[lhnz]

The EU's Digital Services Act permits the gathering of evidence and enforcement activities to be conducted confidentially behind closed doors. It does not require the EU to make their evidence available to the public, particularly when information is considered to be sensitive. This approach aims to preserve the integrity of the investigation and to protect the rights of involved parties.

Once such a law is passed there is no right to public scrutiny. While certain aspects of the process may not be open to public scrutiny, this does not entirely preclude the public's right to some level of transparency as it is stipulated that any decisions taken will be widely publicised (paragraph 101). That is, once they've made their judgement the matter will be settled and a superficial amount of information will be released to the public.

This is exactly why I think it's so important for us to speak openly about the speech rights we expect on the platforms we use and the level of policing of speech we're happy for there to be. If we don't do so, lawmakers can and do pass draconian laws that take these considerations away from us, and at this point we have little recourse to rollback our loss of freedom.

I'm not a free speech absolutist but believe that it's incredibly wrongheaded to try to argue away conversation about this as being without evidence particularly after lawmakers passed laws that denied us this same evidence. Blithely allowing lawmakers to pass laws that enable confidential evaluation of evidence limiting public scrutiny, but then afterwards criticising public discourse for lacking evidence without acknowledging that access to such evidence has been restricted by the same laws -- what a manipulative argument/framing!

The whole conversation on speech rights is also incorrectly centered in my opinion, as freedom of speech rights are centered on the speaker instead of the audience/public. I personally find myself advocating the following approach to speech rights:

  > "It’s not just the right of the person who speaks to
  >  be heard, it is the right of everyone in the audience
  >  to listen and to hear."

[Vinnl]

Absolutely, more transparency there would be great. But you said:

> Apparently the dissemination of illegal content refers to the October 7th videos of the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel that galvanized American support for Israel

...which does not to me seem to be a conclusion you can draw from a lack of evidence.

[lhnz]

I think they intend for their tactics to cause damage, but I do not think that they have set forwards reasonable evidence for their proceedings, or even been clear what they consider illegal or whether it's merely a case of them disallowing automated moderation tools.

When they said "dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel" I can only assume that it refers to the October 7th attack by Hamas upon Israel and not to another attack.

Of course, it could refer to a specific video posted during this time period that they consider to be disinformation, however, taking action against a singular video would be quite over-the-top which is why I believe they're referring to the overall dissemination of videos around this time.

[Vinnl]

Oh, I think it's absolutely clear that they're referring to those attacks. However, you said that they didn't want footage of those attacks in general to be spread, rather than misinformation about those attacks.

So as far as I know, it would probably have been fine to share videos showing eg the damage to a hospital, but not to post a deepfake showing Oprah planning the destruction of a hospital.

[willsoon]

> or to hear not."

You forgot one line.