I’m talking about the regulation of broadcast media on the airwaves. And how it is a bit weird that it has a carve-out for censorship there.
Yes the “problem” is slowly disappearing but from a legal curiosity standpoint of the past decades that doesn’t make it less interesting that it existed.
He probably does mean that. An environment of censorship very quickly demands meta-censorship -- censoring discussion about the existence of censorship, otherwise you could circumvent the censorship of the particular topic by discussing the fact that it's being censored.
We saw this clearly demonstrated during covid -- discussion about covid censorship was also censored.
> censoring discussion about the existence of censorship, otherwise you could circumvent the censorship of the particular topic by discussing the fact that it's being censored.
Can you elaborate what that would consist of here?`
> discussion about covid censorship was also censored.
Examples of censorship around Covid? Are you serious? Pick the topic. Either about the existence of Covid in countries like China, or about the questioning that a vaccinated person still being able to transmit the virus.
Those are on the topic itself. We were arguing whether the discussion of the existence of censorship was being silenced or not.
Basically: did someone who said "I can't talk about X or I'll be silenced! there is censorship!" also get THAT opinion muted?
While it was off the topic of the original argument: was there censorship of the opinion that Covid existed in China in any countries with supposedly free speech?
I think it's great that we don't have Chinese-style censorship of the internet but disagree that "there really isn't much to talk about (yet)". I think there is good reason to believe that many governments around the world are interested in making laws to control the dissemination of various kinds of speech, and whether or not we have the full information on individual cases this shouldn't stop us from commenting on our overall rights around speech and what we believe these should be. Personally, I don't wish to self-censor over this, as I think it's important.
I live in a country with even worse speech laws than those in the US and I wish people stood up for the kinds of speech that should be protected instead of waiting until our lawmakers pass draconian laws and then complaining.
I’m fairly concerned about how broadly some are interpreting “operating in the EU”.
The furthest this has gone that I’m aware of is the Dutch, alongside other EU authorities, has issued a fine to an American website, alleging that they subject themselves to EU jurisdiction by merely hosting information about EU citizens. This seems to me to be too far.
Actually, not really. His Tesla and SpaceX assets completely overshadow X.
Its value could shrink to zero, and he’d still be one of the wealthiest folks on the planet.
I’m personally grateful that he’s standing on principle regarding free speech! So much that we get from “official” channels turns out to be fiction, or propaganda.
I actually think it's more likely that this is to prevent people from posting videos of ongoing Israeli war crimes and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and also to prevent people from posting anything in support of Palestine or Hamas.
It's become apparent that the Israeli political/war/propaganda machine has an incredible amount of influence - far beyond anything I'd personally imagined could be possible. They've been able to effectively commandeer most of the West's "traditional" mass media, but social media is a huge problem for their narrative, as it allows people to see what is really happening, often in real-time.
I clearly see now the benefit to humanity or a system like Twitter, but it really worries me that Twitter/X is in the hands of a single billionaire, especially one with some very controversial views. I'm not sure what the solution is, but we (humanity) really need something free from the influence of government (foreign or domestic) and other bad actors.
>It's become apparent that the Israeli political/war/propaganda machine has an incredible amount of influence - far beyond anything I'd personally imagined could be possible. They've been able to effectively commandeer most of the West's "traditional" mass media
Why make up blatant lies like this when mainstream media has been very critical of Israel for the past few weeks? The only exception is Fox News.
"Blatant lies"? It's my opinion, based on what I see here in the UK, and what I see coming from the US. And what I see is not very critical of Israel's actions at all. Sometimes there's a "surface" of it, but invariably with language that both diminishes Israel's culpability and dehumanises Palestinians.
Hell, I still see Western media repeating the untruths of mass raprs, babies hung on clothes lines etc, even though they were debunked a long time ago, and even Israel now admits those events didn't happen and, furthermore, admits many civilians were killed by Israeli helicopter and tank fire on October 7th.
I will say I've noticed a small improvement in the past week or two, with publication of many more stories of the horrors of what Israel is doing in Gaza, and some improvement in language use.
Nice strawman you got there - as I'm sure you're aware, I didn't say anything of the sort. Hamas (or at least, Palestinian militants) definitely murdered and kidnapped civilians on Oct 7th - those atrocities are bad enough without having to make up stories of torture (released hostages say there were treated well), mass rape, burned civilians (we know know there were killed by tanks and helicopters), etc.
> You describing it as ethnic cleansing is a form a propaganda and falsifiable pretty quickly.
I'm genuinely confused as to how it could be seen in any other way? Entire family trees wiped out, civilians and doctors killed indiscriminately by dumb bombs, snipers and drones, deliberate targeting of journalists to hide their war crimes. Israeli politicians are now even coming out and saying it - they want to deport Palestinians from Gaza, then occupy and settle it. They're saying it out loud now, as if it wasn't clear already, and still people don't believe them.
> Making false statements is not a crime.
Correct, not a legal crime; though I'm sure many would agree that making false statements to "justify" an invasion and ethic cleansing is a moral crime against humanity.
Even a casual glance of the major Western media sites in the U.S. would confirm that Israeli doesn't appear to wield any influence over the Western media.
Right now, the top story on the Israel-Gaza conflict on NBC, WaPo, NYT, and LAT is the IDF accidentally killing 3 hostages. Stories from the last week include multiple reports about potential Geneva Code violations. And in the weeks before the ceasefire, there was a constant drumbeat of opinion pieces calling for a ceasefire.
You've cherry-picked the single incident that Israel has been forthcoming about.
Everything I see has a very heavy and obvious bias in favour of Israel, even for the few stories they do choose to cover, e.g. "42 perished in airstrike" vs "3 IDF soldiers murdered by militant extremists". We also still see Western media repeating the falsehoods about beheaded babies, baked babies, mass rapes etc - even though Israel eventually admitted it wasn't true.
And that's aside from the absolute nonsense we've seen where anyone against the ethic cleansing is branded an anti-semite and risks cancrllation.
Israeli politicians are publicly calling for the total destruction of Gaza and relocation of anyone left, and for settling Gaza with Israelis - they're not even trying to hide it anymore, yet Western media is largely silent.
Israel absolutely did not "admit" that the stories of beheaded children and mass rapes weren't true.
Hamas absolutely did behead children, and rape and torture and murder dozens of women. That was not made up.
Israel has been showing pictures and videos of the bodies found after the Hamas attack. (They are showing them right now in various locations in SoCal.) Witnesses who survived the Hamas attack have testified to witnessing rapes and murders. Even the few Hamas terrorists taken alive have admitted to both.
> Hamas absolutely did behead children, and rape and torture and murder dozens of women.
No, they did not. I can't believe these lies are still being peddled, though you are proving my point about the culpability of the traditional media - they originally aired this "news" with minimal fact-checking, and then barely a mention of when Israel admitted, bit by bit, that they never happened.
> Witnesses who survived the Hamas attack have testified to witnessing rapes...
You mean like the witness that later admitted he was never even there? Or the one who later admitted he made it up? Or the other witnesses who later admitted they were just repeating what they were told by others? AFAIK, there isn't a single first-hand testimony that agrees with you.
> Even the few Hamas terrorists taken alive have admitted to both
You can't seriously be taking confession taken under torture as fact? Hamas have publicly, repeatedly and vehemently denied any rapes - and if you think about it, claiming that mass rapes and tortures were going on in the middle of a firefight (with not only small arms, but tanks and Apaches!)... is kind of unbelievable. More recently, we've seen the head rabbi of the IDF say that it's totally fine for Israeli soldiers to rape Palestinian civilians.
Hamas absolutely did kill civilians on October 7th, and some were definitely beheaded (no children though) - their actions were horrendous enough without Israel making up atrocity propaganda. My guess is that Israel panicked after killing so many of their own on Oct 7th, then Netanyahu realised it would be the perfect time to save his presidency by invading and occupying Gaza (this is pure speculation on my part, of course)
But I fear now we're veering into an argument that isn't suitable for HN; I've said my piece and would politely and respectfully invite you to do some research on Israel's recent admissions regarding their original claims on Oct 7th.
I think it's more that Birdwatch/Community Notes, which gets a lot of feature-love from Valley types, is already being weaponized to the point of failure. In the absence of any other moderation, this is leading Twitter into a dark descent of increasingly moderationless content.
> How Twitter's Community Notes Accelerates Denialism About Hamas Atrocities Against Israelis
> The Community Notes feature was supposed to shut down conspiracy theories on X, formerly Twitter. Instead Elon Musk's preference for crowdsourced moderation is allowing malicious users to weaponize hatred, lies and disinformation about the October 7 Hamas attack
Community Notes is just a subset of rank-based comment systems (e.g. Reddit and HN), and these are known to fail over time due to the commodification of votes. Even now you can go on certain forums and purchase a Community Note for a post for some hundreds of USD. It's not a substitute for moderation and everyone knows that if Hackernews defaulted to it instead of relying on dang that HN would fall apart.
