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Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

ec.europa.eu

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Re: Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

#101

Post by RandomLensman »

gwervc wrote: post #77
RandomLensman wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU as well as nation states have laws to uphold and policy/social objectives that might require that. The way to change that is to change laws, customs, and objectives. You are welcome to push down that route, of course.

> You are welcome to push down that route, of course. Of course not, precisely because public speech including on media such as twitter is heavily censored. The trick is gross but effective: treat ideas threatening to the system as illegal so they can be fought using the legal system instead of the political one. It's a power grab to silence Europeans. Same old trick used in China, Iran, any autocracy really.

There is nothing heavily censored. You have new parties rising up, for example, nothing stopping that.

Re: Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

#102

Post by logicchains »

exceptione wrote: post #85
jongjong wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, they were happy about social media platforms censoring or otherwise suppressing content which opposed the COVID19 vaccine mandates; they didn't raise any alarms there while there was actual substantial manipulation of the algorithms involved... But now that X has mostly removed filtering and manipulations from the algorithms, they begin proceedings against it! Just because they don't like the kind of con…

Please realize that the anti-vaccine nonsense is content driven by hostile regimes, ie China and Russia. I will give you some links: - https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-china-covid-disinformation-ca... - https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/foreign-disinformation-... - https://www.politico.eu/article/antivax-conspiracy-lean-pro-...

Who said anything about vaccines? Some European countries have been penalising people for entirely organic anti-immigration sentiments.

Re: Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

#103

Post by leadingthenet »

pjc50 wrote: post #52
slim wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having tried the "Added context" contributions, I think Twitter solved the moderation. It simply works. There's an abundance of free labor and it scales linearly with controversy/spread.

But that doesn't remove the content. It just sticks a label underneath it. And it's only on the most popular tweets.

That’s a feature, not a bug.

Re: Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

#104

Post by RandomLensman »

fallingknife wrote: post #78
tephra wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just wrong. In many EU countries the free speech protections are quite extensive (and some of us live in countries that have protected speech longer than the U.S have been around).

You can have a government that can punish you for saying things it doesn't like, or you can have freedom of speech. And here is your own high court proving that you don't https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/calling-muhammad-paedo...

This is not the government wanting things, but a societal thing. These laws would not be particular difficult to remove if enough people wanted that. Germany removed something around insulting heads of states in 2017, for example.

Re: Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

#105

Post by ExoticPearTree »

fallingknife wrote: post #78
tephra wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just wrong. In many EU countries the free speech protections are quite extensive (and some of us live in countries that have protected speech longer than the U.S have been around).

You can have a government that can punish you for saying things it doesn't like, or you can have freedom of speech. And here is your own high court proving that you don't https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/calling-muhammad-paedo...

It is discouraging that the ECHR thinks you should not call a religious figure a pedophile. How is it right to tell people what to think?

Re: Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

#106

Post by exceptione »

exceptione wrote: post #70
rsynnott wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the timing is _probably_ coincidental, more down to a bunch of different things happening in European law currently than anything else. The Threads delay seems to be down to Digital Markets Act compliance tweaks (the DMA entered into force earlier this year); this is under the Digital Services Act, which enters into force in two weeks. > These are the first formal proceedings launched by the Commission to enf…

And about time. The EU (and the US even more so) has been pretty ignorant about the way hostile anti-democratic regimes wage war against free and democratic societies. For dictatorships a misinformation campaign is both way more effective and cheaper than a single Mig fighter jet. This asymmetric war was already a big problem, but the oligarch Musk might have been too loud a siren for the sleepy lawmakers that believ…

Never thought a plea to save our democracies by making a distinction between honest criticism one the hand, and sponsored covid disinformation campaigns on the other would attract this response.

Ones wrong opinions are absolutely tolerated. We all have them. Hybrid warfare is something else and should not be.

Disinformation is not harmless: half of the US believes that the elections were stolen. If people don´t believe in democracy anymore, it is game over without people realizing it.

Re: Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

#107

Post by lispm »

jongjong wrote: post #46
RandomLensman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what the issue is? European countries not being allowed to have their own culture around speech (which rolls up into the EU to some extent)?

I don't think it's the job of EU government to manipulate the algorithms to suit their values. Their job is the opposite of that; to ensure that the algorithms operate with as little manipulation as possible so that every individual has equal voice/reach on these platforms (at least equal on a per-follower basis) with as little manipulation as possible. As someone who didn't have much prejudice about the current Isra…

> to ensure that the algorithms operate with as little manipulation as possible so that every individual has equal voice/reach on these platforms

The companies do that? In which alternate world do you live?

Re: Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

#108

Post by dotandgtfo »

logicchains wrote: post #99
demondemidi wrote: post #68

Disappointing that the vast majority of top levels here are describing the EU as some sort of totalitarian police state. It does respect rights. Do the people in the USA think that every country should let its citizens act like uneducated armed griefers?

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-violation-priv... trying to ban end to end encryption is the opposite of respecting rights.

Chat control was struck down last month and was never going to go through anyways as just having a cursory understanding of technology is enough to understand that banning end to end encryption is infeasible.

And chat control being struck down was in part on the grounds of respecting rights around private correspondence so you're just spreading factually wrong information for no good reason.

Re: Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

#109

Post by pseudo0 »

lapinot wrote: post #75
pseudo0 wrote: post #58

Just pull out of the EU. It's overtly hostile to freedom of speech. Run Twitter from the US, and let the EU erect their own "Great Firewall" if they want to block it. F500s (or at least the ones still advertising) can pay for ads through their US subsidiaries, and the handful of remaining Twitter employees in Europe can either take a relocation package or severance.

How is fighting against dark patterns, opaque and arbitrary moderation decisions (among other things) an attack on (your very american conception of) free speech?

They seem largely focused on "illegal content", specifically referencing the Oct 7 attack on Israel:

> concerned the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel

> The compliance with the DSA obligations related to countering the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, notably in relation to the risk assessment and mitigation measures adopted by X to counter the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, as well as the functioning of the notice and action mechanism for illegal content in the EU mandated by the DSA, including in light of X's content moderation resources.

At least in the US, footage of a terrorist attack is not illegal. In fact, it often serves important journalistic and public interest purposes. Twitter is an important source of first-hand coverage of conflicts such as the Israel/Hamas conflict and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. EU safetyism threatens to interfere with this important function.

Re: Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act

#110

Post by ExoticPearTree »

jltsiren wrote: post #95
focom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Europe 2.0" aka "the usa" has a better free speech implementation than "Europe 1.0". So yes different as in bad.

I'm not sure the US approach to free speech works that well in practice. Political polarization has become worse in the US than in most other developed countries, and that looks like a consequence of free speech. When you value free speech far above social harmony, you give a lot of power to extremists of all kinds.

It is better to go through a phase like this than live in a country where you're not allowed to speak freely.

This is the cost of being free, not everyone likes it, but it way better than the alternative.

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