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‘No Longer Acceptable’ for Platforms to Take Key Decisions Alone, EU Commission Says

posted by mrpg on Friday January 15 2021, @02:01PM   

An Anonymous Coward writes:

'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.

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Original Submission

• Re:Will we really though? (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:15PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:15PM (#1101605)

  For anyone saying well there is 'xxx' new privacy network out, go look into who is running those new services. Many of them were started by people who were on those networks and either actively doxxed people using them, or have publicly stated opinions that perhaps privacy and free speech aren't that important (perhaps during bipolar or depressive episodes, but are you really going to trust a crypto/anonymity developer who isn't 100 percent behind their beliefs in anonymity/privacy at all times, particularly when the code is not being externally audited?) If you are, try things like lokinet, but beware you're just trading one second of known risks and compromises for what is likely to turn out to be another set, perhaps even with backdoors baked in.

  For reference: I was someone heavily into the scene from 2012 to 2018, and finally quit after a newly re-appointed dev, who had taken over the channel after the founder left over concerns the network was no longer anonymous and that the server admin were spying/censoring people, started censoring/banning users of that channel for objectionable comments. This was a person who had in prior years been banned from the project over personal attacks against a rather inept dev who later become the project head (overseeing the embezzling of over 6 million dollars worth of cryptocurrency donations that had been made to the project during the first and last 'official' convention for the project.) Many of the changes made since to increase performance have also caused similar anonymity attacks to what have been happening with Tor, while there has yet to be an external audit of the code, despite having had donations provided that should have covered even the most thorough auditi payments completely.

  are you referring to lokinet through this whole quote or two different projects? i had high hopes for lokinet, at least for a reasonable amount of time.

  Parent