Just because young people are critical of Israel, doesn't mean they've been "brainwashed" by Hamas. Believe it or not, people can have different points of view from you without being brainwashed.
Twitter is chock full of accounts like Jackson Hinkle and Syrian Girl (two of the most prominent) who post lie after lie after lie in favor of Hamas. Just an endless stream of claims that have been proven wrong. TikTok and Instagram, without moderation like a community note feature, is far worse at this.
Whenever talking to someone who is “critical of Israel” (who isn’t critical of that government? That’s not the point!) they use this line of defense despite leaving no room for criticism of their own extremely flawed and manipulative sources.
Twitter is also chock full of Zionists who lie. But there's little basis to say that either camp of liars is responsible for the lionshare of support either side has.
How can you say that with a straight face? There are something like 2 billion Muslims compared to a few million Jews in the entire world.
You can very easily go on twitter yourself and see how much louder the blatantly anti-Israel voices are compared to your antisemitic claims of “zionists”
We're talking about the number of young people who are critical of Israel and whether those people are primarily influenced by propaganda; I don't see how the relative number of Muslims and Jews have anything to do with it. In fact the most relevant population here isn't either of those but instead Christians, particularly in America. Support for Israel is [still] highest in America relative to almost the entire rest of the world, and in America support for Israel is the most popular with evangelical Christians (who support Israel at a greater rate than American Jews, and who greatly outnumber American Jews.
For these evangelical Christians, unconditionally support for Israel is a matter of religious imperative which they believe to be an essential prerequisite for the reincarnation of their Messiah!)
And it happens that American Christians have been experiencing a demographic collapse which has nothing to do with Palestinian propaganda! Young Americans have been rapidly abandoning Christianity, particularly the white evangelicals who support Israel the most, and the rabid support for Israel gets dropped in the process. Young people in America are abandoning their support for Israel because they are abandoning Christianity, which was traditionally the dominant religion in America (Muslim Americans may as well be a rounding error and didn't support Israel in the first place, they aren't being brainwashed by twitter propaganda either.)
Zionists such as yourself feel accustomed to a very high level of support in America that predominantly comes from a religious demographic which young people are presently fleeing from, but for some reason you can't seem to connect the dots and resort to blaming twitter propagandists for the decline in support for Israel. Get real; most young Americans don't even use twitter. They support Israel less because they're becoming secular and now only support Israel at the rate that is typical of secular people in other countries.
I think both you and your parent commenters are correct in the sense that while there are people who pretend to support Israel online, they aren't actually friends of Israel.
These are people who do not care one bit for the welfare of the Jews anywhere, much less Israel.
These twitter people are problematic because it makes for very bad optics for people who genuinely want the best for the people of Israel.
I think generations of leadership has turned a blind eye to this simply because it is expedient but at some point we all lose credibility as people spew illogical ideas while purportedly supporting Israel.
EU is a big org. There are good and bad players. Twitter is a cesspool of bad players. The whole point of this investigation is to flush out bad players from many places. Propagandists, partisans and manipulators.
The "propagandists, partisans and manipulators" that label themselves "journalists" and "media companies" want to dictate what posts should be allowed on Twitter.
They are no better than the Russian and Chinese counterparts after all. You cannot deviate from the agenda without getting censored.
The planet were "critiques of western political leaders" are increasingly stiffled, and governments and "independent" third parties and "fact checkers" (funded and working with said governments) dictate what's allowed to say and what's "disinformation".
Yet here you are, criticising them with absolutely 0 fear of any kind of repercussion, and you could be 100 times harsher and still expect nothing wrong happening
>Yet here you are, criticising them with absolutely 0 fear of any kind of repercussion, and you could be 100 times harsher and still expect nothing wrong happening
How benevolent! Zero fear as a person with insignificant reach and following, commenting on a tech forum (and under a nickname). What a feat!
Try having 0 fear as a journalist doing your job. Or as a whistleblower. Or as a content creator.
Even mere regular people expressing counter to the party line views in major issues on social media are fired, censored, harassed by the police, "fact checked" into social media bans, increasingly the target of new related laws (recent examples from UK, France), and so on.
Heck, just a couple of weeks ago students supporting Palestine in US universities were doxxed, threatened, and had a coordinated effort to render them "unhireable".
> Try having 0 fear as a journalist doing your job. Or as a whistleblower. Or as a content creator.
Journalists, whistleblowers, and content creators in the west are living in fear of governments targeting them for saying things the government doesn't like?
Yes, they do and Thierry Breton is on the frontline in this fight. He proposed legislation that would have endangered free journalism and protection of their sources aside from the fight for editorial control of social media. And he did that multiple times, every time to protect particular interests that fool people that have diffuse fears about social media.
I think you don't understand how china operates. You conflate so many things at once, most of these aren't governmental censorship. Companies firing people, advertiser dropping influencers, being fact checked, &c. has nothing to do with the government
Do you know what censorship is ? Do you know how china enforce censorship ? and at what scale ? If so you can't say in good faith that EU = China.
>I think you don't understand how china operates. You conflate so many things at once, most of these aren't governmental censorship.
A lot of these is outsourced governmental censorship.
And all of these support a single narrative, in lock-step about all kinds of issues.
>Companies firing people, advertiser dropping influencers, being fact checked, &c. has nothing to do with the government
Yeah, just happens to coincide with domestic and foreign policy agendas and narratives the government pushes, and government affiliated/sponsored overt or covert "fact checkers" and "independent bodies", all the way to direct orders from the government. Read on "The Twitter Files: The Censorship Industrial Complex".
The private sector companie don't have to be told what to do: they just see where the wind goes and act accordingly. Nobody was fired for being pro-narrative or for firing anti-narrative people. But increasingly they are also told what to do, threatened with related ("disinformation") or unrelated (taxes and such) violations, and such.
>Do you know what censorship is ? Do you know how china enforce censorship ? and at what scale ? If so you can't say in good faith that EU = China.
No, but I can say that I give very few fucks in what China does, but as a person in the EU I give many fucks what the EU does, and how the public discourse is getting increasingly less open than in past decades.
(I wouldn't give much fucks about what the US does internally either, but unfortunately, unlike China, they also export it)
You're free to think whatever you want, just don't expect people to swallow the "EU = literal China" without commenting, especially if you admit of not knowing much about half of your statement. I have yet to see an argument being strengthened by the "it's literally china", "it's literally hitler", &c. techniques
Matt Taibbi also on the Twitter Files: thousands of lines, citations, and evidence about goverment directly and covertly asking Big Tech to censor content and people on all kinds of issues, keeping tabs on how that goes, threatening, and so on.
Which is actually pertinent to the discussion, as opposed to Biden's son laptop.
The government had a more direct “report content” button. Twitter is free, has been free, continues to be free, to ignore or actively reject almost all such requests. These rights are extremely well-established, extremely well-defended, extremely well-known to the lawyers Twitter has on staff. The US has a rich history of being successfully sued for coercing private parties, which Twitter has still never claimed actually occurred to them.
>Twitter is free, has been free, continues to be free, to ignore or actively reject almost all such requests.
Of course it's free to ignore or actively reject all such requests from an entity like the government. Kind of like how a shop owner is free to ignore requests from the goodfellas that pass by and say "Great shop you got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it".
Yes, and we all hope that the Missouri v. Biden case currently before the Supreme Court will add to that body of case law and further restrict government's ability to interfere with social media.
Oh, so we are back to litterally tens of thousands of people at non-approved demonstrations sayong they cannot voice opposition anymore as we had during Covid...
I would not expect that level of self awareness from Tankies. Such people always existed, and always will. They claim living here is intolerable, and yet they never seem to go and live elsewhere.
Did I say "no different from China or Russia"? (1)
Or are you notorious for making it ad-hominem, and of putting statements in other people's mouths they didn't make?
Yes, I frequently hold opinions "in contradiction to other people’s statements" and state them. I wouldn't do it if I knew that such blatant individuality isn't approved!
Though surely "putting out public statements in contradiction to other people’s statements" is true for any non trivial statement one can make about a subject that has at least two sides: it would be in contradiction with some people's statements, and in agreement with other people's statements.
So, isn't your accusation basically boiling down to: "putting out public statements in contradiction to [your preferred people’s] statements"?
(1) And isn't that a pretty low bar to be happy about?
In general I’d like stronger speech protections but I find your approach to be hysterical and counterproductive. For example, I don’t think it’s right to say the government cannot possibly request content moderation action, nor do I think it’s right to say that a private company can’t voluntarily cooperate with such a request.
So your whole hysterical “private companies can’t stand up to this!” is actually adding to the problem by giving the impression they cannot. In reality, they can, they should, and they very often do.
>For example, I don’t think it’s right to say the government cannot possibly request content moderation action, nor do I think it’s right to say that a private company can’t voluntarily cooperate with such a request.
So much for "stronger free speech protections".
If someone who says they agree with free speech says talking against this is "hysterical", I'd like to see what those against free speech say.
So in your ideal model of the world, it would be forbidden for anyone working for the government to click a “report child pornography” button on Twitter et al?
