Germany will continue "critically" monitoring Twitter for disinformation:
Twitter CEO Elon Musk continues to deal with intense scrutiny of how his social media platform will fight disinformation with its reduced staff. Early in 2023, Musk met with Germany's digital minister, Volker Wissing, in California to discuss whether Twitter would "voluntarily comply" with an agreement Twitter previously made with the European Commission to combat disinformation.
A ministry spokesperson described the meeting as "a very open and long talk" that ended with Musk assuring Wissing that Twitter wouldn't back down from the disinformation fight. Politico reported in December that part of Twitter's agreement with the commission involves preventing users from profiting from misinformation, labeling political ads, and making data available to researchers.
Ars could not immediately reach Twitter for comment. A ministry spokesperson told Ars that "in his talks with Elon Musk, Federal Minister Wissing made it clear, among other things, that Germany expects the existing voluntary commitments against disinformation and the rules of the Digital Services Act to be observed in the future."
The DSA was implemented in November, designed to "ensure that the online environment remains a safe space," while "safeguarding freedom of expression." The European law targets major social networks for compliance first, noting that they have "greater responsibility" to protect users from risks like "dangerous disinformation." Twitter and other "very large online platforms" have until mid-June 2023 to comply fully with the law. Unlike the voluntary agreement that Twitter made with the commission, a ministry spokesperson told Ars that "like any company, Twitter must in future comply with the rules of the Digital Services Act. There are no exceptions here."
[...] Back in November, the European Commission's Internal Market commissioner, Thierry Breton, told Musk that Twitter had "huge work ahead" to effectively tackle disinformation, Politico reported.
When 2023 started, one of the first changes Twitter made, however, could potentially result in more misinformation spreading on the platform. Earlier this week, Twitter lifted a political ad ban designed to stop misinformation spread and announced a plan to stop limiting the reach of "cause-based" tweets.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09, @08:23AM (1 child)
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/ [techdirt.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 09, @03:12PM
Seems like they're at step 12.5 right now.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by cykros on Monday January 09, @10:29AM (10 children)
Germany's butthurt because Elon's always bent over for the authoritarians in China and it's looking like he won't afford them the same degree of bootlicking.
Twitter should take the opportunity when it's not making money anyway to just cut off the EU. They've made it clear they're hostile to an open Internet.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Monday January 09, @10:50AM (9 children)
I'd be with you, if we hadn't already shown that people are too stupid to figure out when they're being fed bullshit.
You want a free and open internet, where no state gets to control the narrative. That's fine, and I'd be with you, if that was an option. As it is now, though, your choice is only whether your country, which at least nominally has your interest in mind, controls it, or whether foreign actors trying to destabilize your country do.
That's the actual choice you have.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by crafoo on Monday January 09, @02:53PM (3 children)
I see we have a Hamiltonian in the crowd. That's right. Foreign Interlopers. Foreign Entanglements that will take down our very country.
Now we just need tariffs in support of domestic industry, a massive reduction/elimination of taxes (replaced by tariff funds) to promote individuals starting businesses and building national wealth.
Alexander Hamilton's "Report on the Subject of Manufactures" and his biography written by Lodge are both fantastic. Every American should at least try to read them.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by crafoo on Monday January 09, @02:55PM
P.S. Thomas Jefferson admitted he was wrong about everything and Hamilton was right about everything a bit after Hamilton's death, and Jefferson had seen his retarded ideals tested in the early 1800s.
Jefferson would apologize and fully admit his very, very dumb libtard ways in a letter after Hamilton's death.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Opportunist on Monday January 09, @03:57PM (1 child)
No, we just have someone in the crowd who simply wonders who the hell benefits from bullshit stories and fearmongering. And I'm not even talking about "the evil, evil (insert group here" stories. I mean those stories where nobody really wins and everybody just loses.
