That's the real concern here. Speech must be handled very carefully, but now we're elevating some specific people to be 'more equal' than others? Who are these people, and why do they get more say? I can see that opening a can of worms.
I don't live in the EU, but just like that well intentioned but shortsighted cookie law, the rest of us will have to deal with the fallout of that for a long time to come.
This costs nothing on the corporate expense sheets, but makes the society increasingly more toxic.
Yes, they were first but now they are strangling everybody.
And this is not only true for EU, same goes for USA. Someone will have to do something about it but with the power of home lobbying I dont believe that the States will do anything meaningful. On the other side, EU needs to protect its market.
As for who is a trusted flagger: "The status of trusted flaggers under this Regulation shall be awarded, upon application by any entities, by the Digital Services Coordinator of the Member State in which the applicant is established where the applicant has demonstrated to meet all of the following conditions: (a) it has particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting, identifying and notifying illegal content; (b) it represents collective interests and is independent from any online platform; (c) it carries out its activities for the purposes of submitting notices in a timely, diligent and objective manner. "
I.E. if you can convince your local government that you should be one, bam you are one, and online platform the EU needs to expedite processing of any notices you make.
On the other end of the spectrum, the companies are required to allow you to appeal takedowns and account suspensions/terminations (for TOS or illegal content reasons, not for non-payment reasons) for a 6 month period. Further, if you appeal a takedown or account suspension and the company rejects your appeal, the law will allow you to take the matter to binding arbitration. If the user wins, the company pays all costs, and must reinstate the content or account. If the user loses, they only pay their portion of arbitration costs. (The company's portion are just part of doing business in the EU).
Well, who are the people that censor all other kinds of media? As far as I know movies are censored (Motion Picture Production Code, Motion Picture Association film rating system), music is censored (Parental Advisories), TV is censored (TV station licenses), radio (radio station licenses) is censored, news paper are censored (I can't find the exact reference).
The roof hasn't fallen because of existing censorship, or am I missing something?
True, calling them censorship is kind of stretching the definition.
But there's still a small group of people that decide those ratings and the commercial impact of those ratings, as far as I know, is massive.
So it's not direct censorship, but it still has a "chilling effect".
To the extent they are incorporated with schemes that limit access to the rated content imposed by powerful entities outside of the transaction, they are part of schemes of censorship. (Public censorship schemes that incorporate movie ratings, and thus delegate to movie raters the role of public censor, are common.)
> I'm not going to argue that censoring broadcast is ideal or valid, but I'm certainly less sympathetic to the plight of massive media companies than I am to millions of private citizens.
Censorship by a third party equally impacts the rights of the parties on both sides of a potential transaction; broadcast media censorship restricts the freedom of both massive media companies and millions of private citizens.
No doubt they are part of "schemes of censorship" in some literal sense, but if someone publishes a rating and another chooses to use that rating as the basis of censorship, the onus is still squarely on the part of the censor and not the rater.
> Censorship by a third party equally impacts the rights of the parties on both sides of a potential transaction; broadcast media censorship restricts the freedom of both massive media companies and millions of private citizens.
You're conflating several things. Yes, censorship by a third party has similar effects to government censorship, but we treat them differently because the government is a special entity (ultimately because it enjoys a monopoly on violence and force). There are legitimate questions about when a third party becomes so powerful that it can unilaterally affect government (as with social media companies being a vector for the manipulation of elections), but this is the purview of anti-trust as I understand it (and I strongly support anti-trust action against social media corporations for precisely this reason).
The other conflated issues are "freedom to speak" vs "freedom to hear". Yes, restrictions on the content of broadcast media corporations limits the "freedom to hear" of millions of citizens as it does with restrictions on social media; however, restricting social media also infringes on millions' freedoms to speak.
Indeed, when you consider that the volume of communication in a social media network is combinatorial, the impact on regulations is far greater than for restrictions on traditional broadcast media.
My post was discussing whether censorship occurred and whose freedom was affected. While it did mention certain explictly public schemes, it nowhere argued that other schemes should be treated as government censorship, so you are inventing a position here for the sole purpose of claiming it is in error and a conflation of different things.
> My post was discussing whether censorship occurred and whose freedom was affected. While it did mention certain explictly public schemes, it nowhere argued that other schemes should be treated as government censorship, so you are inventing a position here for the sole purpose of claiming it is in error and a conflation of different things.
You brought up the 'third party vs government' dynamic; I was merely mentioning that it's distinct from the dynamic of 'freedom to speak' vs 'freedom to hear'. I specifically never claimed that you were arguing that we should treat third parties the same as the government. No need to speculate about my motives.
No, “third-party” contrasts with the parties involved in the transaction (mostly the source, which may exercise self-censorship, which does not restrict the freedom of the participants the way third-party censorship does.)
The government would be an example of a third-party censor, not something distinct from it.
And yet I consider restricting access to educative LGBT+ films under the banner of "18+" to be censorship
Similarly, I don't think your local theater's prohibition on minors viewing 'adult' content compares favorably to a large social media company which steers and manipulates so much communication that it can unilaterally sway national elections. The latter is an issue of national sovereignty.
There are some very real problems with unfettered access to communication, and I don't think we've solved them yet. I am very concerned that this law will have a range of unintended negative consequences, and I don't think defending our existing (flawed) structure really proves that it'll all be fine.
Specifically we're talking about moving from a model of centralized media control (eg: media companies and the conglomerates that own them) to one where a select group of people get to manage the filtering of content on the largest platforms. That seems like something that will be almost impossible to manage properly, and ripe for (at a minimum) political manipulation.
"The status of trusted flaggers under this Regulation shall be awarded, upon application by any entities, by the Digital Services Coordinator of the Member State in which the applicant is established where the applicant has demonstrated to meet all of the following conditions: (a) it has particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting, identifying and notifying illegal content; (b) it represents collective interests and is independent from any online platform; (c) it carries out its activities for the purposes of submitting notices in a timely, diligent and objective manner."
edit: Yeah, NGOs and also MPAA/RIAA style associations will probably be the most common entities.
I could be wrong though.