In Europe, the bird will fly by our EU rules
twitter.com
twitter.com
A form of this system already exists on German Reddit, I believe.
The tech-savvy can continue to use a VPN as usual.
Maybe the NetzDG which is a German law that requires some unconstitutional comments (after being reported) to be hidden in Germany? This was and is highly controversial and applies to all social media.
Basically, I think they should go a step further: you only have access to EU-siloed twitter accounts without actively opting in and being warned.
My general read is that most Europeans would be okay with that (and would not opt-in), and the ones that wouldn't would just use a VPN anyway, so it wouldn't matter
Just because Europeans subscribe to a different notion of freedom of speech that doesn't mean that people want siloed and separated social media (except natural language barriers which do that automatically for most). Some probably want a "family friendly" internet but that's not unique to Europe.
Speaking from (my) German perspective it's important to realize that the national trauma of the Nazi and (Eastern German) Communist/Socialist regimes is embedded deeply into the foundations of society (e.g. even most far right extremist pay lip service to not be associated with the OG Nazis). A vast majority of people agree that the wish for society to not fall under one of those regimes again outweighs the freedom of individuals to advocate for violent far right/left causes and the abolishment of democracy.
A similar (though much weaker and more controversial) sentiment exists when it comes to celebrating crimes again humanity.
Anything beyond that is highly controversial and was/is a topic of many debates and political fights.
i mean the point here is not to argue which vision of free speech is correct, as an American i obviously disagree but what's at issue is how they're separated. y'all may not want a "siloed" solution, but y'all have also passed laws that restrict stuff more than the rest of the world. the rest of the world is not willing to have its speech policed to meet german/EU sensibilities so this is a possible compromise.
am i "operating" in zimbabwe, or moldova, or fiji? no.
if twitter stops selling ads to EU entities, closes any offices, and hosts just outside the EU borders it does not have to comply. if for no other reason then the eu loses its power to enforce.
Maybe they'll move to Sealand.
Probably everybody operating a website is in violation of a law somehwere around the globe.
If you want to sell to European customers you will find that (depending on your size and business) you will have to comply with some laws in order to continue in this Market.
The bigger your business the more rules and at a certain size laws will be created to regulate you in particular. This is what Twitter and friends face.
What will they do if Twitter doesn't comply, ban Twitter?
Twitter is the life-blood of journalists, watch how quickly the whole press will turn against EU anti-Twitter regulation.
No, they'll fine them.
What is right for the US must be right for the EU, right?
like imagine i host a human rights site. if iran says it is illegal for me to provide access to content supporting womens rights to iranian citizens, it is not "illegal" for me to continue doing so because i am American, i live in America, and i operate only by American laws. America would not extradite me to iran for failing to comply with their internet rules.
1) follow Iranian law
2a) not follow Iranian law and be blocked
2c) not follow Iranian law, circumvent any blocking and be prosecuted
2c obviously wont matter much in the case of Iran, in other cases it might. And while the US wont extradite you, other countries might. And there is still the option of abusing Interpol and red notices, again maybe not a problem in case of Iran and US internet co executives.
You know who thought the same way you do? German citizen living in NZ Kim Dotcom. You know who disagreed? The US DoJ. Would be about time if other countries would do the same to certain US entities, wouldn't it?
It’s fairly commonly recognized it’s was a ploy to force the sell of Alstom to GE, as opposed to a Chinese joint venture
Twitter want to be in good standing in regard to the laws.
Why would they bother pay taxes at all anywhere otherwise ?
Yes. Twitter is a lot less essential than you might think.
It's an irrelevant act on its own weight, but there always comes a straw that breaks the camel's back. Now is just such an absurdly horrible time to do something that might agitate.
In fact, the law was so well-designed that Iran, Russia and China quickly copied it.
Everyone always forgets that if you create a sharp sword, it still can be wielded against yourself. Abuse of censorship infrastructure is only one autocrat away.