Or would it just be forbidden for Twitter to look at that report and then remove the content?
I'm not sure if you just didn't notice, but public and private gatherings were unilaterally outlawed just 2~3 years ago in the name of national emergencies.
The freedoms we enjoy here in the west are closer to erasure than you realize.
“Unilaterally” outlawed by elected governments who can be peacefully deposed, that is to say, not unilaterally at all.
It’s worth being paranoid about our freedoms, which is why I take issue with the characterization that we are just the same as China and Russia. We are neither as helpless nor as victimized as those people.
> “Unilaterally” outlawed by elected governments who can be peacefully deposed, that is to say, not unilaterally at all.
Well... It took one signature on an administrative act and almost everyone in Italy, not in China, was under house arrest for 70 days with armed soldiers on the streets. No oversight, no checks and balances, no constitution, nothing. This warrants being very careful of any government activity.
And at some point someone even suggested to postpone elections.
But more on topic, the only reason the Commission is going gung-ho is because of the elections next year. They are very afraid.
It is my impression that checks and balances, constitutions etc need to work exactly in times of crisis. If they only work when everything is all right, they are useless. Especially when it comes to freedom.
The fact that a government minister even wrote in a book (hastily taken off the market) that he hoped the situation would be used for "a new cultural hegemony" speaks volumes.
Didn't dictatorships always use justifications for threats or emergencies to be instated?
An emergency doesn't justify taking away fundamental freedoms. Hence, anything the EU does in this space, justified or not, must be scrutinized.
> It is my impression that checks and balances, constitutions etc need to work exactly in times of crisis. If they only work when everything is all right, they are useless. Especially when it comes to freedom.
Agreed, but you haven't demonstrated that these checks and balances have been violated. At least in the US, authority was exercised and at times found overreaching and at times found well-within Constitutional bounds. That's exactly those checks and balances functioning correctly.
> The fact that a government minister even wrote in a book (hastily taken off the market) that he hoped the situation would be used for "a new cultural hegemony" speaks volumes.
What volumes does it speak?
> Didn't dictatorships always use justifications for threats or emergencies to be instated?
Nope, not always. And even if that were true, it's also true that threats or emergencies have sometimes required extraordinary government action that didn't result in dictatorships.
> An emergency doesn't justify taking away fundamental freedoms. Hence, anything the EU does in this space, justified or not, must be scrutinized.
Of course not. But obviously the debate is what is "a fundamental freedom" and what counts as "taking away." Sure, scrutinize away. Just don't assume that lockdown == illegal == immoral == people don't agree with it == you can just assert that it was illegitimate. People elected the governments they elected, a crisis emerged, and those governments did what they felt they were elected to do, and if you disagree you just vote for different leaders next time around. That's how it works. We're obviously not going to do snap elections every time a new crisis emerges.
> Agreed, but you haven't demonstrated that these checks and balances have been violated.
I mentioned specifically Italy, because that's where I live and where our freedoms where completely thrown out of the window by, as I said, an administrative act (not even the equivalent of an executive order, nor a law), from one day to another. An act that shouldn't have had that force, but well... rules were bent.
(A year later, people were also deprived of their ability to go to school or to work, which regardless of the reason, was equally bad)
> What volumes does it speak?
That while the event wasn't predicted, it sparked ideas on how to "revolutionize" society in a "different" way (the actual passage was about taking the pandemic as an opportunity to bring forth "a new cultural hegemony of the left"), not caring about consequences.
And we see the same with other aspect of society (misinformation, climate policies...). Some EU commissioners (Timmermanns to name one, until he was in office) are hell-bent in that direction (although this time there's significant pushback).
> those governments did what they felt they were elected to do
Outside my country, in many others (e.g. Spain), courts actually said that well, governments weren't allowed to do what they did.
> You cannot deviate from the agenda without getting censored.`
The main difference is that the """agenda""" is a well lit 8 lane highway with the occasional crash in Europe and in Russia/China it's a dark twisty path in a very dense forest with wolves at each bends
But yes sure, Europe is literally a dictatorship, and thousands of people are sent to jail for criticising any arbitrary thing
Literally every single country on this planet has censorship one way or the other, some a bit, some a lot, what you're saying is that any censorship = China tier authoritarianism ?
My point is that the important difference, i.e. the difference between autoritarianism and democracy, is how the agenda comes about, not what the agenda is at any specific moment. We would like to bring about a certain agenda through democratic means, and maintain (or change) it through democratic means, and for that it is important that the agenda and those implementing it (i.e. EU politicians in this case) can be criticized limitlessly.
Initially, when censorship is implemented but the agenda is still largely unchanged, it might look like there's not much of a problem since after all the actions actually undertaken by the government are still those that the majority of the population agrees with. But by that point it has already become a little more difficult to peacefully remove people from power, because they now have an extra tool to remain in power, namely censorship.
>what you're saying is that any censorship = China tier authoritarianism ?
I think where you are disagreeing with mustafa_pasi is that you are comparing the end results of authoritarianism after different amounts of time, whereas mustafa_pasi is comparing the methods of governance that lead to and maintain those end results. You are right that the situation on the ground is not as bad in Europe as it is in China or Russia, but (IMHO) mustafa_pasi is right that people who want to limit what can be said are "no better than the Russian and Chinese counterparts" in their disregard for democratic values and methods.
Where do you draw the line ? It sounds a lot like any kind of law would be censorship following that logic, any law enforcement is a road to authoritarianism if you think no failsafe exists between the two end of the spectrum
Should I be allowed to call for jihad online ? upload execution videos for propaganda ? can I create a blog to discuss ethnic cleansing with my armed nazi militia hometown association ? When does "fighting the agenda" become "being flooded in foreign agendas" ?
Yes, I want to see you calling for Jihad. The fact that many people actually do call for that was tried be hidden from the public by officials that like to either pronounce or belittle problems in society, the normal political arena. To be able to make a democratic and informed decision, I have to see people doing that to be able to have a perspective on a problem.
There is a political will to deny these facts and you only have to be marginally creative to find the causes yourself. To put trust in the EU here is completely naive.
The fact that things are better in Europe than in Russia or China does not mean that we can't show concern for the changes that are being imposed in Europe.
I don't know why people keep bringing up Russia or China in every one of these conversations. It's nothing but a strawman fallacy.
> They are no better than the Russian and Chinese counterparts after all
Correct, we should be protective of our freedoms and indeed the EU (IMO) is a bit lacking in its speech protections, but no one except China and Russia are served by this meme that US/EU are just as bad as China and Russia.
The number of anti-EU comments here surprises me, frankly. My understanding, as an Australian, is the EU is just enforcing rules regarding transparency and moderation reporting - they’re not setting some speech-controlling agenda. Seems reasonable to me?
Actually i'm pro-EU but what we have in the past 15 years is brussels acting like a corporate, with careerist wannabes doing anything that sounds popular in order to climb up the corporate ladder. There is 0 politics in brussels these days, all lobbying. I think it's my duty to be critical of that
Yeah but be careful what you wish for. Constructive criticism is good, shitting on the EU and parroting "EU is a corrupt dictatorship!!" propaganda will make foreign-backed populists rise. Who will benefit from the downfall of th EU? Why are so many people seemingly happy about it?
The downfall of the EU could potentially allow for a successor framework that is more democratically backed. There are some that think the EU is corrupted beyond saving and it would be easier to start a new project instead of reforming the existing.
Personally, the fact that the EU considers itself above the constitutions of its member states without having this "constitution level" approved by the actual people (there are two referendums that failed at the ballot, in France and in the Netherlands, that lead restructuring so that no more popular vote was necessary, those are the contracts which are now in place), is a major no go for me. If there ever is to be an European constitution, the people must absolutely be able to vote on it, and the vote must be binding - so rejection means no, and a not "bypass by restructuring" - and a new attempt must then furthermore be voted on.
Britain leaving the EU didn't result in a war so it kinda disproves your point. If some countries leave and later reunite on according to different set of principles, it doesn't necessarily mean there would be a war.
They do have a speech-controlling agenda (I am not commenting on whether this is positive or negative here) in that this also relates to "illegal content", which can be something factual but still illegal to publish. For instance videos of the 7th October attacks made by Hamas are likely illegal:
""Content circulating online that can be associated to Hamas qualifies as terrorist content, is illegal, and needs to be removed under both the Digital Services Act and Terrorist Content Online Regulation," a Commission spokesperson said." [1]
Precedent in France is that this is understood to apply even if the content is published to denounce those facts.
> The DSA imposes new rules on content moderation, user privacy and transparency. Any firm found in breach faces a fine worth up to 6% of its global turnover.
The EU has been rent seeking on FAANG and US tech for a decade. They want control and money. Thanks for USB-C but they can keep their fucking cookie banners. This will create huge problems for the whole world when an arbitrary agency can "impose rules on content moderation" and "privacy[1]" and levy a huge fine. The US tech companies should form a bloc and force them to be reasonable
Yes, and it creates huge problems for the whole world when an arbitrary multi-billion dollar organisation can "impose rules on content moderation" and "privacy" with zero accountability while skirting local laws. Non-american countries should form a bloc and force them to be reasonable.
