the EU seems to be starting to take serious measures against disinformation and hate speech by fining social media that don’t block these things and now threatens Musk about Twitter moderation: what do you think about this?

16 comments

1. Couldn’t Musk tell the EU to fuck off, stop letting EU use Twitter, then EU’s Twitter users use VPN to get on it like they do for a bunch of other shit anyways?

2. > would be deemed illegal, including material that promotes terrorism, child sexual abuse, hate speech and commercial scams.

   Three of those sound good, especially the commercial scams. But as always, the big question is who gets to define hate speech? The current definition that some use is that hate speech is any speech that makes them feel the least bit uncomfortable.

   And yes, europe tends to have pretty different views than americans on this, though surveys show that this is rapidly changing, with an increasing number of americans seem to support banning hate speech.

   The article also specifically mentions disinformation with covid. The elephant in the room on that subject is that virtually everything stated by the health authorities on covid turned out to be wrong or misleading. The pro-censorship folks really need to provide an argument for why speech questioning government officials should be banned, especially when the government officials have such a poor track record.

3. That crap would not fly in the US as of right now. I am disturbed by the number of people who think government censorship of something so subjective as hate speech is okay.

   I would rather see blocking EU IP addresses from those sites than compromise on free speech, but that’s up to individual companies and governments.

4. As always, the question is who determines what hate speech is. I’m a fan of less hate speech, but when it comes at the cost of government-required and enforced censorship? That’s not a tradeoff I ever want to see. My feelings are that it’s well intentioned but it goes much, much too far in the direction of restricting free speech.

   As for the facial recognition, my biggest question is have they tested the software for biases against minorities? The software to recognize faces created in the US was and probably still is trained primarily on white men. You ever hear someone who lives in a single race community say “all [race] people look alike?” That’s what happened to the software. When tested, it was racially profiling black men as criminal because it couldn’t tell them apart very well. With Europe’s growing minority populations, the exact same thing will happen unless they take very strong measures to prevent it.

5. I recognize that Europe and America are different and that our free speech laws and customs need not line up in every way. They don’t have the codified speech protections we do, and that’s alright. With that said, with very small exceptions, I favor an internet and a society-at-large that has little to no censorship. The answer to hate speech is more speech, not less. I think Europeans could come to regret their intrusive government actions in the long run. Who gets to define hate speech? Is posting nazi-supporting material hate speech? What about anti immigration posts? What about posts that make fun of another head of state? Your head of state? The point being is that what can start out looking like a clear line can get complicated…quickly. Sometimes it’s just better to ridicule people you disagree with in the open than suppress what they’re trying to say. And having twitter, or whomever, do your dirty work for you is just a cheap way out.

6. And that’s one reason American rights are better than European ones. When they’re done with that, free speech in Europe will be farce, just enough to make Europeans feel superior, but not actually existing. If you’re not free to offend people or the government, you don’t have free speech, you have the freedom to say popular things, and that never needs protecting. Even in North Korea, you’re free to say government approved things

   Besides, this “disinformation ” is just an excuse to take people’s rights. Often what people call “disinformation” is actually just something they don’t like or is inconvenient. Saw that often with covid

7. It’s clear to me that the EU has a different definition of what constitutes free speech that as an American I find a little to heavy on government control.

8. Fighting fascists with fascism. So European.

9. Quick question: how is Amazon a social media site

10. I like free speech. I don’t *like* misinformation and hate speech, but I don’t like government suppressing speech. I sympathize with the sentiments behind trying to do what the EU is trying to do, but regardless I firmly don’t support these things

11. I find it very ironic that the entity that enacted the GDPR as an attempt to protect personal data is now creating and planning to implement facial recognition technology that significantly expands surveillance capabilities.

    I also find it problematic that the EU government will apparently decide what should and shouldn’t be censored. There’s no neutral, objective method to define hate speech or disinformation. And even defining a commercial scam could be problematic. As an example on the scam piece. IMO, there’s a fine line between multi-level marketing and a Ponzi scheme.

12. I don’t know how seriously to take the EU and it’s leaders when they released statements condemning a private company for making internal decisions that greatly affect democratic discourse in the US.

    https://www.axios.com/macron-social-media-bans-trump-twitter-facebook-bf8640d0-57d0-4747-affb-e91835f9fb84.html

    https://m.dw.com/en/angela-merkel-calls-trump-twitter-ban-problematic/a-56197684

    https://www.politico.eu/article/angela-merkel-european-leaders-question-twitter-donald-trump-ban/

    It’s hard to know what they actually believe, although the Digital Services Act looks interesting if only because a good jab at big tech that has a real chance at landing on their chins is always nice, the EU is mostly inept and incompetent when it comes to creating meaningful change. One only has to look at the GDPR to see an example of what they thought was good legislation.

13. I think they tend to want to block things they don’t agree with.

    I don’t agree with this.

    Let it all out in the open. Teach people critical thinking and the power of attention. Don’t give attention to stuff you don’t like. Let disinformation die out on it’s own.

    If it doesn’t investigate why not. Perhaps we were wrong about something. Perhaps something needs to be discussed or debated. Perhaps humans have tiny brains incapable of rational though. That’s all ok. Let’s find out and point it out and say ‘x is the reason people keep doing this thing’.

    It’s harder this way but it leaves nowhere for bad ideas to hide and fester and grow unnoticed.

14. We Americans don’t trust the EU’s stance on free speech. In our minds free speech with a bit is not free at all.

15. It’s honestly pretty worrying how much y’all support allowing the government to control what you can and can’t say.

16. I’ve found that if you just block and remove people who believe awful things, they form their own communities that serve as echo chambers. People need to respect and talk to each other about these things, not sit in rooms where the only opinion they hear is copies of their own. That just serves to radicalized individuals and further polarize both sides.