...which are elected.
So if you want e. g. a right-wing EU commissioner just vote for your local right-wing party. It is that easy.
How indirect can democracy be until its still democracy?
Maybe the EC should be appointed by the EP. That way it would be about as democratic as most national governments. Of course the problem there is that the EP is incredibly fragmented and there are almost no European parties; they're all national parties, so it's going to be hard getting a majority of those to agree on a government. I guess that's a big part of the reason why it's done by the smaller number of national governments instead, and the EP can only approve or reject.
https://www.rp.pl/swiat/art1359931-juncker-kaczynski-nie-chc...
"Nobody knows this, but last time I rejected six commissioners that had been presented to me by national governments.
Also from Central Europe?
Yes.
From Hungary?
Not.
From Poland?
Not. If I wanted it to be made public, I would have done it long ago. Let me just remind you that governments only propose commissioners, but it is the President of the European Commission who accepts them and divides their competences between them, and the European Parliament approves or rejects it."
The EU spreads a lot of misinformation about its own operations. Here Juncker "reminds" the journalist of an arrangement that is explicitly not allowed by the treaties, which say the head of the Commission must accept whoever is sent by each country. He also admits that "nobody knows this" and that he never made it public. In case you think he would have accepted a right wing commissioner, let us recall this is the same man who railed against "stupid populists", said "The European Parliament is ridiculous, very ridiculous" and kept threatening eastern European countries that elected conservative governments with fines and sanctions. Von Der Layen is even worse, reacting to Italy's recent election of a right wing politician by saying that "if things go in difficult directions, we have tools".
What happens in reality doesn't match what's written in the treaties much of the time. It's very effective misinformation. This thread is full of people making claims about how the EU works that reflects its own claims (or propaganda), but doesn't match the documented reality of how Brussels decision making actually operates.
We’ll see about that when the far right has finished installing election officials wherever it can.
During the last EU election here I even called individual MPs and talked to them, or their office staff, about various subjects. So they're quite accessible.
It's like having a presidential race between Biden and Trump and then installing Weird Al Yankovic as president after all votes are counted.
Von Der Leyen was not proposed by any party. The parties proposed other leaders. The "spitzenkandidaten" system that led to Juncker becoming EU President was only used once and was ignored this time. In fact nobody knows why or how Von Der Leyen became the EU President, only that the council leaders disappeared into a secret meeting and at the end, the deed was done. What was discussed? Were countries bribed or threatened to go along with it? What exactly qualified her for this role given her track record of failure in Germany? Nobody knows the answers to these questions.
So no, it's really nothing like the Chancellor in Germany or leadership anywhere else. The EU's own misinformation campaign around this topic is clearly highly effective. Normally, the people who run the country are elected by at least some local voters and then by the party itself. With the EU Commission, the president just ... turned up.
Germany and France wanted these positions and decided amongst themselves who got which. Both wanted the ECB presidency more.
Is that meant to be a bad thing? Because you make it sound like a good thing.
This could still happen in the USA. The electors (the 538 people in the Electoral College who actually pick the president) could vote for anyone they wanted, and if enough wanted Weird Al then he would be POTUS. States have made laws to require electors to vote for the person who won the state election or face punishment, but that is not a Constitutional requirement or anything.
We need more examples of this, to show that you can actual reach your representatives.
Either way, yes I was able to just call their office numbers listed on their websites and get through. I also in some cases got personal replies to my e-mails from individual MEPs.
If you call their office most likely someone else will answer the phone but in some cases, if you're lucky, you can just ask if the MEP is available.
And it was irrelevant because the EU Parliament isn't a real Parliament, no more than the assembly of representatives in North Korea is. It lacks the so-called right of initiation, meaning that only the EU Commission has the power to change the law. As a consequence nobody who cares about politics bothers going there, except in cases like Farage or Le Pen as a way to get free money they can spend on campaigning against the EU as a concept. Why would anyone who cares about politics spend their time in a body where political ideas are worthless because you aren't allowed to propose them?