The tech companies are much more accountable than the EU. You can just not use Twitter. Nothing bad will happen to you. Good luck trying to just "not use" the EU if you happen to live there. That's much easier said than done.
Yes I concur /s. Don't use Google search. Don't use websites with Google Analytics. Don't use websites with Google Ads conversion tracking. Don't use Android phones. Don't send SMSes to android phones. Don't use YouTube. Don't use websites that embed YouTube. Don't use Chrome. Don't use gmail. Don't send email to gmail addresses. Oh yes, and I also don't use news media sites who monetise through Google adsense either.
Yes, I agree that the first DSA investigation targeting X obviously has more of a populistic bent due to Elon. But he's drawn a pretty good target on his own back including but not limited to firing the election integrity team [1] while the DSA clearly states that VLOPs have to do risk assessments before elections.
Honestly, American big tech has shown close to zero ability to self-regulate the externalities of their platforms, especially abroad, and especially in smaller countries.
If the consequence of this regulation is that American tech companies pull out of hard to serve European markets I wouldn't mind that one bit. That would open up markets for local competition closer aligned to their audience. Norway doesn't use Meta as the dominant messaging app because people like it. We use it because network effects creates unassailable moats, lock-in and network effects. Most people absolutely hate Meta and loathe Google - but we can't exactly not use them without it costing us greatly.
I'm happy to live here and the actions being done by the EU with GDPR, DSA and DMA are in my honest opinion critically needed as American-centric, free-market, "free-speech" norms are misaligned with other cultures in a way that foreigners would never understand without delving deep into a countries culture. Not just through naive metrics-driven technology scaling engagement at all costs. This is warping and killing culture, media environments, advertising ecosystems and political communication in the name of profit for a select few massive tech companies which aren't even taxing to the countries they're siphoning advertising budgets out of.
X is nothing special. The only reason there isn't another Twitter is because these markets mostly have room for one platform. If Twitter disappeared in Europe there'd be a local replacement in less than a year or two. And honestly it would probably be better.
"Regulate the externalities of their platform" is so weasel worded that it has broken into a henhouse. That just means "Unable to stop literally anything bad from happening as a side effect of their actions." Which if we are being remotely intellectually honest is an impossible hurdle.
> Unable to stop literally anything bad from happening as a side effect of their actions
That's neither what I said nor the stated goal of this regulation.
Theres tons of externalities ranging from increased political polarisation, mental health issues, increasing social isolation to the decimation of the traditional publishing sector. These socio-technical systems are some of the most complex ever built and we are barely scratching the surface of the challenges they are causing. It doesn't help that these platforms actively stop the collection of data on their platforms for research purposes (as they probably know it'll reflect poorly on them).
The platforms themselves have identified their content as a legitimate existential risk. Mostly due to how advertisers don't want to be affiliated with certain types of content. See the multiple rounds of demonitizations done by Google in the adpocalypse or Elsagate. Or Meta's crackdown on content post 2016/Brexit. Or Elon's current YOLO which has killed their advertising revenue.
The current status quo is that platforms govern their platform content through advertisers threatening to pull advertising budgets. I'd say you Americans are mildly crazy for regulating the reach of speech through informal negotiations by big advertisers and big tech, but it does sound on-brand for you guys. I find it pretty disgusting though, and I bet a lot of you Americans do too.
Anyways, the DSA in it's current form is largely revolves around increased transparency into data for researchers and mandated reporting processes around moderation decisions. More informed decision making can be made in the future while not relying exclusively on leaked documents from whistleblowers like Frances Haugen.
The EU's attempts to regulate these externalities impose literally impossible burdens on American tech companies. And similar attempts to do so with the AI Act are impossibly flawed and technically impractical. Conditionals keep on being added and added.
Do you know that Meta, Google, etc have to hire literally tens of thousands of people exclusively to keep up with EU regulations? And even then, it's not even possible, so the EU tosses massive fines (up to 20% of global revenue.) This is rent-seeking no matter how you cut it.
Perhaps if the EU had the barest shred of competency in developing modern consumer technology, it would understand. But wildly, regulators doggedly proceed ahead with simply absurd asks, not realizing that the EU tech industry is well and truly dead because of their actions. Let's not let them do the same to American tech.
The AI act I won't comment on as I'm not that well read on it and it's not been codified yet. I agree that some parts are more wishful thinking then others.
The belief that if EU removed their regulation a big tech sector would pop up is absurd libertarian propaganda. I'm not saying you believe that, but some people do. Norms, values and the insanity of scaling a business across 20+ languages are way bigger factors for why companies settle into local geographical maxima's. Try managing 3 different marketing agencies, 3 different websites, 3 different app languages. Imagine doing an A/B test on this and maintaining different winner variants across geographies. Congratulations you've just scaled to 20 million people in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. I deal with this everyday - it's horribly inefficient. I think that's the main factor hindering the European B2C tech sector. It's easier to just scale in the US.
This article is about the DSA so I'll stick to that.
> Do you know that Meta, Google, etc have to hire literally tens of thousands of people exclusively to keep up with EU regulations?
A platform serving billions of users needs thousands, if not tens of thousands of moderators. Hell even a forum with hundreds of users need a couple of moderators to keep things in check. Unmoderated platforms turn into self-destructive cesspools without exception.
Facebook and Twitter scaled to other countries with the wishful thinking that algorithmic moderation would scale. Turns out it doesn't. It was a risk they took while moving fast and breaking things and now they're cashing in their check.
The DSA in large parts revolves around transparency around how platforms are dealing with moderation. Did you know that Twitter only has one polish speaking moderator? Do you think that's enough for the 14 million MAUs they have? [1]
In Germany it's illegal to show nazi symbolism. It's also illegal to "harm someones reputation". In Norway the Sapmi ethnic population is a protected class. In Denmark you can't burn the Quran. This are real codified laws and preferences that a foreign company can't just ignore. And you have. There's thousands of examples and a decade of cases. There's a reason the entirety of Europe is standing together to do something about it - and it's not to seek a measly billion euros or five in fines.
While you may be ideologically or philosophically opposed to the "limiting of speech" you'll find that this varies wildly across cultures and across topics. Just because the US has laws and norms around "free speech" and "safe harbour laws" doesn't mean that other countries must be forced to be imposed these rules from American tech giants who put no or a marginal effort into following laws behind extremely opaque platforms with zero accountability.
When doing business in another country you follow their laws, it's as easy as that. If the cost of the fine is less then the cost of following the law it won't be followed. If the cost is too high to bear, it opens room for local competition who will follow the rules. That's fine. American tech can do whatever the hell they want in the US, that's not our right to influence.
We absolutely need to sanction this clusterfuck of an economic bloc. The EU contributes nothing to consumer technology (outside of ASML) and yet seeks rent on American companies.
There's a reason the EU barely has any successful tech companies over the past two decades. And yet, people will still say "the EU has done nothing wrong!"
Tell that to the literal trillions of euros in growth the EU regulated away into oblivion by stamping out any hope for an emerging tech industry.
Is it competition if the only way it can exist is if there are no other players, especially from far more technically competent countries like the US and China?
If you can't keep up the pretense of a free market, you get sanctioned. The EU can regulate US companies out of the EU but it won't end well for either faction.
I think the negative attitude towards the EU on Hacker News is the product of a couple things:
- The EU has drastically scaled up regulatory requirements for tech businesses, starting with GDPR, running through the DSA, and probably eventually continuing through the AI Act and the proposed cybersecurity law. Because this is a community mostly centered around people who start or work at or invest in tech businesses, there’s a lot of frustration that the new regulations are making life harder.
- In this case, part of what the EU alleges is that Twitter is not doing enough to actively combat disinformation. People are concerned that what the EU wants in terms of combatting disinformation IS a speech-controlling agenda.
I’m not sure either argument is 100% correct, but I can understand why many are arguing that the EU regulations are going too far, both in terms of requiring too much work for too little gain, and in terms of jeopardizing Internet independence.
I think it's also because the people on hacker news in general are not stupid and they can see through the bullshit to the real agendas that are being passed.
Let's have a test:
What's wrong with the following:
In 2020, the Netherlands passed a new law that stated that anyone that works in a job with an obligation to secrecy cannot be prosecuted for perjury for lawing in court under oath.
The example given by the government was, "Consider a lawyer and his client".
Forget for a moment that in this trivial example a lawyer could simply refuse to answer?
Figure it out yet?
Here's a hint, everyone in government has an obligation to secrecy, including prosecutors.
See the problem here? I'm sure that lots of hacker news people would.
He was lying in court again just before he retired. No consequences. Worse, he was never found out officially. The press were never even interested in the story.
However, two years later the law was changed. Now there can never be consequences in such cases. The Netherlands officially only has a kangaroo court now.
You're also missing the part where local politics will always blame EU for unpopular legislation (even one they supported themselves in euparl) and take credit for all positive EU directives (even if they fought against them).
