EU Official Hopes X Will Face "Peer Pressure" to Hire More Censors | Hacker News Reader

EU Official Hopes X Will Face "Peer Pressure" to Hire More Censors

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15 pointsBender15 comments

Hahahahaha

The EU official in question clearly has no clue.

Elon wants the unique Twitter style of chaos… I’d argue he’s addicted to it if some of the anecdotes I’ve heard are true. Censorship only ruins that specific chaos…

You would have to make it hurt… be it financially or physically… I mean really hurt… before I would expect Elon would give a fraction of a furlong about giving up the chaos he clearly wants to be king of.

No thanks, the EU (and Russia, and China, and North Korea, and Iran, and all the other censorial assholes of the world) are welcome to keep their censorship to themselves.

Just a summary of this (credited) original source:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/musks-x-has-fraction-riva...

Does anyone have an even remotely feasible explanation on the EU hard-on for censorship, other than wanting to cover up their own blatant corruption and power tripping?

"Disinformation" is not an acceptable answer because it's about as tangible as quicksand.

Governments like to control people and they never back down. Once the government commits to a position like censorship, it can be near impossible to force them back. Since the EU member countries have not pushed back very much on this, and those politicians in the countries that represent the people have not felt any pushback, the government will keep going.

I also think government bureaucrats saw how much they were able to push citizens during the pandemic, and force them to do things they vocally did not want to do, and so now they feel emboldened.

This plus the fact that legislation in the EU happens via one or more proxies, so the potential for a citizen of a member country to have a say in these matters is close to zero

> Governments like to control people and they never back down. Once the government commits to a position like censorship, it can be near impossible to force them back.

This seems like a fatalistic take. Surely, for the government and legislative body, removing government censorship is easier than enforcing it?

Well, in my country the citizens managed to push back on broad logging of all internet traffic. It went to court and the logging was deemed illegal. Appealed to supreme court - deemed illegal again. Entered EU court, deemed illegal again.

That was 3 years ago I believe. The logging never stopped and continues to this day. The courts are a lie. Democracy is a lie. Pushing back doesn't matter. The only solution is some sort of technology similar to encryption, Tor, freenet etc.

How can tangibility be a prerequisite for content/dissemination rules? That's unrealistic. It's a very subjective arena.

Something as invasive as a censorship rule needs to be extremely tangible and precise to avoid censorship "creep"

I can’t say for sure that this is the cause, but after WWII the US created the German constitution (originally intended to be temporary). The priority was “keep people from becoming Nazis” and not “freedom of expression”.

Maybe their.. issue.. is more related to yelling ‘fire’ in a theatre.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_t...

From that same source:

     The utterance of "fire!" in and of itself is not generally thought to be illegal within the United States

The premise of the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" example is obviously not predicated on the illegality of shouting "fire" in and of itself.

> Ultimately, whether it is legal in the United States to falsely shout "fire" in a theater depends on the circumstances in which it is done and the consequences of doing it.

Edit: I am not agreeing with the parent that there is value in the comparison, only that the premise of the example is valid - i.e. that speech can have consequences dire enough to make it worth controlling that speech in certain contexts.

> blatant corruption and power tripping

That about sums it up. Censorship is another way of saying control of information.

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