Would you like more evidence? The commissioner who made this tweet about the DSA flew over to California and told Musk to obey the new regulations before the EUP had even had a chance to vote on it at all. In a normal government, the legislature has to actually vote to pass new rules before the executive tells people to comply. But the EUP is a rubber stamp designed to grant the surface level appearance of legitimacy to the Commission's decisions, not a body that can actually keep the EU in check, so Breton didn't even bother waiting for it before starting to implement the DSA.
That's how much the EU itself cares about its "Parliament", so why should anyone else care?
To be fair, both are kind of a shit show.
Really? That's some knot-twisting you have right there.
Not only, George W. Bush didn't win the popular vote, either - that was 22year back.
Edit: Also, it's not just a single system. At different levels the positions are directly elected.
> Breton received a master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from École Supérieure d'Électricité (Supélec, now CentraleSupélec) in 1979 and later graduated from the Institut des hautes études de défense nationale (IHEDN).[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thierry_Breton - former VP of Groupe Bull and various other high-ranking telecoms posts there.
Also:
> Breton received world attention after an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2011 when he reiterated his intention to ban internal email, dubbed as "the pollution of the information age", at Atos within 18 months (known as the zero-email strategy), replacing internal emails by a set of enterprise social networks, enterprise instant messaging, collaborative tools etc..., both being developed inhouse and partially aggregated from other vendors
That's it, that's all I wanted to say about this.
Couldn't Thierry Breton come up with something more suitable to his position?
China: I'll bring the hardware!
EU: I'll bring the regulation! - @paulg
What I don't like is simplistic thinking, where regulation is bad by definition - like he does in his tweet. It can be bad, but it can also be really good if done cleverly.
The losses the companies he has invested in sustain duento regulation are not necessarily "absolute losses" in the sense that it is wasted money. The are "societal costs" that need to be payed in order to make sure the companies adhere to a certain level of civility.
The way I read it is more like if you substituted the EU for say, Saudi Arabia. The Saudis btw bring oil (i.e. energy) to the party - but if they brought nothing but Saudi regulations would you still invite them? What "societal costs" would you be willing to pay to adhere to a certain level of House of Saud defined civility?
There's a danger in the myopia of fake universalism, of believing everyone wants your culture and civilization's definition of civility enforced on them - and perhaps they will accommodate you if you're bringing a lot else to the party, but if that's all you're bringing you might simply find yourself uninvited from a lot of parties.
The EU is pretty good at regulation. and its easier to get the best from US software and Chinese hardware with sensible regulations in place.
So yes, even though the EU is ridiculed in this joke it actually makes important contributions. Perhaps the only issue is that well-designed regulation is usually so subtle that people don't even recognize the benefits, or take it for granted...
I'm pretty sure Google etc. still know everything there is to know about me.
GDPR itself only mentions cookies once and only observes that they can be used to profile people. It contains no instructions on what to do about that.
The majority of GDPR is a bunch of mostly sensible privacy principles, such as if you manage personal data, you have to look after it well, and not use it for purposes it wasn't collected for.
Only for those wanting to track users. Don’t track users, it’s all good, ignore GDPR all you like.
> and force annoying pop ups on everyone.
Pop ups reminding you that all those web sites:
1. Want to track users more than they wanted to avoid annoying users
2. Want to blame the annoying pop-ups on the GDPR instead of, you know, the tracking.
Others being that encryption is enforced, you have a clearer picture what of your data companies can process etc.
As long as he wants to sell ads here, Twitter must comply with our rules and laws and can be cut off from it's (paying) customers otherwise.
Is Musk's goal to actually make money with Twitter or make some sort of ideological point?
But if they are also motivated by something different it could happen.
@elonmusk
In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules.
#DSAalways funny how the same people who support working towards open communications in e.g. iran and china by ignoring their laws get mad when somebody suggests this.
