[Sol-]

The EU's attitude to American tech firms is weird. On the one hand, they have extrajudicial private entities they outsource censorship requests to ("trusted flaggers"), which the companies have to follow at the threat of massive fines and which therefore creates the incentive to ban quickly.

On the other hand, there is stuff like this where they created another arbitrary "voluntary" mechanism to punish the companies for banning too much. I think ultimately the EU just wants a set of rules to use as a pretense to levy fines on big tech.

[J-Kuhn]

You assume that the EU acts in a coherent manner.

I think that premise is wrong - there are many interest groups, and by luck/lobbying/reaching critical mass/... they manage to put one of their interests into a law.

[alex1138]

EU has different things going on though. Some good regulation, some bad

[fooker]

> You assume that the EU acts in a coherent manner.

When it comes to aiming for maximum extraction from big tech, yes.

[stefan_]

There are no fines, this is about having recourse when big tech randomly bans you. Which you will remember, is a very common outcry on this very page.

This is just an uninformed EU rant.

[vrganj]

I think the censorship framing is quite manipulative. It is removal of unlawful content.

Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?

If no, then where do you draw the line? Why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to decide instead?

[dragonwriter]

Restricting the distribution of any material on content-based criteria by persons other than sender or intended receiver is censorship.

Whether it is desirable censorship or not is generally a separate issue from whether or not it is censorship, unless, for example, you have previously adopted a rule that the particular actor committing the censorship shall not engage in censorship at all, in which case they are, of course, inherently the same question. (Where this gets hairy is when one likes to pretend that one has such a rule for a particular actor, but actually really would prefer that actor to censor certain things, which sometimes occurs with modern liberal democratic regimes, and especially frequently occurs with a particular North American one which has what superficially looks like a very strong restriction in that area in its Constitution.)

[Pragmata]

>I think the censorship framing is quite manipulative. It is removal of unlawful content.

Yeah, that's called censorship. It's exactly the same thing everyone you accuse of censorship does. There is exactly zero difference beyond your support of the views/people being censored (and sometimes not even that).

>Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?

Yes. Yes.

>If no, then where do you draw the line? Why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to decide instead?

Well in my country that line has been drawn. It's just recurring and persistently ignored by the state, the justice system, and private entities.

When a constitution says explicitly "no type or form of censorship is permitted", that's pretty clear what it means. You ignoring it doesn't make that line less clear.

[like_any_other]

Nice motte-and-bailey. Removing CSAM is good, therefore so is removing “we need to take back our country”:

@JudiciaryGOP has been investigating European censorship since the EU tried to silence President Trump last August. In February, we subpoenaed tech companies for their communications with foreign censors in Europe and around the world. Today, we’re releasing a report with preliminary findings about the EU’s censorship regime. The EU’s censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), requires platforms to censor so-called “misinformation” and “hate speech,” even when the content “is not illegal.” New documents obtained by the Committee show that European regulators distort these terms to require censorship of legitimate political discourse that is neither harmful nor illegal. In May, the EU hosted a DSA-focused “workshop” where platforms were asked to consider hypothetical “scenarios” involving hate speech online. Unlike other EU “workshops” with tech, the public was NOT allowed to watch this one. And the EU told the platforms to NOT share the “scenarios” with the public. What were they trying to hide? Turns out, the EU wanted to hide what it defines as “illegal hate speech” that must be censored: tweeting ordinary political rhetoric like “we need to take back our country.”

https://x.com/jim_jordan/status/1948730617803296910

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...

[vrganj]

If removing CSAM is good, then there is clearly a line somewhere.

The only question is "who gets to draw it"?

Why should it be foreign oligarchs and not our own democratic representatives?

To do so, ironically, constitutes "taking back our country" from autocrats abroad.

The arrogance of the House GOP trying to tell our democracy what is and isn't harmful is grating. You're not our colonial administrators. Abide by our rules or get out.

[like_any_other]

No, it constitutes the taking of the country by the autocrats at home (or in Brussels). It is ridiculous to call them "democratic representatives" when they are trying to keep secret how they are censoring the people they rule, sorry, "represent".

It's also ridiculous to claim that censoring the very desire to reclaim one's country, is reclaiming one's country, by virtue of who is doing the secret censoring.

> Who do House Republicans think they are that they can tell our democracy what is and isn't harmful? Abide by our rules or get out.

As a European I am very grateful to the Republicans for exposing how my own supranational rulers are controlling me, something which, again, they tried to keep secret, while preaching about "democracy".

Edit as reply:

> So your definition of "taking back our country" is... Americans telling us what we can and can't do in the best interest of their owners?

They're not telling us what we can and can't do. They're telling us what our rulers are keeping secret from us.

> Should the EU actually overstep, tech companies can take it to the open, public courts

I repeated how they kept the nature of censorship secret three times. You don't get to talk about "open, public courts".

