Live data from Hacker News

Europe gives Mark Zuckerberg 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas conflict

cnbc.com

21–30 of 166 posts

Re: Europe gives Mark Zuckerberg 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas conflict

#22
post #16

Facebook should just block Europe. 'For your safety from your government which can imprison you for participating in this popular global website, we have blocked you from viewing this page'.

Limit them to just "verifiable content", so its a endless sea of bland posts from corporations and governments.

Re: Europe gives Mark Zuckerberg 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas conflict

#23

Sorry if this is a silly question: The article states that if the companies fail to comply then they can be issued with fines worth 6% of the company’s annual revenue. What would happen in the even where one of the companies just said "Nope. We're not paying it."? In that case I assume the offending company would be dragged into lengthy and expensive legal battles against the EU. But is it likely that the EU could or…

Yes it is. So far every offender ultimately complied, so there was no need to go the last mile in reality.

But I guess having suddenly zero access to one of the worlds biggest markets (europe) would make wall street a bit nervous about the companies‘ revenue targets. Not to mention customers immediately jumping to some competitors, which might hurt a bit in the long run.

Re: Europe gives Mark Zuckerberg 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas conflict

#24
How is anyone meant to be able to confirm or deny posts on a suprise war that is going on in real time? Surely this would mean that Facebook and X would have to have better intelligence than the actual military intelligence agencies? Even the letter accusing them of posting says they have "indications" not "we have evidence". I'm no Zuckerberg or Musk fan but I just don't see how it's humanly possible to meet these requirements.

And in this case at least, wouldn't it have had the opposite effect of what they wanted? By letting the terrorists post all these horrific videos the entire West is unified in damning Hamas. If these videos hadn't come to light, would the reaction be so strong?

What worries me, is that soon enough AI is going to be at the point where anyone with an agenda can generate clips like this and feed them to the populace and then we're going to see fighting break out in contested regions everywhere across the globe. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle, but I don't see anyway where this doesn't end up with the major social media giants being forced to tie user identity to national identitifiers like passports, with the end result being that each national intelligence agency passes on lists of who they consider to be terrorists, which are then either filtered out entirely (this will be preferred by the governments) or flagged with a warning by the social media company (this will be preferred by the companies). Either way, we're heading towards a fucking scary world.

What's then interesting, is whether governments will try to ban out of existence any websites that don't comply with the verify scheme, or if they'll force them, browsers or internet providers to display some sort of "unverified content" warning, like when you get a chrome warning page saying they can't verify the page and you might be vulnerable to attack.

Re: Europe gives Mark Zuckerberg 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas conflict

#25

Sorry if this is a silly question: The article states that if the companies fail to comply then they can be issued with fines worth 6% of the company’s annual revenue. What would happen in the even where one of the companies just said "Nope. We're not paying it."? In that case I assume the offending company would be dragged into lengthy and expensive legal battles against the EU. But is it likely that the EU could or…

> In that case I assume the offending company would be dragged into lengthy and expensive legal battles against the EU. But is it likely that the EU could or would also block access to the services offered by these companies?

If they didn't pay then eventually the government would probably seize assets to cover the debt, and they would face increasingly more severe legal action until they paid.

It shouldn't really an option to just ignore the law.

Re: Europe gives Mark Zuckerberg 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas conflict

#26
post #8

Mindlessness. There is a reason spectrum is regulated. Broadcast being free for all, has Never made any sense. Social media is an abnormality.

> There is a reason spectrum is regulated

Yeah because it's scarce and if overuse leads to pollution and interference.

It's not because [x] group of people are too dumb and shouldn't have ideas voiced.

Re: Europe gives Mark Zuckerberg 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas conflict

#28
post #20

Sorry if this is a silly question: The article states that if the companies fail to comply then they can be issued with fines worth 6% of the company’s annual revenue. What would happen in the even where one of the companies just said "Nope. We're not paying it."? In that case I assume the offending company would be dragged into lengthy and expensive legal battles against the EU. But is it likely that the EU could or…

You stick the CEO in jail.

The CEO of Meta, who lives in the US? Good luck with that.

Re: Europe gives Mark Zuckerberg 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas conflict

#29
post #9

Very few countries have freedom of speech enshrined quite as forcefully as it is in the United States. One really has to wonder where this is going to go? I understand why they want to do it, but once a censorship regime is established it will be very difficult to dislodge. What happens when the next set of elections puts in somebody who uses that power for less than ideal purposes?

I'm not sure this "freedom of speech" absolutism is such a good idea. A society needs to put limits on behavior of its individuals to be sane. I support that people can express whatever opinion they have, but not in any way they want.

I think one issue is that on the internet it's becoming impossible to know anything. You can't know that those thousands of accounts are trolls or neighbors. Does freedom of speech grant you the right to use a troll/bot army to spread misinformation? I suppose if each troll/bot were labeled I would be fine with it but they aren't, they pollute these online spaces. Whose speech is being protected?

Re: Europe gives Mark Zuckerberg 24 hours to respond about Israel-Hamas conflict

#30

Misinformation. No examples of such. Not even for which side. Hard to disagree with a blanket “avoid misinformation”. But I guess that's the point.

Generally, social media companies have agreed there is some responsibility to remove false content and coordinated misinformation. That certainly seems to be happening, and linking to particular misinformation just spreads it further, feeding the trolls.

https://www.mediaite.com/tech/a-coordinated-propaganda-campa...

Post reply on HN