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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @04:14PM
For the short term gain of 'keeping a democrat/republican out' rather than voting for the long term policies they want and eroding the political clout of both the democrats and republicans for longer term gains and actual political change. Instead they are counterintuitively throwing away their votes by voting for a candidate more likely to win.
I've been voting 3rd party for over 20 years now. Usually Green for the presidency, although this last election I voted Libertarian (The replacement for Stein had even more nut-jobby policies, and out of the four top candidates the Libertarian one looked best, even though about a quarter of the policies I disagreed with, none of them were in key areas that both the Republicans and Democrats have been continually colluding to erode, like digital rights, privacy, etc.)
That got the libertarian candidate to over 1 percent this election cycle. They need 5 or 10 percent for the federal funding stuff, and perhaps more to actually get debate time and other media coverage. If Sanders hadn't betrayed his 'bernie bros' in the '16 cycle by signing on with the Democrat ticket, even if he'd lost, he would have gotten the percentage of votes to gather federal funding for the independents. His choice to sign on the Democrat ticket however lost them both the campaign funds he gathered and even a place on the ballet (They may have had a candidate but I don't even remember it showing up in the election results.)
Point being, until/unless we can get runoff voting legislated into the system here in the US, the best we can do is sacrifice a few elections, even if it that gives us another Trump (hopefully not the same one, so we don't risk a successful coup next time) so that the election after that sees one or more alternative political parties with the cloud to both erode the corporate sponsorship that has kept the two nominally colluding parties in power, and shift the presidency and congress into groups who have to listen to their consituents at risk of being permanently purged from politics thanks to voter disdain and ignoring the will of their constituents. Until that happens the same donkey and elephant show will keep going on, and we the American People will all be the worse off for it.