Apparently the dissemination of illegal content refers to the October 7th videos of the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel that galvanized American support for Israel [0].
I personally don't think it's in people's interest to have this kind of thing hidden from them and I really dislike the EU for attempting to censor this.
Musk is really under a lot of financial pressure and it might be a losing battle to try to fight the EU over this in court. To be honest, I hope he is able to pull out from the EU without cratering the company, but he is now being pulled into lawfare with multiple actors across the globe so Twitter might have no choice but to accept is role as a conduit of censorship for state-level actors.
The previous iteration of Twitter under @jack already learned this lesson. Once you say yes to stuff beyond warrants/criminally illegal stuff it's just an ever increasing set of demands until it's borderline automatic between gov requests->deletions. With low level agencies sending lists of a 1000 tweets to be flagged or accounts with tenuous connections to current bad thing (ie Russia) to be banned etc.
"Apparently" means some guy on Twitter says he seems to remember that those videos were the reason? Would be great to see a real source for the footage of the attacks themselves being the problem.
The press release itself says that the formal proceeding concern "the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel" and the person you refer to as "some guy" is a adjunct professor of law at a few institutions, as well as a legal fellow of the Adam Smith Institute where his research interests have focused on free speech and related technology regulation.
Well, if Thierry Bretton (French business executive, politician, writer and the current Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union) will link to the document that describes the reason for the formal infringement proceedings rather than post a meaningless screenshot of the front page that includes redactions, we can all have a more meaningful debate.
One can think anything about the particular line-drawing about what is and what isn't something X should moderate. By operating in the EU they do agree to the DSA though. And no one is saying that the content in question is or isn't something that twitter has handled incorrectly. All that's happening is that there is an investigation into it. There really isn't much to talk about (yet).
Even though we don't know everything about what is happening in this particular instance, I do think there should be a global conversation on the ability for state-level actors to directly or indirectly pull strings in order to coerce Twitter into censoring information on their behalf.
I think this should be of particular importance to the US which has fudamental rights protecting freedom of expression.
I'm very worried about co-ordinated lawfare against Musk-operated companies being used as a tool to force his compliance with systems that exist to get around laws against the US government's direct involvement in censorship. I'm also worried about the EU's lurch towards Chinese-style censorship of social media. And, I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.
I’m fairly concerned about how broadly some are interpreting “operating in the EU”.
The furthest this has gone that I’m aware of is the Dutch, alongside other EU authorities, has issued a fine to an American website, alleging that they subject themselves to EU jurisdiction by merely hosting information about EU citizens. This seems to me to be too far.
Actually, not really. His Tesla and SpaceX assets completely overshadow X.
Its value could shrink to zero, and he’d still be one of the wealthiest folks on the planet.
I’m personally grateful that he’s standing on principle regarding free speech! So much that we get from “official” channels turns out to be fiction, or propaganda.
I actually think it's more likely that this is to prevent people from posting videos of ongoing Israeli war crimes and the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and also to prevent people from posting anything in support of Palestine or Hamas.
It's become apparent that the Israeli political/war/propaganda machine has an incredible amount of influence - far beyond anything I'd personally imagined could be possible. They've been able to effectively commandeer most of the West's "traditional" mass media, but social media is a huge problem for their narrative, as it allows people to see what is really happening, often in real-time.
I clearly see now the benefit to humanity or a system like Twitter, but it really worries me that Twitter/X is in the hands of a single billionaire, especially one with some very controversial views. I'm not sure what the solution is, but we (humanity) really need something free from the influence of government (foreign or domestic) and other bad actors.
>It's become apparent that the Israeli political/war/propaganda machine has an incredible amount of influence - far beyond anything I'd personally imagined could be possible. They've been able to effectively commandeer most of the West's "traditional" mass media
Why make up blatant lies like this when mainstream media has been very critical of Israel for the past few weeks? The only exception is Fox News.
Even a casual glance of the major Western media sites in the U.S. would confirm that Israeli doesn't appear to wield any influence over the Western media.
Right now, the top story on the Israel-Gaza conflict on NBC, WaPo, NYT, and LAT is the IDF accidentally killing 3 hostages. Stories from the last week include multiple reports about potential Geneva Code violations. And in the weeks before the ceasefire, there was a constant drumbeat of opinion pieces calling for a ceasefire.
I think it's more that Birdwatch/Community Notes, which gets a lot of feature-love from Valley types, is already being weaponized to the point of failure. In the absence of any other moderation, this is leading Twitter into a dark descent of increasingly moderationless content.
