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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, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @02:27PM (21 children)
What's next? Make it compulsory to express myself through these platforms? Sheesh... these MEPs seem to have their head in the same spot as Trump in terms of knowledge on what the internet really is.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @05:53PM
Will you be able to speak if you have no mouth, mister?
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by Grishnakh on Friday January 15 2021, @06:51PM (19 children)
Exactly. There are many, many platforms out there, and if you don't like the centralized ones, you can always set up your own site, or even a Diaspora node. If you're too dumb to do that, then maybe you don't deserve to be heard.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @07:21PM (5 children)
Soon we will have p2p software that totally protects anonymity, etc. sure, pieces exist already, but i'm talking about easier and more full featured, linkable, etc. The government and big tech can sit around and jerk each other off.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @03:25PM (4 children)
Tor got taken over by SJWs, many of the node operators were actually alt-right types (not just Americans) who eventually defected to I2P over Tor devs ignoring longstanding issues with guards and misbehaving nodes that weren't being caught by the concensus. I2P in turn lost it's pro-anarchist, then its pro-communist factions, eventually devolving into SJWs and pro-fascists (and yes this was as weird as it sounds!) among its developers, eventually becoming a pro-censorship majority of both SJW and fascists who would kick, mute, and ban people they didn't like. Now almost all the channels on IRC2P are registered users only to post messages, even the formerly 'free voice at all costs' ones.
The former I2Pers have become a diaspora as nobody trusts the increasingly centralized, censored, and questionably secure networks, with lots of us having noticed oddly behavior node patterns to the point of actively distrusting the networks. Furthermore within the past 4 years both I2P and Tor have been subject to either denial of service or traffic monitoring attacks that call into question their suitability for anonymous service hosting as well as peer to peer communications.
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.
And that is where we are in the world of anonymity networks in 2021. No one to trust without an angle, and many of those same people only desiring free speech until it's the other guy speaking. Eternal September wasn't the worst the internet had to see, the true Dark Ages are just beginning. It will be educational watching what unfolds and if cyberspace will ever manage to recover, either culturally, technologically, or politically free from the traps now unfolding upon it at all levels.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Saturday January 16 2021, @05:16PM
... When Advocating For Social Change" (an essay I wrote some years back): https://pdfernhout.net/why-encryption-use-is-problematical-when-advocating-for-social-change.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Here is a partial list of all the ways a tool like Briar can fail when being used by activists engaged in controversial political actions. ... In general, a system intended to ensure private communications is only as secure as its weakest link. If any of these levels is compromised (hardware, firmware, OS, application, algorithm theory, algorithm implementation, user error, user loyalty, etc.) then your communications are compromised. ... If you want to build a mass movement, at some point, you need to engage people. In practice, for social psychology reasons, engaging people is very difficult, if not impossible, to do completely anonymously in an untraceable way. People have historically built mass movements without computers or the internet. It's not clear if the internet really makes this easier for activists or instead just for the status quo who wants to monitor them. If you work in public, you don't have to fear loss of secure communications because you never structure you movement to rely on them. If you rely on "secure" communications, then you may set yourself up to fail when such communications are compromised. If your point is to build a mass movement, then where should your focus be? ..."
That essay mainly discussed individual issues of equipment compromise and also compromise by the other party. Maybe I should update that essay someday to include the sort of social trust issues you insightfully mention here about trusting some supposed "private" network with unknown and potentially biased operators...
And of course, there is also this: https://xkcd.com/538/ [xkcd.com]
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 17 2021, @03:48AM (1 child)
So you're saying that the Jews ruined it, like they ruin everything else that's good?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @08:41AM
You're just pissy because your ancestors gave up their ancestral paganisms without even documenting them and fell to conquest, accepting some Roman psyops cool bro story about the One Righteous Jew and his hatred of Jewish bankers that's just yet another cult of the dead god with some vaguely Buddhist sounding stuff tacked on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 17 2021, @07:15PM
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.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday January 15 2021, @09:07PM
I heard there's this one platform where you can say pretty much whatever you want and the worst that will happen is that you have to eat 10 cans of spam or something. I guess they must consider that torture, the name of the website sounds slightly vegan.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @09:58PM (3 children)
No. You can't. Big tech will take you down one way or the other.
Either by removing hosting, dns, or ddos protection, or payment methods. Cross the wrong powerful people, and you will not stay online very long.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 15 2021, @11:45PM (2 children)
Yes, you can. Dark website inside onion.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Reziac on Saturday January 16 2021, @02:06AM (1 child)
So, ultimate echo chamber??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 16 2021, @08:32AM
Cryptonerd fantasy, duh.
(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.