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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

One can think anything about the particular line-drawing about what is and what isn't something X should moderate. By operating in the EU they do agree to the DSA though. And no one is saying that the content in question is or isn't something that twitter has handled incorrectly. All that's happening is that there is an investigation into it. There really isn't much to talk about (yet).

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Even though we don't know everything about what is happening in this particular instance, I do think there should be a global conversation on the ability for state-level actors to directly or indirectly pull strings in order to coerce Twitter into censoring information on their behalf.

I think this should be of particular importance to the US which has fudamental rights protecting freedom of expression.

I'm very worried about co-ordinated lawfare against Musk-operated companies being used as a tool to force his compliance with systems that exist to get around laws against the US government's direct involvement in censorship. I'm also worried about the EU's lurch towards Chinese-style censorship of social media. And, I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.

> I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.

What does that even mean? Are you saying the debate about free speech itself is somehow silenced?

He probably does mean that. An environment of censorship very quickly demands meta-censorship -- censoring discussion about the existence of censorship, otherwise you could circumvent the censorship of the particular topic by discussing the fact that it's being censored.

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

> censoring discussion about the existence of censorship, otherwise you could circumvent the censorship of the particular topic by discussing the fact that it's being censored.

Can you elaborate what that would consist of here?`

> discussion about covid censorship was also censored.

Any examples?

Examples of censorship around Covid? Are you serious? Pick the topic. Either about the existence of Covid in countries like China, or about the questioning that a vaccinated person still being able to transmit the virus.

This is very thoroughly documented.

Those are on the topic itself. We were arguing whether the discussion of the existence of censorship was being silenced or not.

Basically: did someone who said "I can't talk about X or I'll be silenced! there is censorship!" also get THAT opinion muted?

While it was off the topic of the original argument: was there censorship of the opinion that Covid existed in China in any countries with supposedly free speech?

I think it's great that we don't have Chinese-style censorship of the internet but disagree that "there really isn't much to talk about (yet)". I think there is good reason to believe that many governments around the world are interested in making laws to control the dissemination of various kinds of speech, and whether or not we have the full information on individual cases this shouldn't stop us from commenting on our overall rights around speech and what we believe these should be. Personally, I don't wish to self-censor over this, as I think it's important.

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.

We're very fortunate in the USA to have a written Constitution that limits government censorship. But I doubt that most EU countries will ever adopt that approach. That conversation has been going on for literally centuries with no international consensus.

Tbh anyone growing up in (democratic) Europe would consider the US to be extremely censored compared to Europe simply because most obviously censored media is TV and that's very censored in the US and mostly uncensored in Europe. From an outside perspective that censorship is hard to square with the 1st amendment but I think americans just grew used to that.

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...

What are you talking about? People can subscribe to Playboy Channel or whatever and watch that on TV with no censorship. The only real restrictions were applied to broadcast (OTA) channels due to limited spectrum. Even that is now effectively moot as broadcast TV is dying off.

Yes I’m talking about the regulation of broadcast media on the airwaves. And how it is a bit weird that it has a carve-out for censorship there.

Yes the “problem” is slowly disappearing but from a legal curiosity standpoint of the past decades that doesn’t make it less interesting that it existed.

How many Americans own an over-the-air TV station? How many Europeans have been arrested for "offensive" remarks on social media?

There's no contest here.

> I think this should be of particular importance to the US which has fudamental rights protecting freedom of expression.

It is important for everyone in the world and most nations have already wrestled with this problem. The US is not special. The only reason the US is starting to wonder about the influence of other states on such a critical piece of infrastructure is because they are not dominating it anymore and only now are beginning to find out that there are other nations present that have different cultural norms.

Laws like the DSA are exactly created to address this problem. If you want to operate in the EU, you have to adhere to European laws and values.

> I'm very worried about co-ordinated lawfare against Musk-operated companies being used as a tool to force his compliance with systems that exist to get around laws against the US government's direct involvement in censorship. I'm also worried about the EU's lurch towards Chinese-style censorship of social media. And, I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.

Well, other people are very worried about companies exploiting exploiting every technique they can think of to fuck their users and make more money. Trying to prevent that is not even remotely close to Chinese-style censorship.

> If you want to operate in the EU, you have to adhere to European laws and values.

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.

> If US tech firms just state that they will ignore EU regulation whilst continuing to serve requests from EU IP ranges, then what?

Then they are unable to take money from EU businesses to show ads to EU users.

Social media companies don't develop their products out of altruism. Their goal is to make money. (and increasingly the ability to manipulate public opinion/ban wrongthink) What's the point of letting millions of EU users hammer your servers if you can't make money from them?

That would only be the case if the EU imposed financial sanctions on the USA (forbidden transactions with US banks), which the US would retaliate against.

Additionally, even if enforced, it just means European visitors would see ads for American products (which they can still import) instead of local products. An own goal for sure.

I’m fairly concerned about how broadly some are interpreting “operating in the EU”.

The furthest this has gone that I’m aware of is the Dutch, alongside other EU authorities, has issued a fine to an American website, alleging that they subject themselves to EU jurisdiction by merely hosting information about EU citizens. This seems to me to be too far.

https://edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2021/dutch-dpa-imp...

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