> How Twitter's Community Notes Accelerates Denialism About Hamas Atrocities Against Israelis
> The Community Notes feature was supposed to shut down conspiracy theories on X, formerly Twitter. Instead Elon Musk's preference for crowdsourced moderation is allowing malicious users to weaponize hatred, lies and disinformation about the October 7 Hamas attack
Community Notes is just a subset of rank-based comment systems (e.g. Reddit and HN), and these are known to fail over time due to the commodification of votes. Even now you can go on certain forums and purchase a Community Note for a post for some hundreds of USD. It's not a substitute for moderation and everyone knows that if Hackernews defaulted to it instead of relying on dang that HN would fall apart.
EU is a big org. There are good and bad players. Twitter is a cesspool of bad players. The whole point of this investigation is to flush out bad players from many places. Propagandists, partisans and manipulators.
The "propagandists, partisans and manipulators" that label themselves "journalists" and "media companies" want to dictate what posts should be allowed on Twitter.
They are no better than the Russian and Chinese counterparts after all. You cannot deviate from the agenda without getting censored.
The number of anti-EU comments here surprises me, frankly. My understanding, as an Australian, is the EU is just enforcing rules regarding transparency and moderation reporting - they’re not setting some speech-controlling agenda. Seems reasonable to me?
Actually i'm pro-EU but what we have in the past 15 years is brussels acting like a corporate, with careerist wannabes doing anything that sounds popular in order to climb up the corporate ladder. There is 0 politics in brussels these days, all lobbying. I think it's my duty to be critical of that
Yeah but be careful what you wish for. Constructive criticism is good, shitting on the EU and parroting "EU is a corrupt dictatorship!!" propaganda will make foreign-backed populists rise. Who will benefit from the downfall of th EU? Why are so many people seemingly happy about it?
They do have a speech-controlling agenda (I am not commenting on whether this is positive or negative here) in that this also relates to "illegal content", which can be something factual but still illegal to publish. For instance videos of the 7th October attacks made by Hamas are likely illegal:
""Content circulating online that can be associated to Hamas qualifies as terrorist content, is illegal, and needs to be removed under both the Digital Services Act and Terrorist Content Online Regulation," a Commission spokesperson said." [1]
Precedent in France is that this is understood to apply even if the content is published to denounce those facts.
> The DSA imposes new rules on content moderation, user privacy and transparency. Any firm found in breach faces a fine worth up to 6% of its global turnover.
The EU has been rent seeking on FAANG and US tech for a decade. They want control and money. Thanks for USB-C but they can keep their fucking cookie banners. This will create huge problems for the whole world when an arbitrary agency can "impose rules on content moderation" and "privacy[1]" and levy a huge fine. The US tech companies should form a bloc and force them to be reasonable
Yes, and it creates huge problems for the whole world when an arbitrary multi-billion dollar organisation can "impose rules on content moderation" and "privacy" with zero accountability while skirting local laws. Non-american countries should form a bloc and force them to be reasonable.
I think the negative attitude towards the EU on Hacker News is the product of a couple things:
- The EU has drastically scaled up regulatory requirements for tech businesses, starting with GDPR, running through the DSA, and probably eventually continuing through the AI Act and the proposed cybersecurity law. Because this is a community mostly centered around people who start or work at or invest in tech businesses, there’s a lot of frustration that the new regulations are making life harder.
- In this case, part of what the EU alleges is that Twitter is not doing enough to actively combat disinformation. People are concerned that what the EU wants in terms of combatting disinformation IS a speech-controlling agenda.
I’m not sure either argument is 100% correct, but I can understand why many are arguing that the EU regulations are going too far, both in terms of requiring too much work for too little gain, and in terms of jeopardizing Internet independence.
I think it's also because the people on hacker news in general are not stupid and they can see through the bullshit to the real agendas that are being passed.
Let's have a test:
What's wrong with the following:
In 2020, the Netherlands passed a new law that stated that anyone that works in a job with an obligation to secrecy cannot be prosecuted for perjury for lawing in court under oath.
The example given by the government was, "Consider a lawyer and his client".
Forget for a moment that in this trivial example a lawyer could simply refuse to answer?
Figure it out yet?
Here's a hint, everyone in government has an obligation to secrecy, including prosecutors.
See the problem here? I'm sure that lots of hacker news people would.
You're also missing the part where local politics will always blame EU for unpopular legislation (even one they supported themselves in euparl) and take credit for all positive EU directives (even if they fought against them).
With less informed, this creates a pretty big "EU bogeyman" trend.
