EU opens proceedings against X over efforts to combat information manipulation

We saw this clearly demonstrated during covid -- discussion about covid censorship was also censored.

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.

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...

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.

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.

[1] https://smartpolitics.lib.umn.edu/2011/02/10/selection-bias-...

[2] https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/8f9a6f3b-efd7-46f3-b4be...

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.

(If anyone thinks I'm exaggerating with the decapitation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Samuel_Paty & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arras_school_stabbing which was "just" a stabbing)

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.

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.

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."

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.

The freedoms we enjoy here in the west are closer to erasure than you realize.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/28/elon-musk...

Or we have a revolution and a world war to replace it. Millions dead.

I'm sorry but these things don't tend to have a middle solution. That's what history teaches us.

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.

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)

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.

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.

- 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.

Ah yes, a riot by 150 unarmed idiots in which the only person killed was one rioter shot by a police officer, well after it started.

>"Civil war" is politics via violence. Please give me a scenario as to how you see that happening in specific countries in the EU.

You mean, like the French generals who in 2021 warned in an open letter of coming civil war in that country? <https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210427-french-genera...>

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.