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'No longer acceptable' for platforms to take key decisions alone, EU Commission says
It is "no longer acceptable" for social media giants to take key decisions on online content removals alone, following the high profile takedowns of US President Trump's accounts on Facebook and Twitter, the European Commission has said.
Trump's accounts have been suspended by the two platforms for inciting calls to violence ahead of the violent riots that hit Washington's Capitol Hill last week.
Speaking to lawmakers on Monday (11 January), Prabhat Agarwal, an official who heads up the eCommerce unit at the European Commission's DG Connect, noted how the EU executive's Digital Services Act attempts to realign the balance between effective content removal and preserving freedom of expression online.
"It is no longer acceptable in our view that platforms take some key decisions by themselves alone without any supervision, without any accountability, and without any sort of dialogue or transparency for the kind of decisions that they're taking," Agarwal said.
"Freedom of expression is really a key value in this," he told the European Parliament's internal market committee.
The comments came following concerns raised by some lawmakers in the European Parliament following the suspension of Trump's social media accounts. In doing so, platforms giants had demonstrated that they yield a disproportionate degree of power over the freedom of speech online.
"The fact that platforms like Twitter and Facebook decide who can speak freely is dangerous," Green MEP Kim van Sparrentak said.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Friday January 15 2021, @03:27PM (8 children)
What you say is largely true, but the real reason that usenet died was because the noise level got too high.
And the basic problem that is difficult to solve is that when lots of people are trying to speak at once, only the loudest voices get heard.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @04:04PM
One major problem I remember with Usenet towards the end was that even a short term archive (that aged out in days) was taking up 4 GB of space. At the time that was an enormous amount.
It was also decentralized. So every major NNTP server had it's own copy of the archive. But not all servers served the complete set of available newsgroups. They tended to pick and choose based on economics and the needs of their local users.
Yes, you could get Comcast in hell.
Yes, you could also get Usenet in hell, but there was only one newsgroup: comp.news.sci.rec.soc.talk.misc.
Why is it that when I hold a stick, everyone begins to look like a pinata?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by choose another one on Friday January 15 2021, @04:13PM
Not just signal to noise issues, also total content volume and associated storage and bandwidth requirements - most usenet servers in the early days were free, and roughly zero budget, keeping any kind of usable history of alt.binaries.* just became impossible (either physically or financially).
Once your "local" servers started keeping only a limited selection of groups for a couple of days only (with propagation time often significant) you either dropped usenet or went to one of the big hosts out on the web for better propagation and more groups held for longer. And once you were out on the web anyway, why use a kludged user interface over a legacy system, gaining no benefit from the underlying distributed nature - just use a dedicated web forum.
Type of internet connection probably also played a part, usenet was useful in dial-up days when you setup your own server and let it sync (along with your emails) while the connection was up, and then read / reply at your leisure without the pressure of the per-minute costs, an advantage that disappears as soon as you've got always-on internet connections.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @05:11PM (4 children)
One thing that was no doubt instrumental in killing Usenet was the invention of Spam.
Spam began on Usenet.
Then it moved to email.
Why is it that when I hold a stick, everyone begins to look like a pinata?
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Friday January 15 2021, @05:52PM (1 child)
If you like odomoter wraparounds, if anything, we should be celebrating usenet - today is 9999th September 1993!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday January 15 2021, @06:01PM
Sorry, I didn't realize Usenet was still alive.
Why is it that when I hold a stick, everyone begins to look like a pinata?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 15 2021, @11:55PM (1 child)
FWIW, I first saw span on email. And I did use usenet, though admittedly only a few technical groups.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:42AM
Same here. I actually remember the first spam I ever got... it was from a lawyer named Beard. (For some years he owned beard.com.) Arrived once a month like clockwork for about 15 years; was actually surprised when it stopped, but I suppose he retired.
Where I was reading Usenet, the main problem wasn't spam, it was cranks like "Usenet Freedom Fighters".
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:53PM
I actually tried to create a group once, and the response I got made it clear that these people didn't really understand the software architecture of the underlying system, and why it was good/bad for various reasons. The thing is, cross posting was essentially exactly the same thing, technically speaking as hash tags. There was only one message, the header just made it appear in different parts of the heirarchy. Facebook basically nicked the system, and they could because the committee didn't understand what they had.
And I understand the capacity issues too. Yeah it was huge, and still is. But not so much if you didn't carry alt.binaries. But again that comes down to somebody having to make an administrative decision about capacity. So the details don't matter really except the fact that it costs money to back up other peoples content. Which is a fundamental problem with a wide open distributed system. Even Google is starting to show some push back on bulk content now (indirectly)
Really the capacity needs to be born by all users, which is what freenet, and torrent does to some degree. But formalizing that is tricky. Text-only content compresses well, until you start getting uuencodes and base 64 encodes getting posted. What Facebook and Twitter really did was bring together people under a common contract and interface. The core of the tech wasn't all that much better, it was just more acceptable to people, and they traded their civil rights for the convenience of doing what was already available elsewhere, (mostly).
Politicians are making demands that the markets serve THEM, rather than making demands that the market serves the people. That is why they are getting so much push back. It is a backwards mentality. They say "it shouldn't be this way, and we DEMAND that (pick a provider) changes to suit congress". Of course they could simply support civil litigation under the 4th amendment on behalf of citizens who are angry that they are being molested by providers. In which case the market impetus for the providers would change, and the products would more clearly reflect social norms without having to create a bunch of bad legislation.
You can't fix this by passing laws that will never see a court room. You have to fix this by actually going to court on behalf of citizens. So the question isn't "what law to pass", it is how to possess the necessary evidence to bring civil and criminal litigation under existing statutes. And that data lives in the terrabytes of log files spread across all the vendors. The data required to litigate exists, they just aren't using it. So if they have such a need for new laws, that need certainly isn't in the interest of the public, because if they were willing to serve the public, they already would have.