Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act
ec.europa.eu
ec.europa.eu
I can't find an English source here and the original is paywalled, but from a German article (https://www.heise.de/news/Leak-Leugnung-des-Holocaust-und-me...) summarizing the original reporting comes the following example of a tweet that is allegedly allowed now:
> Next stop on our tour across Poland is Auschwitz. For Jews this is the last stop, please exit and take your luggage with you.
It also mentions that threats of physical are no longer a reason for suspending accounts.
Of course many platforms wouldn't want such content on their platform, but there is also a vocal portion of people who have long called for platforms to behave more like town halls or public plazas, letting public discourse run uncensored as long as it isn't illegal. That's exactly what Musk seems to be doing
Do you feel some jokes are too offensive to be said? Do you feel the EU/UK are correct in their stance that offensive (aka hateful) jokes should be illegal?
Context matters.
It's not calling for violence, it's not denying the holocaust (quite the oposite), so why would it be illegal?
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1) Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
2) Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law
3) Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
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Something can only be deemed obscene if it meets all 3 criteria, which courts tend to interpret pretty rigidly. For instance, an average person is not the most sensitive or politically correct person. Of course it also somewhat amusingly emphasizes the cultural differences. Creative use of a nipple and some mayonnaise might be deemed as obscenity, while a graphic decapitation could not.
I won't say it happens particularly often, but we do charge people in the UK for posting offensive jokes. Hell, you can be charged for saying something factually true if it's offensive in the UK.
Does it? Because I've seen it used to spread all sorts of bullshit, including against Musk/X.
One case that comes to my mind when Musk wanted to make blocking to work the same as muting, and the false claim of it being against Apple's App Store rules was added as context.
Because it (or parts of it) were recently trying to ban private online communication, which is exactly what a totalitarian police state does.
And chat control being struck down was in part on the grounds of respecting rights around private correspondence so you're just spreading factually wrong information for no good reason.
If your government is working properly, there should be a small part of it trying to ban encryption, and a part of it trying to keep encryption legal. It's an adversarial system. Encryption will be an unpopular subject here, so let's talk about zoning instead: a small part of the government should be representing builders by trying to make it legal to build anything anywhere, and a small part should be representing land speculators by trying to make it illegal to build anything anywhere.
But the big problem for X is that Musk burned so many bridges with fired employees that the list of whistleblowers for any issues will be endless.
> These are the first formal proceedings launched by the Commission to enforce the first EU-wide horizontal framework for online platforms' responsibility, just 3 years from its proposal.
A mere 3 years! This is, in fairness, quite proactive by EC standards.
Isn't that just because EU rules have quite long transition periods to give companies time to comply with the new rules? GDPR had a two-year transition period before enforcement, and even then there was tons of complaints towards the end of the two-year period on how there just wasn't enough time to comply.
I suspect the “local regulators do enforcement” model won’t feature heavily in future EU law; it doesn’t work very well.
One thing is just the transition periods you mention, then there is the delays caused by the need to have legislation at the EU levels turned into actual national legislation to be implemented.
Then there is the whole trialogue thing where, after first approving a draft law, the EP and the EC have to hold further negotiations on a common text while supervised by the Council, which tended to happen behind closed doors so the experience is that the contentious law that was just approved is quietly sucked into a black hole and then you might hear of it being passed only many many months later.
Finally, we also have instances like with the Chapter 7 investigations against Orban where the commission knows the council is likely to block any conclusions so there's no point in rapidly pushing ahead.
For dictatorships a misinformation campaign is both way more effective and cheaper than a single Mig fighter jet. This asymmetric war was already a big problem, but the oligarch Musk might have been too loud a siren for the sleepy lawmakers that believed that democracies will survive no matter how much you are killing its base.
- yes, there are all kind of problems people are rightly upset about.
- yes, politicians have traded trust for political results.
- yes, the US/EU has also failed by opting for "Real Politik" instead of values.
- no, a whattabouttism doesn´t help our societies. Instead, fight to preserve and improve what we inherited.
- no, helping to fuel distrust undercuts the fabric of our societies.
Ones wrong opinions are absolutely tolerated. We all have them. Hybrid warfare is something else and should not be.
Disinformation is not harmless: half of the US believes that the elections were stolen. If people don´t believe in democracy anymore, it is game over without people realizing it.