> If you don't like the DSA, vote for MEPs that are opposed.

I will. But many won't, because they are being deceived by the EU regarding how the legislation works. How democratic is it when governments lie, and people vote based on those lies? And for some strange reason, none of the many misinformation watchdogs picked up on this misinformation.

[vrganj]

So your definition of "taking back our country" is... Americans telling us what we can and can't do in the best interest of their owners?

Should the EU actually overstep, tech companies can take it to the open, public courts, thanks to our actually functioning separation of powers. That is the beauty of democracy.

If you don't like the DSA, vote for MEPs that are opposed. You're never going to be able to control what's going on in your country if you give away power to wannabe colonialists abroad.

[miohtama]

The problem is that the EU politicians do not want the think about the problem. They want to outsource it and make someone else to pay it.

But there is no solution. Any censorship is always subjective.

Also trusted flaggers bans cannot be disputed easily. Meta rather just takes whatever trusted flaggers have flagged, real or not, and it is not their problem. It is a problem between the EU citizen and anonymous trusted flagged with no accountability.

The next step is of course corrupted trusted flaggers who can take down business pages, whatever, for a payment.

[EA-3167]

It's almost as though they want to be the government making the rules, rather than sitting back and letting the likes of META do whatever they want. The imperfect approach comes down to the reality of politics.

[dgellow]

There are no fines at all in this story.

[petcat]

The EU fines are not enough to get the US tech companies to change, or even leave completely. But they are enough to continually fund the EU regulatory bureaucracy itself. So this arm of the government really only exists to preserve itself.

I would be interested to see how many EU government jobs the US tech fines are supporting. Maybe Meta or Google is indirectly the largest employer in Brussels?

[PunchyHamster]

Incorrect. Plenty of changes made because of that, they just apply only to EU member countries coz they still want to sell the data about other country's citizens

[ginko]

> But they are enough to continually fund the EU regulatory bureaucracy itself

Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? The EU budget is hundreds of billions of Euros. Even the largest fines so far would be a drop in the bucket compared to that. But more importantly it's the individual member states that invoke those fines (like Ireland with the €1.2B GDPR fine on Meta) not the EU itself.

[rusk]

Another way to read this is the tech companies are stupidly bankrolling the EU by not complying with the laws of the lands (EU states voluntarily enact their own implementations of EU directions in return for a slice). That’s far too good a cash cow to pass up. Keep it coming.

[mschuster91]

> The EU's attitude to American tech firms is weird.

At the core, what the difference is is how "free speech" is interpreted. In the US? Unless you literally fake-call "fire" or call for Luigi'ing someone, it's protected free speech, even if it's a bunch of Nazis holding tiki torches and showing the Hitler salute [1].

In Europe? We have been through 1933-1945. Almost every country in continental Europe was either occupied by Hitler's Germany or lorded over by one of his allies (e.g. Spain's Franco, Ante Pavelic in what would be Yugoslavia or Mussolini in Italy). An awful, awful lot of people died thanks to these regimes, and our collective learning from that history is to either ban such speech entirely or at the very least ostracize its followers. The Eastern Bloc countries who had been occupied by authoritarian pseudo Communism in the decades after WW2 added the Communist symbols (e.g. Red Star) for the same reason. Generally, we do not want a repeat of these eras.

Now with social media, we saw Americans (and people of other non European countries, but mostly Americans) openly post symbols we see as symbols of hate, we saw them call for a repeat of what happened between 1933 and the 1990s, and US platforms did barely anything against that. We tried the soft way as we almost always do, announced "hey we don't like that", platforms didn't get it under control (and some, like post-Musk Twitter, openly announced they DGAF)... and similarly to GDPR or USB-C, we acted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally

[zombot]

> massive fines

What are you smoking? Any fines against these megacorps are at best a tiny fraction of their quarterly profits. They get booked as cost of doing business.

[thefz]

As an EU citizen I am glad there's at least some overwatch and control over these companies. I don't trust them at all. In the US unregulated capitalism is fine: everything and his mother are for sale. Here, not so much.

Ironically if there is a single population that will immensely benefit from socialism, is the United States. Yet they are raised in fear of the very doctrine that would save them.

[matchbok3]

I'll take our #1 companies, #1 tech scene, #1 innovative companies and #1 stock market over.... whatever you have, any day.

We aren't raised in "fear" of anything. We are raised to reach our potential, not depend on a nanny state or the USA. (which the EU does, you conveniently omit)

[thefz]

> I'll take our #1 companies, #1 tech scene, #1 innovative companies and #1 stock market over.... whatever you have, any day.

Good, just don't expect others to do so.

[tsss]

EU is an organization of bureaucrats. They want rules, first and foremost. Rules that they can lord over you and that justify their continued existence. What those rules are about is a secondary matter.