Take "Pizzagate". One of my reminders that anything that ends in "-gate" can only lead to a bullshit story. Care to tell me who actually had any benefit from that loon who took his gun to shoot up a pizza shop because someone pretended there's a kiddy porn ring in the basement (that doesn't even exist)? Who benefits from Covid bullshit stories that keep people from using sensible steps to prevent it and cause the disease to spread and circulate, propagate and become a threat to the health system?
If you have a better explanation, go ahead.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 09, @04:50PM
(Score: 1, Troll) by cobaco on Monday January 09, @03:42PM
"if we hadn't already shown that people are too stupid to figure out when they're being fed bullshit."
and that includes whoever is assigned to figure that shit out officially
either that or they inevitably get captured by political pressure
... that's kinda why we have free speech in the first place
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 09, @04:29PM (1 child)
I'd go with foreign actors, obviously, since they're going to do what they do anyway and they won't actually control anything in the first place. Free and open internet over foreign actor cooties.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10, @04:31AM
The Democrats are/were just sore losers and trying to blame Russians and Facebooks for their own failings and screw ups.
The Democrats themselves were using/abusing social media. And Clinton was going around calling voters a basket of deplorables (great way to win votes eh?).
See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05/05/inside-democrat-facebooks-vicious-civil-war/ [washingtonpost.com]
https://web.archive.org/web/20160506172750/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/05/05/inside-democrat-facebooks-vicious-civil-war/ [archive.org]
It doesn't take a bright spark to know that Big Tech (Facebook, Google etc) have a democrat bias.
https://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990 [gizmodo.com]
https://www.newsweek.com/google-engineer-anti-trump-conservative-bias-fox-news-employees-kevin-cernekee-tucker-carlson-1452492 [newsweek.com]
Despite all of that bias, Clinton still lost, and they started to try to blame others for it.
Don't forget Clinton's team wanted to go against Trump: https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/ [salon.com]
But the sore losers go on and on and on about the Russians and Facebook. Clinton lost it. They were just out of touch with half of the USA or never even tried to reach out. Sanders might have had broader voter support. I don't see as many republican voters or fence sitters voting for Clinton as they would have Sanders.
Heck some Cracked writer was far more in touch than Clinton and her team seemed to be (or they knew and just didn't care): https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about [cracked.com]
Lots seem to forget how it really was in 2016.
(Score: 0, Troll) by darkfeline on Monday January 09, @06:20PM
I agree that people are too stupid to figure out when they're being fed bullshit, and funnily enough that is most apparent from the people trying to push, or are accepting of, censorship as the solution.
It is a problem, and censorship is not the solution.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10, @03:33AM
Foreign actors have freedom of speech too. The US people can recheck their precious First Amendment and Constitution. Don't like it, amend it again.
Foreign actors are free to buy guns and shoot up US schools and schoolkids too. But US citizens are doing such a good job of that, that foreign actors don't have to do such stuff.
So similarly I do wonder whether the foreign actors really play as big a role as the USA claims. It could be mostly the locals.
To me it seems like lots of people are just trying to put the blame on the Russians and Facebook just because Clinton lost that previous election vs Trump. Clinton was going around calling voters a basket of deplorables, what a nice way for a politician to win hearts, minds and votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables [wikipedia.org]
But in 2016 I remember Big Tech having an anti-Trump/republican bias. Facebook, Google etc. I can't find the links but I remember people in those organizations asking how they could deliver a Democrat president. They certainly weren't happy about Trump winning: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-google-leaderships-dismayed-reaction-to-trump-election/ [breitbart.com]
So it's more like the Democrats and Clinton doing a abysmal job than the Russians doing a miraculously good job of influencing the voters to vote for Trump instead of Clinton.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday January 09, @10:54AM
Removing information is essentially a bad thing. But we can't expect every citizen to recognize false information, so maybe information can be labeled with warnings like this?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday January 09, @11:38AM
Continue to evolve safeguarded freedom of expression until...
You will know nothing and you will be happy about it.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Spamalope on Monday January 09, @12:46PM
Add a filter for the tag, so you can filter out (or go see) the inevitable shitposting to get the tag.