With less informed, this creates a pretty big "EU bogeyman" trend.
As far as I know there are no common laws surrounding that. There is a legal framework/agreement requiring states to have some kind of hate speech laws though, but they'll vary wildly. E.g. in Germany you can't be openly Nazi. In Denmark you can't burn a Quran etc. So there is no agreement of WHAT constitutes hate speech across the EU.
The DSA itself imposes EU-wide requirements on the “mitigation” of “illegal hate speech”, although it does not define the term. Section 35, 1(c). My amateur guess for how this would end up is that large European wide platforms will be expected to take down hate speech that is illegal anywhere in Europe, but I don’t think we have seen an example for certain. It’s possible this enforcement action will bring more certainty.
I think this is going to inevitably create more and more tension between EU and American contexts, because hate speech is affirmatively legal in the U.S., most recently ruled under Snyder v Phelps.
Really not a fan of the EU as a speech arbiter, especially considering that they are one of the biggest spenders of political ads on facebook in most european countries: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/
The EU has separation of powers. I don’t see the European Commission (who opened the present proceedings) listed as an advertiser under your link. And ultimately it is the judicial branch who will decide.
If for example you change the country to Spain you can see both the european commission and european parliament among the top spenders: https://i.imgur.com/TjzlrV5.png
Also i don't understand what you mean by 'judicial power'. The EU is not a state, it doesn't have judicial power and the legislative is shared between EC and EP
You… may be thinking of the ECHR (not an EU body), though even describing that as advisory would be a major over-simplification. But for the ECJ, you’re just flat-out incorrect.
Calling the ECJ a "judicial branch" is also an extreme stretch. The ECJ can't enforce a law, that is up to each country's national system to do. It can only decide if asked by a national court or in matters of union law. There is no clear separation of powers in EU because EU is a treaty, not a state.
thierry breton, ursula Vdl, and any of the commissionaires are not elected democratically, unless you consider the internal brussels lobbying some sort of democracy. at best it s a detached aristocracy
by that logic, elon's stock prices and tesla sales are an even more direct form of check for his power.
Ursula Von Der Leyen was appointed by the EU national leaders and elected by the EU parliament (which is elected by EU voters). It's as "democratically elected" as any minister in any democratic government: the people elect those that appoint the person. The same applies for EU commissioners.
Yes it becomes second- or third hand democracy (the EU parliamentarians are usually appointed by their domestic parties, the appointments for commissioners are appointed by other politicians and so on). But such is representative democracy. At the end of the day it's the elected members of the parliament that vote on all positions, and all laws.
It is tiresome how people promote this propaganda.
> Ursula Von Der Leyen was appointed by the EU national leaders and elected by the EU parliament
She was "elected" by the EP in a vote in which she was the only allowed candidate and still nearly lost because so many of the MEPs refused to vote in digust. Sorry, but an election in which there's only one option is not an election, that's an abuse of the word.
And the Parliament is itself not a real Parliament. It has no actual powers of any use, so the people who run for it can't have policies. They rubber stamp what the Commission wants to do, they cannot override or control it. Just like the "election" of von der Leyen, this is a sinister abuse of terminology: it is an abuse of the word Parliament.
Finally, we actually have no idea how von der Leyen got her job. She is the most powerful person in Europe and nobody can answer basic questions about how that happened. Yes, the leaders of the member states went into a room, and when they came out vdL was in charge. What was discussed in that room? Who were the other candidates? Were they any? If not, why not? Was there a vote? By which criteria was she judged? Did every country's leader even get a chance to speak at all? Were they threatened? (The EU threatens members routinely so it is not unthinkable).
The truth is nobody knows the answer to any of these things because despite the EU being supposedly democratic, the people who are theoretically in charge are all sworn to secrecy. (by whom?! that's also a secret!)
This is an absolute joke. Europeans should all be collectively ashamed of what a pathetically totalitarian system they have allowed their ruling classes to construct, and then they should work tirelessly towards its abolition.
> She was "elected" by the EP in a vote in which she was the only allowed candidate
That’s an approval, yes. Had she been rejected a new candidate would be presented, and so on. I agree it could have been better to have N candidates presented to begin with, but this procedure is how many top political positions are appointed.
Every commissioner is appointed* by the government of the member state they are from.
The president of the commission is chosen by the council (heads of state of the member states) and has to confirmed by the parliament.
So in theory only internal brussels lobbying would be who gets assigned which seat but in practice all of it as the EU citizens don't give a fuck who represents them in the EU so these kind of decisions are never talked about in local elections where they should be.
* (well proposed but if they don't accept they would just get another proposal from the same government)
The president of the Commission can reject candidates as often as they want (not in theory, but in practice they do), so the member state's power to appoint someone is largely meaningless. The EU gets the kind of person it wants, every time. There is no actual power by the member states here.
The Council is a joke that won't explain its decisions, it won't even explain if there was a vote on who got to be EU President or if Germany just announced the decision was made already and then they played with their phones for the rest of the meeting.
The entire thing is literally decided by lobbying, except we have no idea who is lobbying who, when, how or what they want. All we know is that the key processes are all secret - super democratic!
> The president of the Commission can reject candidates as often as they want (not in theory, but in practice they do), so the member state's power to appoint someone is largely meaningless.
The member states effectively decide who is the president of the commission. A candidate can't go for vote to the parliament without their approval first (72% majority required).
Who is which countries commissionaire and gets what seat is very much part of the whole process of deciding who is going to be the president.
And as the commissioners require the parliaments approval too that is where they usually get shot down instead of being rejected by the president of the commission (can't agree on these beforehand with the parliament)
> it won't even explain if there was a vote on who got to be EU President
EU does not have a president and will not get one without a new treaty to replace the Treaty of Lisbon and is not something the Commission would ever get to decide on (this is the kind of foundational EU treaties that has to be signed by all member states)
> The Council is a joke that won't explain its decisions
Just like any government it mainly explains itself to the people who voted it into power. In this case the governments of the member states / council and to some extent the parliament.
> by that logic, elon's stock prices and tesla sales are an even more direct form of check for his power
That's quite a stretch of the imagination. Elon can make X go up in stock price by firing half the team, or by outsourcing their work to Bangladesh or replacing them with badly made AI, or adding porn advertisers. None of these ways of bumping the stock price is a represention of how well they are upholding the law or their approval by the general public.
On the other hand, EU governments who elect their representatives in the EU parliament are all democratically elected.
If they misbehave, the public can throw them to the curb at the next election, like what happened in Poland where the government tried to behave like the nasty greedy man child that Elon is.
Let's put it like that, I don't fully trust my government, but I believe we as people have the ability to improve some things, while I think Elon is a deranged out of touch and control lunatic. Luckily, in the Nordics they showed this petulant little brat what happens when workers band together and boycott Tesla.
Does anyone have more information about what the infringements are? It would be very obviously hypocritical for the EU to be publicly alleging "breach of transparency obligations", if they arn't willing to be transparent about the allegations.
I'm still not seeing any reference to specific violations by X, just some surrounding context and listing of allegations.
The EU has broad discretion to start formal inventigations, but specifically CHOSE to begin litigation against X for specific reasons. I would expect a transparent governing body to provide a litany of information to the public about why they are choosing to take that action. If there is a lack of said information, that would lead one to suspect that information is being purposely concealed and/or that it is a targeted partisan political action.
Alternative hypotheses: the information is published but not reported; the information is reported but you haven't seen the reporting; the information will become available at trial.
Just to clarify, since I believe "partisan" in the US is often meant to refer to one of the two parties, that the EU has several bodies, and the European Commission specifically consists of people nominated by the member countries and do not necessarily come from the same party (to the limited extent that EU-wide parties even exist).
With Musk publicly tearing down lots of the existing moderation and compliance infrastructure and welcoming back highly problematic disinformation actors like Trump and Alex Jones, Twitter seems like an obvious choice?
Yes, it's quite possible twitter platforming certain unsavory people is part of the reason the EU is perusing litigation, but that also somewhat de-legitimizes this action as a legalistic inquiry.
As an aside, the idea of "disinformation" is fundamentally political/partisan because it defines a grouping of conflicting people and ideas. Furthermore, one of the core principles of liberalism is that people in a society will never be able to agree on "hard questions" (i.e. religion, culture, values, economic system) so the government should not take stances on them. If the EU is a liberal institution, then it is totally contrary to be perusing something as arbitrary and difficult as defining what is and isn't "disinformation". They should be leaving that to individuals and private organizations.
So do Facebook, Faux News, Sky (and anffiliates in the continent) and any number of other right-wing media sources. Do we see federal or EU regulators going after them?
The process of selecting the current leader was done in secret.
Even the single-option EU Parliament ballot with her name on it, was a secret ballot.
She replaced the previous leader who is on the record as saying, "Monetary policy is a serious issue. We should discuss this in secret, in the Eurogroup [...] I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious [...] I am for secret, dark debates."
