Twitter axes European Commission's ad account after €120M EU fine | Hacker News Reader

Twitter axes European Commission's ad account after €120M EU fine

politico.eu

37 pointsphoronixrly16 comments

It doesn't sit right with me that a government body has an ad account in a centralized for-profit service in the first place.

Even having a free account seems wrong to me. The European Commission could post news, updates on its work and polls on the official European Commission site. I don't think the government should favor corporate social media sites or have anything to do with them in the first place. If they feel like posting on their own site is not enough, why not use a free social media outlet? Something self-hosted, using ActivityPub, for example?

> Something self-hosted, using ActivityPub, for example?

There is one: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/public/local

https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/1156677153...

Deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark’

Lack of transparency of its advertising repository

Failure to provide access to public data for researchers

This seems like a really odd take. What you're effectively advocating for here is for people not to see information about publicly funded services, because ultimately centralised for-profit services own user attention, & therefore govern what the majority of people see.

> why not use a free social media outlet?

This would be fine if people used free social media outlets. They don't. Short of banning private social media, I don't see what governments can do to change that.

> Nikita Bier, X’s head of product, accused the EU executive of trying to amplify its own social media post about the fine on X by trying “to take advantage of an exploit in our Ad Composer.”

For those that haven’t followed Nikita Bier on Twitter, he’s a childish and immature person. The way he talks about changes at X is completely unprofessional. So this type of deceptive revenge action is completely in character. I guess Elon hired him for that reason.

It seems petty, vindictive and childish.

X hit with $140M EU fine for breaching content rules

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46163721

https://archive.ph/icfS3

The grown ups have left the room, and it certainly won't make the fine go away.

Here is an idea, just leave EU completely.

Yes, excellent idea ! Let's make X less legitimate by removing a bunch of people.

They should have left X a long time ago. Now is not too late.

So childish.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com