That is great, I don't think any company should rely on employee trust to keep illegal practices under wraps. If you put it like this maybe it would be good for Meta to piss off their employees also so we can also get some insight into their illegal practices.
it's the first time the law is used, and it also _strongly_ hint that they tried first to get access to the informations without legal proceedings.
The legalese is strong, but I think most of it is understandable (which is surprising).
But: Twitter is now like the 12th social network, who cares?
The "bluecheck" system has been absolutely wrecked, though. Even with the haphazard patching of grey and gold ticks, a bluecheck more often than not is the sign of self-promoted nonsense.
Yes, that is literally what it was designed for, and the only thing it was useful for.
It’s now, I suppose, useful for identifying people to avoid, but it’s no longer useful for preventing impersonation.
That's exactly why it was useful. Major institutions and public figures have impersonators, some satirical and others intentionally misleading. The check made it easy to sift what actually came from someone and what was either lies or satire.
On that front it hasn't gotten too bad because the grey and gold checkmarks exist.
Now blue checkmarks are a sign to ignore the tweet because it's someone who's just paid to boost their signal. Of course this has rendered the thread of replies to a given tweet unusable since the top posts are all posts by people who have paid to be seen rather than posts with more likes or retweets (actual signals of value/popularity).
https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/sverige/x-marker-lank-till-...
Should we blindly trust and consume news from mass media propaganda machines like CNN, Fox news, BBC and etc?
If Meta properties are the example of what to expect from the future locked-down internet, prepare for the internet and much more to wither on the vine and die a slow and sad death.
Then you see why governments end up regulating them. Not because "liberalism was meant to do something magical"
Why not open a case against Israel and some of the citizens for spreading a misinformation about beheaded babies and some other lies?
It is a solution if the problem is "preventing anything that could challenge the entrenched elites".
But now that X has mostly removed filtering and manipulations from the algorithms, they begin proceedings against it! Just because they don't like the kind of content that people posted. They don't want people to have equal voice.
As someone who didn't have much prejudice about the current Israel/Palestine situation, I appreciated seeing both sides; it allowed me to come to the conclusion that both sides fall short of my own moral values and therefore I don't need to involve myself in debates about the lesser or two evils.
Maybe other people with different morals than myself felt that one side met their 'good guy' threshold and wants to support them. They're free to voice their support, but I'd like to keep my taxpayer money in my own country where it can support people whose morals more closely align with my own.
Of course not, precisely because public speech including on media such as twitter is heavily censored.
The trick is gross but effective: treat ideas threatening to the system as illegal so they can be fought using the legal system instead of the political one. It's a power grab to silence Europeans. Same old trick used in China, Iran, any autocracy really.
The companies do that? In which alternate world do you live?
I will give you some links:
- https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-china-covid-disinformation-ca...
- https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/foreign-disinformation-...
- https://www.politico.eu/article/antivax-conspiracy-lean-pro-...
An example:
https://www.dw.com/en/poland-says-belarus-russia-behind-new-...
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/09/22/le-pen-s...
Because of the Russian war against the Ukraine, Europe currently hosts millions (> 4 million) of additional refugees.
You can have all your "anti-immigration sentiments", but you are not going to be penalized. You can be completely opposed against immigration, and if you have some good arguments, you can calmly post them anywhere. I fear that "sentiment" is doing a lot of work here.
Besides: what looks like organic in extremist circles is often not. You start with a business model and you will gather a herd. You just have to feed them.
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/index_en [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission
Of course now that the platform allows more balanced opinions, any power available will be used to silence (growing) opposition.
> concerned the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel
> The compliance with the DSA obligations related to countering the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, notably in relation to the risk assessment and mitigation measures adopted by X to counter the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, as well as the functioning of the notice and action mechanism for illegal content in the EU mandated by the DSA, including in light of X's content moderation resources.
At least in the US, footage of a terrorist attack is not illegal. In fact, it often serves important journalistic and public interest purposes. Twitter is an important source of first-hand coverage of conflicts such as the Israel/Hamas conflict and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. EU safetyism threatens to interfere with this important function.
Not sure why would Twitter leave EU - Musk's Twitter has no problem suppressing freedom of speech, like in that case of Turkey.