Then she negotiated massive vaccine purchases from Pfizer that were far too large, and the deal was secret. People wanted to know what sort of negotiation process led to buying hundreds of millions of shots that then had to be destroyed because nobody wanted them, and it turned out she negotiated it via SMS and those messages were ... yep, secret. (in fact, destroyed). This came as no surprise because at the time she got the job she was under investigation in Germany for corruption, but the investigation stalled after phones that were confiscated turned out to have had all their data deleted before being handed over.
The EU insists that almost every website spam you with reams of boilerplate in the name of transparency, but systematically refuses transparency for itself.
Was the ~"EU is heading towards civil war" post made by the owner of X, community noted?
I realize that would be tough to fact check, but I've lived in the EU for the last 6 years and "civil war" is a take from another universe, and really felt like projection.
Was he suggesting that Orban & Co's politics is going to invade the rest of the EU, with violence?
Can someone explain to me what one of the most influential people on the planet meant by that?
I respect so much of what Musk has accomplished but that left me at a loss for words.
And, sadly, I know many people that think the same. Maybe not a civil war per se but we're heading towards many internal conflicts. And the more we wait to solve things, the worse it'll be.
I can somewhat imagine this happening in the USA after Jan 6th set the example of modern political violence in the USA.
But regarding Europe, I see more right-wing politicians getting elected more often in some EU countries as a response to allowing extra immigration from the war in Syria. In Poland as a counter-example, it went the other way. However, all of these political shifts were non-violent.
"Civil war" is politics via violence. Please give me a scenario as to how you see that happening in specific countries in the EU.
>If this is the case, what is your proposed solution to avoid this "civil war" in France?
I am neither French nor responsible for the generals writing the open letter. Why not ask them?
You asked for evidence of possible civil war in the EU. I provided evidence from a very compelling source of such a possibility in one of the EU's founding members, something you obviously had not been aware of. Taken aback, all you can do is to sputter "no u".
> This report will provide greater detail about the multistep effort devised and driven by Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election and block the transfer of power. Building on the information presented in our hearings earlier this year, we will present new findings about Trump’s pressure campaign on officials from the local level all the way up to his Vice President, orchestrated and designed solely to throw out the will of the voters and keep him in office past the end of his elected term.
> As we’ve shown previously, this plan faltered at several points because of the courage of officials (nearly all of them Republicans) who refused to go along with it. Donald Trump appeared to believe that anyone who shared his partisan affiliation would also share the same callous disregard for his or her oath to uphold the rule of law. Fortunately, he was wrong.
> The failure of Trump’s plan was not assured. To the contrary, Trump’s plan was successful at several turns. When his scheme to stay in power through political pressure hit roadblocks, he relentlessly pushed ahead with a parallel plan: summoning a mob to gather in Washington, DC on January 6th, promising things “will be wild!”
> That mob showed up. They were armed. They were angry. They believed the “Big Lie” that the election had been stolen. And when Donald Trump pointed them toward the Capitol and told them to “fight like hell,” that’s exactly what they did.
> Donald Trump lit that fire. But in the weeks beforehand, the kindling he ultimately ignited was amassed in plain sight.
- Economy is not getting better for everybody. Affordable housing doesn't exist anymore. Owning a car is becoming more and more expensive due the price increases and taxes while also paying other taxes to subsidy rich people buying expensive EV.
- Public services like healthcare are becoming a nightmare everywhere in Europe. COVID changed everything. If you are sick you better have a private insurance or you'll have to wait months for anything. I had to wait 8 months for a 5 min call to tell me the result of some tests. Thankfully it doesn't look like anything serious but that's not the case for everybody.
- Other services are worse. Having to pay money to do some paperwork reminds me of the corruption in Eastern Europe after the fall of the communism.
- We're already exporting terrorist to fight in foreign countries
- You can see even in HN people talking about moving cities because they are unsafe
- Russia is at war with us, fighting the long war, waiting for any chance to destabilize us. Meanwhile a huge part of the US population supports Russia and wants nothing to do with the EU.
- Dumb policies that come from the EU that restrict speech, therefore freedom, only to keep some bureaucrats happy.
- More friction in politics than ever. The era of respectful debate and sharing of ideas is over. Now you have to be incendiary, be trending topic on twitter, point at your enemy (not rival anymore), threaten them and create more friction than ever.
Now, all this is only getting worse. There's no will to improve things because there's no acceptance of a problem. You say immigration must be regulated, you're a fascist. You say big corporations shouldn't be able to do certain things, you're a communist. We only scream at each other while things get worse. We're going at full speed with no brakes.
I think there's a bigger chance of a conflict in Europe than in the US. We only need a country to fuck up and drag everybody else.
Can you explain to me what regulatory framework you would use to address such posts? Are you willing to trust some European bureaucrat to decide how likely civil war might be? Doesn’t that strike you as profoundly dangerous?
I am true admirer of US style free speech regulations, but as EU citizen I agree with this action though. Why? Because Twitter already cave in (and rather easily I must say) to the Turkey request for pre election lets call it "special moderation".
So the solution is either heavy anti-monopoly regulation requiring splitting of Twitter to several competing entities (though preferable, probably not feasible w/o US agreeing and enforcing it) or less than ideal some kind of content regulation. Otherwise we are giving away ability to speak and censor to autocrats (again Turkey) while doing nothing. Kind of stupid. If it is already censored and regulated (again Turkey) I do not see big deal if it regulated according UE rules.
I think to avoid ambiguity it should be always written as social media platform called "X" (formerly known as Twitter). I don't think I will ever be able to get used to the name.
Hey, what a nice coincidence that this happens the day after links to a Swedish tabloid report noting child labour in the Tesla supply chain is marked as "potentially harmful"[0] on twitter!
If anyone wants to have a closer look at the mindset of the EU bureaucrats driving this, take a look at Thierry Breton's Twitter account and despair: https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton
Whatever good the EU does, if free speech is the price, I'm not willing to pay it.
> Whatever good the EU does, if free speech is the price, I'm not willing to pay it.
That is not really 'mindset of the EU bureaucrats', more like 'mindset of european politicians'. Politicians on national level often use similar heavy-handed approach, both in EU, or outside EU (i.e. UK).
There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good at it, for example. West sucks at it (it has Hollywood at least). These regulations aim to help. It's the same type of regulation that attempts to prevent a teacher telling kids that the earth is 6 thousand years old.
I think stellar education together with good journalism is the wholesome way to address this, but obviously we don't have that. So we're playing catch up: ban the Nazi symbols, hand-slap liars, etc. If you don't have an educated and informed populace, how to even reach a practical consensus on what's acceptable?
You can argue for absolutely zero regulation, but demonstrate that you understand the thousand ways that would be abused.
I think it's a problem with democracy: there is zero incentive to pursue the truth or get things right. As the decisions of governments rarely have direct immediate consequences for your life there also isn't a fast enough feedback loop to correct your mistakes. By mistakes I mean supporting politicians who don't have your interest in mind not even some higher good or whatever.
In other words there is no reward for seeking the truth or trying to understand various issues and there is no penalty for being a moron. As long as it's the case it's just a war over who gets to have access to the most efficient propaganda machine to get the gullible masses on their side.
I agree it makes sense for the legislators to ensure that's someone local instead of foreign power though. At least they are close enough to the pitchforks if it comes to that.
That's an interesting train of thought about incentives. I would have said that everyone has an inherent motivation to understand, but now that I think about it, this motivation goes away when group dynamics or poverty start affecting you. Democracy works as long as the majority is lucid, I think. There's no alternative when it's not though. Create financial accountability for long term impact of ruling class decisions? That probably has a million downsides.
My view is that one way to improve the situation is to move as much power as possible to a local level. Quicker feedback loop, getting to know people you vote for, seeing them work for the community could improve things.
I think it's no coincidence that the healthiest democracies are either very small mono cultural countries or ones with a lot of power at local level while universal tendency of power hungry autocracs is to centralise as much power as possible while starving local bodies. One example is absolutely disastrous rules of PiS in Poland for the last 8 years.
> There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good at it, for example. West sucks at it (it has Hollywood at least). These regulations aim to help.
This is precisely the same argument made by every opponent of free speech throughout history and around the world: bad actors will manipulate the public discourse for their own political ends, disrupting the public order. It's important to realize there is nothing new about this argument at all. The West generally settled for speech over order, and many people would now like to re-negotiate that settlement, using the Internet as justification.
Mass media, for a time, created a sort of oasis for "public order" types. Instead of disinformation, gossip, and fake news spread through word-of-mouth - or later, the massively decentralized yellow press - which often led to bizarre political outcomes, riots, violence, and even insurrections and wars, one class of people temporarily/largely controlled a major means of information dissemination via radio and television. Over time it became increasingly centralized in only a few companies, and even allowed for a fairly high degree of government regulation, compared with historic means of information dissemination. I don't know how effective this was in creating actual political consensus, but it gave the impression to people cloistered in the same or similar classes that such consensus existed.
