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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, 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.