> Musk accepts many secret censorship deals from many countries, including EU countries.
This news article is interesting because it underlines the hypocrisy of these self-described paladins of free speech and makes it clear these complains and criticisms are nothing more than baseless and fraudulent grandstanding.
He's replying to a tweet by an EU official who says the Commission thinks X "misleads users", "fails to provide adequate ad repository" (whatever that means - something got lost in translation there) and "blocks access to data for researchers". Which is apparently illegal under the Digital Services Act.
The bit about misleading users seems to be that the EU suddenly dislikes the blue check icon because blue checks used to be restricted to people who are "trustworthy" but now their "preliminary view" is that the presence of a blue check can "deceive users".
In other words, none of the claims made by the EU are related to hate speech, which the EU has a habit of defining as any speech objecting to their policies anyway.
Also ironic that the EU complains that X doesn't send everyone's data to academics. What happened to EU having the best privacy laws?
This kind of micromanagement of product design is one of the reasons new products aren't launching in the EU.
There's no need to define it as hate speech, since the DSA purposely mentions a very vague "harmful speech/content" (not "hateful") which can in turn applied to whatever the EU sees fits.
For example, any objection to the current policies w.r.t the Russian invasion of Ukraine can be censored due to the DSA and this has happened recently to a prominent Italian YouTube influencer (Andrea Lombardi). His tweets were censored for his opinions about the Ukraine war.
How many other tweets are being removed which we don't know of because they are not coming from famous people who have channels to make themselves heard anyway?
> My guess on what you actually mean "I'm an authoritarian shitlib and my arguments can't actually win in a free society so I need to label everything that disagrees with me using the made up and entirely subective concept of "hate speech"
I couldn't not give 2 shits about "free speech" or "free society" when that "free society" validates people activly trying to make lives of other people significantly worse.
A truly free "society" would be literal anarchy and that just isn't how a society works. Freedoms are limited so that we don't tear eachother apart.
> using the made up and entirely subective concept of "hate speech"
If you require an objective definition of "hate speech" you might not be such a nice person to be around IMO, but then again its just a subjective feeling I have so I guess you can disregard it.
I think this sort of thing is going to become more commonplace, but I'm not sure I or anyone else can think of a better solution for now.
Western-aligned powers have been dealing with this prickly aspect of unconventional warfare for some time now: opposing powers intruding into the collective consciousness of their populace to introduce well-designed, self propagating ideas that are harmful to their power base. This basic idea is nothing new, with propaganda being invented somewhere between communication and warfare on the human timeline. However, humanity has never been this connected to so many sources and proxies of information, each being a vector for malicious ideas to spread.
The harmful ideas are best described as a meme in the Richard Dawkins sense. They are harmful to western-aligned powers because these ideas can be things like "democracy doesn't work", or "the government is conspiring against us", or "capitalism is failing". I'm especially fond of the last one, because I don't think it's necessarily untrue - but it's harmful to the powers that be nonetheless. These ideas are not presented so simply: there's usually several layers of indirection, and some sort of built in way of defending against opposing ideas that would cause the harmful idea to be abandoned - this can exploit fear, pride or the need for group identity to do so, for example.
When dealing with unconventional warfare such as this, you have a couple of options as far as I'm aware: innoculate your own populace against harmful ideas; retaliate against opposing powers with your own harmful ideas; or mitigate and remove sources of harmful ideas. That's where events like these start unfolding.
The EU is facing massive disinformation efforts and political interference from external actors, and its fundamentally threatening those in power and their power structures. They are attempting to do number 3 here, and they are running into opposition in the form of free speech absolutism. Whether this is part of a smarter defense built into this web of harmful ideas or just convenient cover, it still results into the survival of those harmful ideas. As the world continues on a trajectory of polarisation socially, politically and economically, I fear we may see more and more of this sort of thing, and it will definitely be abused to suppress good ideas, not just harmful ones. I'm sure it's happening already.
> I think this sort of thing is going to become more commonplace, but I'm not sure I or anyone else can think of a better solution for now.
> When dealing with unconventional warfare such as this, you have a couple of options as far as I'm aware: innoculate your own populace against harmful ideas; retaliate against opposing powers with your own harmful ideas; or mitigate and remove sources of harmful ideas. That's where events like these start unfolding.
Don't be so defeatest. There are numerous ideas for handling this problem.
For instance X/Twitter's Community Notes, which is now being trialed on Youtube too last I heard. There's also efforts towards eliminating secrecy (which is sorely needed in any healty democracy).