American's version of free speech*, as much as Americans want it to be true you can't apply US laws in foreign countries
and yes it can, because the internet reaches pretty much everywhere. as long as there is no server or physical office what can brussels do but scream into the wind about it?
aren't we doing the same thing with iran, belarus, china, other places where we support "American's version" of free speech despite local laws?
(If they are tiny they might fly under the radar but since FAANG and friends aren't charities that won't work)
It's really "unfortunate" that they managed to piss if their own government so that Washington doesn't feel like helping them out much.
Am I supposed to want that ?
Also, no. You have libel/defamation/slander laws in a lot of US states, "b-bu-but muh 1st amendment"
> as long as there is no server or physical office what can brussels do but scream into the wind about it?
Hm, ban these websites out of europe lol ?
> where we support "American's version" of free speech despite local laws?
I know the US think they're the center of the universe and the world's police but what "we" defend there is called "human rights"
ofc defamation law exists. the difference is that is decided in court not by some eurocrat apparatchik. and there has to be some harm demonstrated. and there are special protections for e.g. journalists (see times v. sullivan) that make it even harder in those cases.
how is brussels going to "ban those websites out of europe lol"? license the great firewall from china? hmm yes definitely sounds like a free and open society to me.
> what "we" defend there is called "human rights"
ok cool y'all think that. we think that y'all's vision of "free" speech is authoritarian and necessarily prevents civil disagreement on some important issues, it's already obvious we don't agree on that. but that's not the problem, it's how to reconcile 2 different legal concepts on the same platform. tbh there's no reason why an American would care. if anything it's the euros expecting the rest of the world to police their speech to euro standards that think they're the center of the universe.
Is "civil disagreement" what's feeding the current US political system ?
I see a whole lot of disagreement and hate, not a lot of civil or constructive talks
As a European (well, in the UK - can I still consider myself European?), I do not find my right to speak, or speak truth to power to be restricted unncessarily. I see what is happening in the US with the rise of genuinely authoritarian politics fueled by misinformation and hate speech and find it genuinely disturbing.
I guess a lot depends on the cultural context you grow up in.
Again, this is not an axis with good on one end and bad on the other. It's an axis between fewer limits and more limits.
I was questioning why you see it as authoritarian. Are you saying that any law is authoritarian?
In Europe, after the horrors of the second world war (and our entire history really) we aren't so keen to let people stir up hatred among us. So restricting things like that is not being imposed on the majority of us;we want those restrictions for the most part. So doesn't feel authoritarian at all.
now apply this problem of "potentially hateful depending on context" to more important stuff. some racists have abused studies on demographic differences to give hateful rhetoric some "scientific" backing, ignoring that you can't generalize from a population to an individual. this has led to mention of demographic differences being very sensitive subjects and sometimes labeled as "hateful". but i don't think we want to stop all research involved with this.
i do not trust the government to make these determinations about when context is hateful and not. since Americans are much less trusting of government than most europeans maybe you can see why we come down on a much higher bar for the government restricting speech and even higher for prior restraint.
let's take a counterexample from your country, where a man was sentenced to community service for a "grossly offensive tweet": the only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella buuuuurn
he faced possible jail time. now i think this is more easy to identify as "hateful" than prior examples i've listed. i don't know if this was the person's intent, but in this case hate can serve a legitimate political purpose (anti-imperialism/anti-military industrial complex). similar to how "all cops are bastards" is "hateful" towards cops but again serves a legitimate political purpose (protesting police brutality, racial profiling, etc.)
so again, should anyone really trust a government to be the entity to determine what is "too hateful"?
> Authoritarianism is a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting.
Now if you think sharing nazi ideas on twitter is actually beneficial for society it's your call, Europeans made a choice a while ago about what they want to tolerate or not
Free Twitter must look like real threat to corrupted thieves like Von Der Leyen and her Pfizer sponsors with their "fact checkers" promoting fake news and banning scientific facts.