Similarly, every user or post a gov't employee requested removal for should be tagged with the source of the request whether removed or not. Add some sunlight.
(Score: 2, Touché) by EEMac on Monday January 09, @03:10PM (2 children)
If I never hear the words "safe space" again, it will be too soon.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 09, @03:16PM
Still, anyone who ever thought of an online environment as a "safe space" was fooling themselves. It deteriorated at an epic pace. Sure, there may have been "somewhat safe" online environments, but nowadays it's all hives of scum and villainy. Just some of them have a paper-mache facade.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Funny) by richtopia on Monday January 09, @03:17PM
Now I'm imagining a knock-off Aliens horror movie titled Safe Space.
(Score: 1) by ShovelOperator1 on Monday January 09, @04:43PM
But these services run on misinformation. The misinformation is the fuel of them, as it is more radicalizing, it is forwarded faster so it allows people to watch more ads. The WWW, especially "Web 1.0", was operating on hyperlinks. It was possible to pass information according to some reference, and refer to another site, like in scientist do in their publications. Now, services intentionally block hyperlinks, especially external references!
They literally prohibited the possibility for references and now they are punishing users for it.
The problem is that the misinformation is many times just an information, but it is not comfortable for corporations. Something that may make their workers ask for bigger pays. Something that may make people think like "Jesus what a bulls..t, isn't it a controlled opposition posting there to discredit the real one?". This is unfortunately directly connected to modern "social media" which lost the community and became something like these 90s color supermarket ad newspapers.
(Score: 2) by Sjolfr on Monday January 09, @11:27PM (3 children)
I think the US is still laboring under the illusion that our governments are there to protect us from everything. It just isn't so. Unfortunately too many other governments embrace this idea and it's really really late in the game to just start telling people that their risk is really their own risk.
Plus we seriuosly DO NOT teach our kids to think critically. Sooooo many young adults have a non-existant BS detector these days. Instead too many folks engage in "if someone wrote it down it must be true".
Believe everything, take no responsibility.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by Nobuddy on Tuesday January 10, @03:13AM (1 child)
" Sooooo many young adults have a non-existant BS detector these days."
From what I have seen, its mostly old people falling for the disinformation. Sure, there is a miz of just about all ages, but the percentage of the mix increases a LOT as you reach boomer ages.
(Score: 2) by Sjolfr on Tuesday January 10, @08:36PM
I think we'd have to define what you consider to be 'disinformation', especially what you would consider to be a source of truth regarding what it actually is. A ton of the stuff people argue about really goes back to arguing, even simple bickering, about perspective rather than facts. You and I could argue and argue about whether or not a thing is green or brown. It won't ever get anywhere unless you listen to the fact that I am color blind. Too many people feel comfortable arguing without all the relavent facts at hand.
There's also a bunch of things out there where people are disagreeing on the usage of a term, like gender vs gender identity, and simply will not listen to each other no matter what. Gender identity is a very well established term used by the mental health system. "Gender" is defined as your biological gender. "Gender identity" is defined as the gender someone identifies as. If gender studies wants to collapse those in to one term "gender" that's fine ... just stop arguing that both of those terms do not exist, because they do. and tyhey have very specific meanings.
Then you also have the fact that too many media outlets want to control the narrative of a discussion and they resort to mischaracterizations and outright lies. One way they do that is only showing the stereotype of the "the other side" that they want to perpetuate; like a befunddled old perrson not knowing how to use a cell phone. That's why news, these days, is news entertainment. They don't want to be held to the same level of scrutiny because hype sells and makes more money than facts.
Social trends are not facts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10, @05:39AM
I see plenty of old people getting scammed. Maybe that's partly because old people tend to have more money than young people. But based on my observations old people are as scammable as the young.
(Score: 2) by pgc on Tuesday January 10, @07:19AM
So, the German government wants Twitter to remove disinformation?
They do realize that they themselves are a big spreader of this disinformation?