EU is a big org. There are good and bad players. Twitter is a cesspool of bad players. The whole point of this investigation is to flush out bad players from many places. Propagandists, partisans and manipulators.
They are no better than the Russian and Chinese counterparts after all. You cannot deviate from the agenda without getting censored.
How benevolent! Zero fear as a person with insignificant reach and following, commenting on a tech forum (and under a nickname). What a feat!
Try having 0 fear as a journalist doing your job. Or as a whistleblower. Or as a content creator.
Even mere regular people expressing counter to the party line views in major issues on social media are fired, censored, harassed by the police, "fact checked" into social media bans, increasingly the target of new related laws (recent examples from UK, France), and so on.
Heck, just a couple of weeks ago students supporting Palestine in US universities were doxxed, threatened, and had a coordinated effort to render them "unhireable".
Do you know what censorship is ? Do you know how china enforce censorship ? and at what scale ? If so you can't say in good faith that EU = China.
A lot of these is outsourced governmental censorship.
And all of these support a single narrative, in lock-step about all kinds of issues.
>Companies firing people, advertiser dropping influencers, being fact checked, &c. has nothing to do with the government
Yeah, just happens to coincide with domestic and foreign policy agendas and narratives the government pushes, and government affiliated/sponsored overt or covert "fact checkers" and "independent bodies", all the way to direct orders from the government. Read on "The Twitter Files: The Censorship Industrial Complex".
The private sector companie don't have to be told what to do: they just see where the wind goes and act accordingly. Nobody was fired for being pro-narrative or for firing anti-narrative people. But increasingly they are also told what to do, threatened with related ("disinformation") or unrelated (taxes and such) violations, and such.
>Do you know what censorship is ? Do you know how china enforce censorship ? and at what scale ? If so you can't say in good faith that EU = China.
No, but I can say that I give very few fucks in what China does, but as a person in the EU I give many fucks what the EU does, and how the public discourse is getting increasingly less open than in past decades.
(I wouldn't give much fucks about what the US does internally either, but unfortunately, unlike China, they also export it)
“There's no evidence — that I've seen — of any government involvement in the laptop story."
Which is actually pertinent to the discussion, as opposed to Biden's son laptop.
Of course it's free to ignore or actively reject all such requests from an entity like the government. Kind of like how a shop owner is free to ignore requests from the goodfellas that pass by and say "Great shop you got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it".
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4198285-missouri-v-bid...
Note how nowhere in this thread I said "EU = literal China" or anything to that effect.
lol
Journalists, whistleblowers, and content creators in the west are living in fear of governments targeting them for saying things the government doesn't like?
Or are you notorious for making it ad-hominem, and of putting statements in other people's mouths they didn't make?
Yes, I frequently hold opinions "in contradiction to other people’s statements" and state them. I wouldn't do it if I knew that such blatant individuality isn't approved!
Though surely "putting out public statements in contradiction to other people’s statements" is true for any non trivial statement one can make about a subject that has at least two sides: it would be in contradiction with some people's statements, and in agreement with other people's statements.
So, isn't your accusation basically boiling down to: "putting out public statements in contradiction to [your preferred people’s] statements"?
(1) And isn't that a pretty low bar to be happy about?
If find it abhorrent, even if it passes the low bar of "not equal to China" (which I find irrelevant). Do you disagree with that?
So your whole hysterical “private companies can’t stand up to this!” is actually adding to the problem by giving the impression they cannot. In reality, they can, they should, and they very often do.
So much for "stronger free speech protections".
If someone who says they agree with free speech says talking against this is "hysterical", I'd like to see what those against free speech say.
Or would it just be forbidden for Twitter to look at that report and then remove the content?
The freedoms we enjoy here in the west are closer to erasure than you realize.
It’s worth being paranoid about our freedoms, which is why I take issue with the characterization that we are just the same as China and Russia. We are neither as helpless nor as victimized as those people.
Well... It took one signature on an administrative act and almost everyone in Italy, not in China, was under house arrest for 70 days with armed soldiers on the streets. No oversight, no checks and balances, no constitution, nothing. This warrants being very careful of any government activity.
And at some point someone even suggested to postpone elections.
But more on topic, the only reason the Commission is going gung-ho is because of the elections next year. They are very afraid.
> And at some point someone even suggested to postpone elections.