The Internet has returned us to the pre-broadcast media norm, and a lot of people really don't like it,because suddenly there's a lot of views, a lot of true information, and a lot of false information they really don't like, and which they are exposed to regularly. So their solution is to use the government and political pressure to reset the Overton window to permit only the range of expression they find personally tolerable, for the sake of public order, which conveniently overlaps with their own political goals. (The good guys, of course, are always for public order, so when we manipulate the public discourse for our own political goals, it's a good thing: the same line of argument pursued in China, the EU, and the US.)
> It's the same type of regulation that attempts to prevent a teacher telling kids that the earth is 6 thousand years old.
I don't think regulating Twitter is the same as regulating what an agent of the state says in their capacity as an agent of the state.
What you said makes a lot of sense. I agree that media is a great tool for opinion control.
When you call this a dichotomy between free speech and order, I feel like you're downplaying just how important that "order" can be. Consider Latvia, a minuscule ex soviet republic with a significant Russian speaking demographic: for them it's very visceraly about national security (as in preventing another 2016 Crimea from happening), as opposed to public order, corporate interests or whatever.
I grew up in the Soviet bloc. What's at play in the information space there is different than, say, in the US: the most geopolitically secure country (country slash continent) on Earth. I feel like the argument you're making would be much easier to make in the US.
Edit: by the way, I'd call a teacher an agent of authority, not state.
>There's something called information warfare, which basically means manipulating public discourse to further one's political goals. Russia is notoriously good at it, for example. West sucks at it
Funnily, both of the above points about Russia and US are basically accepted after manipulation of public discourse to further one's political goals in behalf of the latter. Arrived at through countless articles about "misinformation", "indepedent" think tanks and "fact checking" bodies, the BS stories about the 2016 elections and Steele Dossier, all major media outlets complicit, the "Twitter Files" style cooperation of state agencies with Big Tech, all the client states governments and media playing along, and so on.
Russia is at best mediocre or insignificant in this, China is non-existant, and the US has every major force in this game, selling its own discourse, including on the EU side.
I have never heard of them before, but given this background, his opinions are unsurprising and bound to be in line with the Thierry Bretons of the world.
Except Hollywood doesn't represent "the west" or even western values, the same way how McDonald's doesn't represent the cuisine of most western nations.
I don't think it even fully represents much western values at all since it started self-censoring it's own content that wasn't woke enough, and especially since they started pandering to China by removing POC and LGBT content.
It's just another soulless cash-grabbing enterprise from the US that bends over to wherever there's money to be made regardless of any values.
10€ says, it's not "the EU" but some (probably not European) lobbyists using the EU as an attack dog, because they are so conveniently corruptible. We are going to be seeing more of this in the future. American/Foreign elites using EU apparatus to attack other American/Foreign elites.
The article links to an exchange between Musk and Thierry Breton in which the latter says that X violates EU regulations intended to combat fake content (do they really mean "fake news"?) and the glorification of violence.
Why doesn’t the EU and other concerned government run a good counter-intelligence campaign going so far as to sanction especially evil governments. Instead they seem to want to control the narrative through positive censorship.
I wonder with the EU the way it is if the social media space is ripe for a USA only company. The EU has a lot more regulation than the US and a lot less free speech protections.
A company that caters only to the US market might be worthwhile.
There are several social media companies that are in practice US-only: Parler, Truth Social for starters.
But if you wanted to make them places that regular people would want to frequent, then it would be pretty much the same product process as complying with EU rules.
Finally, X hasn’t allowed researchers access to the platform for auditing purposes, violating a principle of transparency which is enshrined by the Digital Services Act. Following changes to the platform, access to data for research purposes has been severely curtailed:
Social media researchers have canceled, suspended or changed more than 100 studies about X, formerly Twitter, as a result of actions taken by Elon Musk that limit access to the social media platform, nearly a dozen interviews and a survey of planned projects show. […] A majority of survey respondents fear being sued by X over their findings or use of data. The worry follows X's July lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) after it published critical reports about the platform's content moderation.
There is, right now, a big immigration wave of Arabs into Europe. Hamas has attacked Israel, and EU has a choice: support terrorists (Hamas) or condemn them, making arabs look guilty in the eyes of laymen. The latter may spark riots.
I am very critical of mass immigration because in large numbers people tend to not integrate and I prefer western values to Islamic fundamentalism by a large degree.
Many of those western values is certainly not reflected by the EU right now and a core of western values is certainly that government has absolutely no capability to determine truth from falsehood. Not even the judiciary would pick up that mantle. So all that is left is bad policies like this.
I don't think censorship would benefit anyone, neither Israel nor Hamas, that is a completely different topic, it tends to benefit particular interest that decide about truth
Can't really see what the harm is if we believe DSA is a good thing and there is real reason to believe they aren't fulfilling the requirements then go ahead and investigate.
Interestingly, yesterday a Swedish newspaper published a story about conditions for child workers in africa mining minerals that go into the batteries of many car manufacturers. Many manufacturers were called out in the article, but Tesla were singled out in the headline (By far the biggest customer of these minerals so nothing strange in that). Twitter/X instantly placed a warning that the article link could be harmful. My trust in EU as a steward of free speech isn't unlimited, but it's massively higher in my trust that Elon Musk being the same.
> Interestingly, yesterday a Swedish newspaper published a story about conditions for child workers in africa mining minerals that go into the batteries of many car manufacturers. Many manufacturers were called out in the article, but Tesla were singled out in the headline (By far the biggest customer of these minerals so nothing strange in that).
Singling out Tesla is not surprising to me, given the recent labor action.
But this headline just blinds us to the wider issue, as reported by Amnesty International already in 2016 about companies using child labor for battery minerals, including Apple, Samsung, Mercedes, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Vodafone, LG, etc.
> Here is the X post where the journalist posted the link to the newspaper https://twitter.com/staffanlindberg/status/17363112639683260...
> If you follow the twitter link and click the newspaper link (image), you'll be shown the warning, and have been since the post was made yesterday.
I think it is an overreaction to say Twitter is silencing folks here. Not only can you access it, you can also turn off "safe filters", but the Streisand effect probably means more people are actually reading it and adding volume to the issue.
So I don't know that you need to really worry about it!
It is very sad that it almost impossible to discuss EU regulations in HN. The noise of angry Americans is too loud ("EU dictatorship!!!!"). I like the expertise on technical topics but tech regulation (which does affect me very much) is very bad here.
Also HN gave me a very negative view on Americans, if on HN ill find more educated Americans. It is not a surprise that Trump is a real possibility.
Like it or loath it, X is the best place for free speech.
It's rather incredible that X was investigated first, given that bin Laden's "Letter to America" recently went viral on TikTok.
However it's worse still that the EU thinks its role is to investigate what should and should not be considered "misinformation".
It was not that long ago that saying Covid came from a lab leak was "misinformation".
The whole concept of bureaucrats becoming the arbiters of truth arguably breaks the EU's subsidiarity principle, which "aims to ensure that decisions are taken at the closest possible level to the citizen and that constant checks are made to verify that action at the European Union (EU) level is justified in light of the possibilities available at the national, regional or local level."
> It's rather incredible that X was investigated first, given that bin Laden's "Letter to America" recently went viral on TikTok
...and then TikTok removed it.
> It was not that long ago that saying Covid came from a lab leak was "misinformation"
Just saying it might have been a lab leak didn't get it labeled that way, at least in all the media I read. Saying it was almost certainly a lab leak and presenting scientific evidence to support that argument also didn't get it labeled.
What got it labeled was things like saying it was proven to be a lab leak and proven to have been deliberate, with no evidence presented for it being a leak and no evidence presented that it was deliberate, and accusations that everyone presenting evidence that it might not be a lab leak being accused to being secret agents of the CCP.
>Other articles and headlines characterized the theory as “false” or “debunked.”
>But many of those news organizations have begun to amend their approach in light of a shifting consensus.
>The Post originally described Cotton’s remarks as “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory” in a February 2020 article. But last week, The Post rewrote the article’s headline, softening “conspiracy theory” to “fringe theory” and noting that scientists have “disputed” it rather than “debunked” it. A correction said the article had “inaccurately characterized” Cotton’s comments “because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.” Post managing editor Cameron Barr said “questions from readers and others” prompted a reexamination of the story.
Saying Covid came from lab leak is still misinformation
The virus still shows genetic markers for natural origin. The “evidence” for lab leak is “it’s happened before. China. There was duct cleaning sometime”
Saying something over and over doesn’t magically make it more true. There is absolutely no good evidence what-so-ever for lab leak, while there is strong evidence (genetic markers) for natural origin.
The worlds leading microbiologists and virologists with billions of dollars of dedicated equipment and tests vs the massively biased opinion of @tjpnz because being wrong destroys your position
Ah, so your evidence for your counter positions against all of the worlds leading experts on this field is
“There’s an elitist conspiracy to remove the truth from the internet.”
This despite the fact that HN, Reddit, twitter, Facebook literally EVERYWHERE is littered with your ridiculous claim.
