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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: 5, Interesting) by theluggage on Friday January 15 2021, @04:30PM
But they were the moderators from day one, even before they started cancelling people. They choose the algorithms that promote and recommend posts to people, creating the central social problem of TwiTubeBook: the way they automatically seek out and feed users more of what you like, and foster the creation of "echo chambers". They chose to base that purely on populism and maximising clicks (...and even if they're fake clicks by fake users on fake accounts, they're still clicks...). Of course, the same is partially true of any other news outlet that came before, but social media has hugely increased the extent to which this is possible, while its operators try to deny any sort of editorial responsibility.
In a way, the whole Twitter/Facebook thing is a sideshow. The more ...interesting development was AWS's ban on Parler (IMHO good riddance to bad rubbish, but there's a 'chilling effect' at stake here). Twitter banning Trump is like a newspaper editor refusing to print your articles in their paper (over which they should have their own creative freedom) - the other is like a print shop refusing to even print your paper in a world where there is a diminishing number of independent print shops. Now, at the moment, Parler can simply go elsewhere for their web hosting (and iPhone/Android users will just have to make do with a regular website instead of an App - oh the humanity!) but AWS represents a significant fraction of cloud hosting capacity in an industry which is prone to monopoly problems - and if ISPs, server hosts/cloud services, DNS registrars and even long-distance carriers are held responsible for the content they carry, it could become very difficult to set up a website without agreeing to suffocating T&Cs on content.
So, part of the solution might be to really clarify the legal boundaries between publishing edited/curated content vs. providing Internet infrastructure (yes, Google, Amazon, MS, Apple etc. that probably means breakups) - NB: that doesn't mean trying to sneak one-sided legislation through as part of an urgent government budget bill...
Also, Mr D. Trump esq. may have the right to freedom of speech as of next Wednesday, but I'm not sure that the President of the US-fucking-A should feel free to dump whatever is on their mind onto Tw@ter without taking advice on the consequences or someone ensuring they're not sending different messages to different people. So maybe - rather than treating them more leniently - Twitter et. al. should just ban all senior members of government. It's not like those people don't have other channels for speaking to the world (hopefully moderated by an advisor to make sure that they're not wearing their underpants on their head today).