I'm sorry someone suggested that.
> But more on topic, the only reason the Commission is going gung-ho is because of the elections next year They are very afraid.
Right, because they in fact don't have unilateral power.
The fact that a government minister even wrote in a book (hastily taken off the market) that he hoped the situation would be used for "a new cultural hegemony" speaks volumes.
Didn't dictatorships always use justifications for threats or emergencies to be instated?
An emergency doesn't justify taking away fundamental freedoms. Hence, anything the EU does in this space, justified or not, must be scrutinized.
Agreed, but you haven't demonstrated that these checks and balances have been violated. At least in the US, authority was exercised and at times found overreaching and at times found well-within Constitutional bounds. That's exactly those checks and balances functioning correctly.
> The fact that a government minister even wrote in a book (hastily taken off the market) that he hoped the situation would be used for "a new cultural hegemony" speaks volumes.
What volumes does it speak?
> Didn't dictatorships always use justifications for threats or emergencies to be instated?
Nope, not always. And even if that were true, it's also true that threats or emergencies have sometimes required extraordinary government action that didn't result in dictatorships.
> An emergency doesn't justify taking away fundamental freedoms. Hence, anything the EU does in this space, justified or not, must be scrutinized.
Of course not. But obviously the debate is what is "a fundamental freedom" and what counts as "taking away." Sure, scrutinize away. Just don't assume that lockdown == illegal == immoral == people don't agree with it == you can just assert that it was illegitimate. People elected the governments they elected, a crisis emerged, and those governments did what they felt they were elected to do, and if you disagree you just vote for different leaders next time around. That's how it works. We're obviously not going to do snap elections every time a new crisis emerges.
I mentioned specifically Italy, because that's where I live and where our freedoms where completely thrown out of the window by, as I said, an administrative act (not even the equivalent of an executive order, nor a law), from one day to another. An act that shouldn't have had that force, but well... rules were bent.
(A year later, people were also deprived of their ability to go to school or to work, which regardless of the reason, was equally bad)
> What volumes does it speak?
That while the event wasn't predicted, it sparked ideas on how to "revolutionize" society in a "different" way (the actual passage was about taking the pandemic as an opportunity to bring forth "a new cultural hegemony of the left"), not caring about consequences.
And we see the same with other aspect of society (misinformation, climate policies...). Some EU commissioners (Timmermanns to name one, until he was in office) are hell-bent in that direction (although this time there's significant pushback).
> those governments did what they felt they were elected to do
Outside my country, in many others (e.g. Spain), courts actually said that well, governments weren't allowed to do what they did.
The main difference is that the """agenda""" is a well lit 8 lane highway with the occasional crash in Europe and in Russia/China it's a dark twisty path in a very dense forest with wolves at each bends
But yes sure, Europe is literally a dictatorship, and thousands of people are sent to jail for criticising any arbitrary thing
Initially, when censorship is implemented but the agenda is still largely unchanged, it might look like there's not much of a problem since after all the actions actually undertaken by the government are still those that the majority of the population agrees with. But by that point it has already become a little more difficult to peacefully remove people from power, because they now have an extra tool to remain in power, namely censorship.
>what you're saying is that any censorship = China tier authoritarianism ?
I think where you are disagreeing with mustafa_pasi is that you are comparing the end results of authoritarianism after different amounts of time, whereas mustafa_pasi is comparing the methods of governance that lead to and maintain those end results. You are right that the situation on the ground is not as bad in Europe as it is in China or Russia, but (IMHO) mustafa_pasi is right that people who want to limit what can be said are "no better than the Russian and Chinese counterparts" in their disregard for democratic values and methods.
Should I be allowed to call for jihad online ? upload execution videos for propaganda ? can I create a blog to discuss ethnic cleansing with my armed nazi militia hometown association ? When does "fighting the agenda" become "being flooded in foreign agendas" ?
There is a political will to deny these facts and you only have to be marginally creative to find the causes yourself. To put trust in the EU here is completely naive.
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.
> They are no better than the Russian and Chinese counterparts after all
Correct, we should be protective of our freedoms and indeed the EU (IMO) is a bit lacking in its speech protections, but no one except China and Russia are served by this meme that US/EU are just as bad as China and Russia.
Good and bad people come and go all the time.
This is why the state determining the truth is so dangerous.