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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: 2) by fakefuck39 on Friday January 15 2021, @04:48PM
There are not "70 million people that do not agree with you."
There are maybe 70 thousand people who do not, and they have zero else to do with their time, so they post a lot of comments online. In real life, I do not know a single person who believes the election was stolen. And about 1/3 of the people I know voted for Trump. This is because they don't like socialist handouts to C students, because they don't want college debt "forgiven" - which means "people who paid theirs off and have good jobs now pay for the ones who majored in gender studies." In addition, most of these anti-democrat voters (most trump voters), do want single payer health insurance, higher minimum wage.
Here's the issue: a small portion of democrats are the BLM guys threatening you at restaurants, burning down buildings, and blocking the road so you can't get home. a small portion of republicans are literal nazis. So we have a huge group of republicans voting against the shitshow that blm has become, and a huge group of democrats voting against the kkk. and the rest, on both sides, are a small group of crazy violent loons, who are too dumb to think about individual issues, and can only select red or blue for all choices they make.
there is no freedom of speech or censorship issue here. my house, my rules. this is freedom of speech - my freedom, in my house. the EU, and I've lived in several countries there and visited the rest, does not have freedom of speech. this is the type of stuff that makes republicans call socialism "communist." walk up to a cop in France and tell him to go fuck himself. you get a 250EUR fine for swearing at the cop. now, as expected, they want to tell you what content you can host on your platform. And if we apply this type of law, then images of Muhammad are illegal to post on your blog, because places like Iran don't want it. EU's stance on this is "we're superior and our government dictates what's good and bad to say." That bs, thankfully, would never fly in the US.
what I find funny is the gop trying to repeal section 230 because their tweets were taken down, not realizing if they do that, a lot more tweets will be taken down. it's like a drooling retard pissing on his shoe, complaining something smells like piss.