The whole mis/disinformation issue simply comes from a lack of trust (in government, authority, or generally any agency who has more legal flexibility than most people). In order to fix that, the easiest solution is for them to be transparrent about everything.
Hypothetically, imagine if you could login to your government website and see a simple chart breakdown of how much money your [insert agency of intrest] had, how it was gained, and how and where it was spent.
Frankly if any government in the world were to do that, it would influence others to ask "Why isn't my government transparrent like that?" and inevitably cause a knock on effect. Democracy was the first step, next is openness and transparency.
The Institute for Propaganda Analysis was set up before WW2 to teach the american public about propaganda. Many academics and researchers sought to educate the people in the face of
mainly foreign related propaganda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Propaganda_Analy...
It was abolished because the Americans wanted to go to war and use propaganda themselves.
In other words, the USA had a national program to educate the public about harmful ideas and misinformation, to see the signs and to resist but they abolished it because they wanted to do misinformation on their own people.
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Today we see "nudging" being used to manipulate. All our governments (and corporations and charities) seek to control our behaviour against our conscious wills. They won't easily give up their toolbox of tricks. Especially when the tricks actually work!
Is bullshit. What about government officials from parties you haven't voted for? Or even the ones in the party you voted for you didn't vote for with preferential votes? It's the same mechanism.
> I am so glad that the European Union wants to protect me from bad words.
You're making it sound like disinformation campaigns driven by hostile state actors are free from any negative impact.
In the meantime, false advertisement is already ilegal in any remotely civilized country, and boosting hate speech is obviously far more damaging to a society than buying subpar shampoo.
> It's always good when people I've never voted for protect me from things I've never asked for.
I don't know what you are talking about. Every citizen of a member-state of the European union votes not only for their representatives in the European union but also for their own government institutions, and all executive positions are either elected by members of the European Parliament or by representatives of all member-states.
… I mean, that’s how pretty much all representative democracies work. In presidential systems, the head of the executive is directly elected, but there are no true presidential system states in the EU (France and some of the Eastern European states are hybrids), so it’d be a little odd if the EU worked that way. And even in presidential systems, it’s only the _head_ of the executive who’s elected; I’m not aware of anywhere which directly elects ministers (you could, and I actually would, make an argument that presidential systems are _less_ democratic than parliamentary systems in this regard, in that, once the president is installed, they typically have almost complete control over ministerial appointment, whereas in a parliamentary system it tends to involve an element of compromise between elected representatives).
The EU system has problems (in particular, it’s rather complex, and people don’t understand it well enough or take it seriously enough - in many countries turnout for European elections is miserably low), and IMO it would be good to transfer more power from the Commission to the parliament (the Lisbon Treaty did this to some extent, but further efforts _really_ annoy the eurosceptics, and are unlikely to happen in the short term), but the idea that it’s especially undemocratic is pretty weird.
> (...) but the idea that it’s especially undemocratic is pretty weird.
Based on the Russia disinformation campaign plaguing Brexit, and how this brand of bullshit was a pervasive aspect of the propaganda effort and a constant on extremist far-left/far-right parties linked to Moscow throughout europe, I would strike this as another example of this attack.
Not really. That's not how it works, and it's a very puerile and cynical take that can't be taken seriously.
Just because you didn't held a referendum to pick what brand of stationary an office clerk should buy that does not mean you didn't voted for the executive branch.
Here in France, the people have only one political right : give up all the power to other people (from a preselected list). Said people will then do whatever the hell they want.
So, while we accept that deal when we vote, the fact is that we do not vote for the actual things.
In just the past few days it has been reported there is a surge of influence campaigns, recruitment of saboteurs, assassination plots, hacking attacks, etc. by Russia on the EU and US.
This is why disinformation is created and spread. It has a purpose. It comes from existential adversaries. Take it seriously. If you do, and you think countermeasures are not needed, you have made a choice.
CP are not words, that is a completely different area. Here, too, it is questionable whether this can be regulated by the state at all. But of course there is a need for investigative authorities who at least try to look into it. But do we necessarily need preventive censorship and breaking up E2E communication on WhatsApp? These are the ideas for regulating such things.
There is no need to regulate legal pornography.
With terrorism, e.g. propaganda, it is difficult. But in the end, the idea of freedom of information prevails. Of course, platforms should have the ability to regulate violent content (e.g. ISIS beheading videos), but we shouldn't give the state the ability to regulate that, because the definition of terrorism can be expanded very quickly if necessary.
I am glad to be protected from idiots who read Russian propaganda and then go marching on the streets calling for terrorism and then commit terrorism. I'd like to ban the idiots instead of banning the propaganda, but eugenics has already been ruled out.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...