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EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

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Re: EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

#51

Post by sofixa »

renewiltord wrote: post #42
sham1 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Europe should fight its own wars. We... do? Of course, if you'd like to name whatever wars we're a) involved with and b) not fighting ourselves, then that would be splendid. Anyway, how is that relevant to enforcing the DSA on X? > We civilized them. And we may have to civilize them again. What does this even mean? What do you mean by "civilize"? Also this sounds very much like how colonialism and imperialism were…

> What does this even mean? What do you mean by "civilize"? Teach them not to gas millions of people, that kind of thing. Nothing outrageous or anything. > Russia is currently conducting a genocide over in Ukraine, for example by kidnapping children and bringing them over to Russia and beyond, for example to North Korea. Ukrainian casualties are nothing like what Germany was inflicting on people. The latter rises to…

> Ukrainian casualties are nothing like what Germany was inflicting on people. The latter rises to the standard. The former perhaps not.

The UN convention on prevention of genocide doesn't have any victim threshold for what counts as genocide.

> To be honest, at first I thought we had to help a European country being invaded by Russia, but over time I've realized that Europeans mostly don't want us there

Anyone using "Europeans" to broadly paint a whole continent with a single brush as expressing a singular opinion is at best extremely misinformed, at worst...

Anyways, Ukrainians very much want American support. And have been providing invaluable information on exactly how the Russians work and think in exchange for it.

In most EU member states, the majority of people, wanted US and EU side by side helping Ukraine. After all, most of those countries sent soldiers to help US kill a bunch of Iraqis, wouldn't it be nice to do it for a good cause for a change? Of course, the ~20-30-40% of Russophiles in multiple Central and Eastern European countries (like Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, etc) didn't want that, they wanted their "brothers" to win. But they're mostly irrelevant, and mostly dying off.

That's also why it's stupid to paint any war as just "it's just Europeans killing Europeans or just Africans killing Africans". How does that change anything about the war, or its casualties? Was Srebrenica not a genocide that merited being stopped just because both were Balkan peoples? Does the war in Sudan deserve no attention because it's just Africans?

But Trump and Vance have completely changed how Europeans see the US. Now everyone knows that they're no longer a partner. There is no going back on this.

Re: EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

#52

Post by oliwarner »

tock wrote: post #27
kaveh_h wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes which are used wisely for the people’s benefit is not a wasteful thing. That was the point original commentator made. Your reasoning is that taxation is always bad and the more you pay the worst, a very American view which I can understand given how badly US government spends money in this regard.

I made no such reasoning. The parent comment wrote about taxes like its something bad.

It didn't just say tax, it suggested what the taxes were for, and how they were levied.

If we're all going to be persnickety about things, let's use the whole context.

Re: EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

#53

Post by defrost »

sofixa wrote: post #51
renewiltord wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does this even mean? What do you mean by "civilize"? Teach them not to gas millions of people, that kind of thing. Nothing outrageous or anything. > Russia is currently conducting a genocide over in Ukraine, for example by kidnapping children and bringing them over to Russia and beyond, for example to North Korea. Ukrainian casualties are nothing like what Germany was inflicting on people. The latter rises to…

> Ukrainian casualties are nothing like what Germany was inflicting on people. The latter rises to the standard. The former perhaps not. The UN convention on prevention of genocide doesn't have any victim threshold for what counts as genocide. > To be honest, at first I thought we had to help a European country being invaded by Russia, but over time I've realized that Europeans mostly don't want us there Anyone using…

> Trump and Vance have completely changed how Europeans see the US. Now everyone knows that they're no longer a partner. There is no going back on this.

The quietly released (no fanfare) 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America that dropped last night explicitly steers the US away from traditional European allies and embraces Russia.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46171812

Re: EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

#54

Post by Aerroon »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #12
Aerroon wrote: post #6

Why can a company be fined for not allowing "researchers" access to data? That seems bizarre to me.

What's bizarre about it? There's lots of legislation that requires companies to report on various data or to provide access to auditors. It's legally valid. I think there's a compelling case to be made for requiring large social media platforms to provide data access to researchers, considering the platform's incredible ability to influence elections and society at-large.

Because those researchers become a potential data leak. We all know that deanonymized data isn't actually anonymous. Do you, as the user, really want people poking around your private data "for research purposes"? Where there are basically no consequences if they mess up and leak your data?

I chose to give my data to the company. I didn't choose to give it to some unrelated third party.