Again. The reason I don’t believe you is because the actual experts in examining the origin of a virus state that it looks natural, while you, who has zero qualifications other than “I did my own research with Facebook memes bro”, state that the worlds leading experts are all organized in a conspiracy with worldwide ISPs, alt-right tech giants like twitter and Facebook who are known to intentionally propagate disinformation intentionally, and media to convince you otherwise for absolutely no benefit what-so-ever.
You are not a victim of a conspiracy, just of falling prey to propaganda.
>Other articles and headlines characterized the theory as “false” or “debunked.”
>But many of those news organizations have begun to amend their approach in light of a shifting consensus.
>The Post originally described Cotton’s remarks as “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory” in a February 2020 article. But last week, The Post rewrote the article’s headline, softening “conspiracy theory” to “fringe theory” and noting that scientists have “disputed” it rather than “debunked” it. A correction said the article had “inaccurately characterized” Cotton’s comments “because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.” Post managing editor Cameron Barr said “questions from readers and others” prompted a reexamination of the story.
Well clearly this thread demonstrates the HN bias towards deregulated capitalism and spewing any garbage at any cost however much damage it does to society.
Our technology industry has a bright future. Shame about everyone else…
Edit: this should be read in context to the initial replies all of which have been flagged and deleted.
The nuance is wiped clean by the rampant flagging of loons that the start of any regulatory thread brings.
The end game is it’s difficult to make a point about dead bodies when someone has taken all the corpses away. The point is those people still own businesses and write code and contribute to society and we take little to no responsibility as an industry of the bad actors, referring them to heroes and role models.
For those following along, a “very large provider” is a provider with more than 45 million monthly users. The population of Sweden is around 10.5 million, so the answer is a definitive no.
He was probably speaking about the concept of disinformation, especially when it suits the current political climate, and not the law itself. If we're talking about disinformation, pointing it out in other places is important too, doubly so if the media is owned by the same government who points fingers at others.
It's funny because there's rules for dealing with alleged disinformation on social media platforms, but SVT, which is literally Sweden's official state television, get to distribute this actual disinformation which directly provides rhetorical cover for ethnic cleansing.
That is, the situation represents a kind of hypocrisy-- a small thing is attacked vigorously, by an entity which does something much, much worse.
Swedish TV is largely outside the purview of the EC; it’s Sweden’s problem to regulate. As a general rule, most EU states are broadly okay with media, including state media, lying. (I’ve no idea of the context of the incident you mention.)
It was in September, after the Karabach-Armenians agreed to the opening of Agdam road into Nagorno-Karabach, which was to be opened along with the Lachin corridor.
After letting through some small amount of supplies Azerbaijan then invaded along the Agdam road instead, putting them in a position to bombard Stepanakert with artillery, which of course, they did.
When the Karabach-Armenians then fled, SVT said that 'Armenian separatists have agreed to leave Azerbaijan', which is of course incredibly misleading.
There are institutions like Medieombudsmannen and pressens etiksråd that work with enforcing the rules of press ethics in Sweden.
Your allegations against SVT is them spreading misinformation directly, the EU is investigation how Twitter as a platform handles misinformation being spread. It’s a different thing
Please show me where on the doll Jane Josefssons questions made you uncomfortable, lol
I've shown it to you on the 'doll', haven't I? I provided an English translation of the quote from Aktuellt, where they claimed that what was in fact an ethnic cleansing that was achieved through starvation and then artillery bombardment, that was left unmentioned over the many months over which it went on, was that 'Armenian separatists have agreed to leave Azerbaijan'.
I might well report it. I have in fact considered doing so, but it remains hypocrisy to spread disinformation while accusing others of doing so.
This is also quite special, since it is in fact support for ethnic cleansing. There is nothing more heinous, when it comes to pressetik, than what SVT have done.
Well SVT is a joke. Examples too many to count, but my two favorites are probably first, when they reported on a police notice on a rape, and republished the description of the perp, with all from the police notice (height, hair, eyes, clothes, etc) but not the skin color. No explanation given on why they felt it necessary to leave that out, and actually harmful since valuable witness reports may not surface.
The second favorite is a "boo-hoo"-interview with a person that risked deportation, hence why he lived in a shed in a forest since two year back to avoid being arrested. He was given ample opportunity to solicit empathy for how hard it was and how insecure he felt. He also said that he was running from a prison sentence in Syria for smuggling guns and had been declined asylum on several applications and hence was living illegally in Sweden. No questions from the reporter on that. They're a joke, simple as that.
Yep... or the ukraine war, so many misinformation from the western media, but since it's "our propaganda", it's "all good"... be it a ghost from kiyev to putin being out of missles since spring last year.
Crazy how this site becomes anti-anything any time Elon or any of his business gets criticized. Thanks to Elon, Twitter has turned into a disinformation-as-a-service platform for maga and foreign actors. But the eu should just watch its population be turned into conspiracy following zombies, and do nothing?
It's also funny how every thread related to UE regulation turns into the UE being depicted a "no-free speech" / "corrupt" / "undemocratic" etc.
Yeah we're living in an absolute hellhole here in the UE, damn those institutions for trying to protect the general population against megacorps / missinformation. (/s)
It honestly feel more like the comment section on Youtube or Facebook sometimes around here.
Yeah, everyone shits on the EU, like "the EU is actually worst than [insert random dictatorship]", yet there are more people trying to emigrate to EU than ever.
Even inside EU, people shit on the EU. My take is that people in EU and in the west generally are bored/ashamed with their easy lives, they want to be badass, not to have it easy. So they live in a fictional universe where they are actually persecuted. "We have no freedom of speech!! We live in a dictatorship". But deep down it's all pretending, no one want to actually emigrate from EU to Russia. Even Russians, whenever enough money is around, well, you can be sure the children of wealthy oligarchs are living in London, Paris, Bruxel, enjoying free speech, freedom, healthcare, schools, but somehow, still shitting on the EU...
The Hunter Biden's scandal was misinformation lite. The fact that it benefits Putin, means it is misinformation enough to be silenced. The fact that you are bringing it up is essentially you being a supporter of Putin.
I laughed so hard when I read your comment, thank you. Even the Democratic base acknowledges Hunter's laptop to be real and full of incriminating evidence - most democrats want Hunter prosecuted.
Please, tell me you're from the EU! Only EU media is still peddling this BS.
That we got downvoted about something so easily verifiable and so shockingly corrupt really says a lot about the length humans go to grip to a delusion.
Back in 2020 those of us that had followed the Ukr war since 2014 knew that the material in the laptop was real. It's 2024; by now even the NYT has admitted the laptop and its contents are his.
I think there's a fair amount of Elon criticism on HN. The EU is unfortunately not very popular abroad, and even within the EU itself. Regardless of the above, I agree with your main point - the EU should do something about the fact the Twitter plays a big role in dismantling democracies.
Sure, but it was also very predictable. Even 20 years ago individual European states started wielding the censorship bludgeon to keep their societies from exploding.
Heck, has there ever been freedom of speech in Europe? Just consider the classic films France has censored (paths of glory, Battle for Algiers) over the last 70 years while allowing the most deprived smut unchallenged. The UK's censorship has a wiki entry (including reservoir dogs and Battleship Potemkin!!). And those are the most liberal speech countries in Europe.
The EU senses competition when it comes to propaganda, hence the backlash.
They (meaning the EU) have started putting advertorials about their benefits even on the bus stations here in Bucharest, I guess they're sensing that they're losing their hold over the hegemonic discourse. Good riddance.
Or perhaps they're trying to avoid a repeat of Brexit, which primarily happened because UK media and politicians blamed the EU for literally anything going wrong for several decades, while claiming all the benefits as their own.
If you want a well-informed population who can meaningfully vote in EU elections, it's pretty much a requirement to make sure the population actually knows what the EU is doing.
Because as a citizen I have no control over them, while they do have lots and lots of control over my life and the lives of my fellow citizens around this part of the continent.
For comparison, I couldn't care less about Musk or X or any other private company involved in what some State-like power labels as "propaganda".
Not the OP but how about cheering for no one? Centralization of power leads to oppression - covid, hate crimes, centralized banking. Maybe you think these are worthwhile pursuits but they are designed to control.
EU is really the innovator at investigations and regulations. With the number of laws they have to protect their customers and prevent monopolies, I am surprised how they only have one big software company and four major car companies. Or maybe those rules are only aimed to help their monopolies.
If your immediate reaction to that is "no but actually they just want to substitute American propaganda for their own" then youre closer to understanding the EU motives than you realize.
Agreed. But in the western media they are not depicted as similar to the CCP. Maybe because compared to CCP they are terrible at it. At least the Chinese policies gave rise to homegrown giants like Baidu, Alibaba and more recently Bytedance.
I personally don't think it's in people's interest to have this kind of thing hidden from them and I really dislike the EU for attempting to censor this.
Musk is really under a lot of financial pressure and it might be a losing battle to try to fight the EU over this in court. To be honest, I hope he is able to pull out from the EU without cratering the company, but he is now being pulled into lawfare with multiple actors across the globe so Twitter might have no choice but to accept is role as a conduit of censorship for state-level actors.