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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 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.