Re: EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

#55

Post by Aerroon »

embedding-shape wrote: post #13
Aerroon wrote: post #6

Why can a company be fined for not allowing "researchers" access to data? That seems bizarre to me.

It's not "any company", it's exceptionally large platforms who can give insight into large societal questions and have enough influence to sway people's opinions. The data is technically public already, researchers could scrape it, but investigations has to be able to be done to ensure the platforms aren't used to intentionally steer people's opinion in a specific direction, since they're unable to self regulate that…

But governments themselves can steer people's opinions just fine? Can I get access to my politicians' emails "for research purposes"?

Re: EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

#56

Post by tock »

oliwarner wrote: post #52
tock wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made no such reasoning. The parent comment wrote about taxes like its something bad.

It didn't just say tax, it suggested what the taxes were for, and how they were levied. If we're all going to be persnickety about things, let's use the whole context.

Still doesn't make sense. How are tariffs "subsidising" corruption? What does that even mean?

Re: EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

#57

Post by qcnguy »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #12
Aerroon wrote: post #6

Why can a company be fined for not allowing "researchers" access to data? That seems bizarre to me.

What's bizarre about it? There's lots of legislation that requires companies to report on various data or to provide access to auditors. It's legally valid. I think there's a compelling case to be made for requiring large social media platforms to provide data access to researchers, considering the platform's incredible ability to influence elections and society at-large.

Auditors != researchers.

Auditors are hired by the company being audited, have a very narrow and fixed mission justified by previous financial blowups that caused a lot of concrete damage to specific people, and there are strict standards defining what they are looking for and how. Audits don't tend to suck up personal data of customers.

"Researchers" here means self-selecting academics going on arbitrary fishing expeditions with full access to everyone's data. It's not narrowly defined, not justified by prior unambiguous harm to anyone, and given the maxed out ideological bias in academia is clearly just setting up universities to be an ideological police force on the general public.

Re: EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

#58

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

Aerroon wrote: post #54
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's bizarre about it? There's lots of legislation that requires companies to report on various data or to provide access to auditors. It's legally valid. I think there's a compelling case to be made for requiring large social media platforms to provide data access to researchers, considering the platform's incredible ability to influence elections and society at-large.

Because those researchers become a potential data leak. We all know that deanonymized data isn't actually anonymous. Do you, as the user, really want people poking around your private data "for research purposes"? Where there are basically no consequences if they mess up and leak your data? I chose to give my data to the company. I didn't choose to give it to some unrelated third party.

I guess one point of confusion is exactly what data is shared, because I understood it to be general access to things that are already publicly available.

Furthermore, X offers paid access to the same data through their enterprise API program, so you're already giving access to unrelated third parties. Is there a significant distinction between the data that researchers could access and what's available through enterprise API?

Re: EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

#59

Post by squigz »

Aerroon wrote: post #55
embedding-shape wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "any company", it's exceptionally large platforms who can give insight into large societal questions and have enough influence to sway people's opinions. The data is technically public already, researchers could scrape it, but investigations has to be able to be done to ensure the platforms aren't used to intentionally steer people's opinion in a specific direction, since they're unable to self regulate that…

But governments themselves can steer people's opinions just fine? Can I get access to my politicians' emails "for research purposes"?

Are those emails already public?

Re: EU hits X with €120M fine for breaching the Digital Services Act

#60

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

qcnguy wrote: post #57
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's bizarre about it? There's lots of legislation that requires companies to report on various data or to provide access to auditors. It's legally valid. I think there's a compelling case to be made for requiring large social media platforms to provide data access to researchers, considering the platform's incredible ability to influence elections and society at-large.

Auditors != researchers. Auditors are hired by the company being audited, have a very narrow and fixed mission justified by previous financial blowups that caused a lot of concrete damage to specific people, and there are strict standards defining what they are looking for and how. Audits don't tend to suck up personal data of customers. "Researchers" here means self-selecting academics going on arbitrary fishing exp…

It's not clear what "full access to everyone's data" actually means, isn't it limited to things that are already publicly available? So for example, I don't think researchers would get access to someone's Likes because that feature is now considered private, but they could access things like Posts and Retweets. My expectation is that researchers would be allowed to run queries against publicly available data as part of their research, but they wouldn't be allowed to do a huge download with a copy of everything posted during the last 5 years.

Facebook / Meta is compliant with these laws, and the way that they handle researcher access is by providing carefully controlled remote environments with sandboxed access to user data, which forms the basis for my understanding of how researchers are typically provided access to social media data.

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