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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 Magic Oddball on Friday January 15 2021, @10:58PM (7 children)
There's countless highly intelligent people who don't have the level of technological skill & knowledge required to do that, even though they can easily do things that we'd find difficult at absolute best. (From what I've heard, that tends to include top-notch doctors of all stripes, for example.) At this point, given most of the tech community has figured that out, I lean more towards "if you still haven't noticed that about humanity, maybe you don't have enough insight into anything outside your field to deserve to be heard."
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 16 2021, @01:30AM (6 children)
Setting up a Diaspora node isn't that hard. You don't even have to create a server; you can just get an account on someone else's. If you can figure out how to create a Facebook account and navigate it, which most of these right-wingers seem to have figured out, then you can figure out how to use a Diaspora account. If you're not techincally adept enough to actually set it up and link it to other federated servers, then find someone who is. Is there no one in the entire conservative movement who can handle a simple IT task like this? Somehow, these people managed to set up Parler (though not very well from a security standpoint, apparently), but you want me to believe that they're utterly incapable of using Diaspora?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @11:32AM
Diaspora is pretty much dead anyway.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Saturday January 16 2021, @05:56PM (4 children)
... And I believe we've just gone full circle....
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Saturday January 16 2021, @08:27PM (3 children)
So you want me to believe that there are no conservatives who know how to set up a server?
How exactly did these people manage to create Parler then?
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Saturday January 16 2021, @09:12PM (2 children)
No. Just noticing that the expectations are fluid. They should set up their own server, cdn, DNS, and then we're back to "you don't even need to set up a server". Once the ISP gets pressured to shut them out they'll be criticized for not creating their own internet, installing their own fiber, phone polls & trenches. Launching a satellite array isn't an unreasonable barrier for free speech, right? It's a free country.
Not that I'm going to cry too hard about it. The "moral majority" of the 80s also used similar arguments to silence things they didn't want to hear. It's just a continuation of the ever escalating game of politics in the US.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday January 17 2021, @01:49AM (1 child)
They would never need to go as far as creating their own internet. At some point, you can just buy your own backbone connection. Amazon doesn't have an ISP, for instance. As for DNS, again, I don't think it's possible to be denied DNS service, per ICANN rules.
For an extreme example of what you can do when you want to actually express yourself using your Constitutional freedom of speech, instead of just sitting around and whining about "Big Tech" "censoring" you, just look at Stormfront. I don't feel like actually bringing up the website itself, but according to Wikipedia, it's still online, and it's been online for **24 years** now.
If those mouth-breathing idiots can do it, there's nothing stopping the MAGA idiots from doing it too. You can't claim that conservative thought is actually being forcibly kept off the internet as long as stormfront.org is still running.
Of course, stormfront is a website, and doesn't have handy stuff like a smartphone app, but we're talking about being completely blocked from the internet here, and this just isn't happening. As vile as I find the stormfront people, I do have to at least give them credit for sticking to their guns and keeping their disgusting website up all this time, instead of whining about "censorship".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @03:04AM
Andrew Anglin, or Flying Farang Syndrome fame? Oh, wait. No money. On the lam.