As far as I know there are no common laws surrounding that. There is a legal framework/agreement requiring states to have some kind of hate speech laws though, but they'll vary wildly. E.g. in Germany you can't be openly Nazi. In Denmark you can't burn a Quran etc. So there is no agreement of WHAT constitutes hate speech across the EU.
Really not a fan of the EU as a speech arbiter, especially considering that they are one of the biggest spenders of political ads on facebook in most european countries: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report/
The EU has separation of powers. I don’t see the European Commission (who opened the present proceedings) listed as an advertiser under your link. And ultimately it is the judicial branch who will decide.
If for example you change the country to Spain you can see both the european commission and european parliament among the top spenders: https://i.imgur.com/TjzlrV5.png
Also i don't understand what you mean by 'judicial power'. The EU is not a state, it doesn't have judicial power and the legislative is shared between EC and EP
Does anyone have more information about what the infringements are? It would be very obviously hypocritical for the EU to be publicly alleging "breach of transparency obligations", if they arn't willing to be transparent about the allegations.
I'm still not seeing any reference to specific violations by X, just some surrounding context and listing of allegations.
The EU has broad discretion to start formal inventigations, but specifically CHOSE to begin litigation against X for specific reasons. I would expect a transparent governing body to provide a litany of information to the public about why they are choosing to take that action. If there is a lack of said information, that would lead one to suspect that information is being purposely concealed and/or that it is a targeted partisan political action.
The process of selecting the current leader was done in secret.
Even the single-option EU Parliament ballot with her name on it, was a secret ballot.
She replaced the previous leader who is on the record as saying, "Monetary policy is a serious issue. We should discuss this in secret, in the Eurogroup [...] I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious [...] I am for secret, dark debates."
Then she negotiated massive vaccine purchases from Pfizer that were far too large, and the deal was secret. People wanted to know what sort of negotiation process led to buying hundreds of millions of shots that then had to be destroyed because nobody wanted them, and it turned out she negotiated it via SMS and those messages were ... yep, secret. (in fact, destroyed). This came as no surprise because at the time she got the job she was under investigation in Germany for corruption, but the investigation stalled after phones that were confiscated turned out to have had all their data deleted before being handed over.
The EU insists that almost every website spam you with reams of boilerplate in the name of transparency, but systematically refuses transparency for itself.
Was the ~"EU is heading towards civil war" post made by the owner of X, community noted?
I realize that would be tough to fact check, but I've lived in the EU for the last 6 years and "civil war" is a take from another universe, and really felt like projection.
Was he suggesting that Orban & Co's politics is going to invade the rest of the EU, with violence?
Can someone explain to me what one of the most influential people on the planet meant by that?
I respect so much of what Musk has accomplished but that left me at a loss for words.
And, sadly, I know many people that think the same. Maybe not a civil war per se but we're heading towards many internal conflicts. And the more we wait to solve things, the worse it'll be.
Can you explain to me what regulatory framework you would use to address such posts? Are you willing to trust some European bureaucrat to decide how likely civil war might be? Doesn’t that strike you as profoundly dangerous?
Readit News
I personally don't think it's in people's interest to have this kind of thing hidden from them and I really dislike the EU for attempting to censor this.
Musk is really under a lot of financial pressure and it might be a losing battle to try to fight the EU over this in court. To be honest, I hope he is able to pull out from the EU without cratering the company, but he is now being pulled into lawfare with multiple actors across the globe so Twitter might have no choice but to accept is role as a conduit of censorship for state-level actors.
If everyone should have free speach, why blocking nut jobs like Trump and info wars guy?
As someone from non usa, all I see is hypocrisy coming America. They are fine with misinformation in other countries but not in theirs
https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1736701607553692020
I think this should be of particular importance to the US which has fudamental rights protecting freedom of expression.
I'm very worried about co-ordinated lawfare against Musk-operated companies being used as a tool to force his compliance with systems that exist to get around laws against the US government's direct involvement in censorship. I'm also worried about the EU's lurch towards Chinese-style censorship of social media. And, I think we should be able to talk about it now while we still can.
The furthest this has gone that I’m aware of is the Dutch, alongside other EU authorities, has issued a fine to an American website, alleging that they subject themselves to EU jurisdiction by merely hosting information about EU citizens. This seems to me to be too far.
https://edpb.europa.eu/news/national-news/2021/dutch-dpa-imp...
For instance, I've found this in France in 2021 (though it looks like it relates to tweets from 2015) and the law might be even stricter now:
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20210210-french-far-right...
Actually, not really. His Tesla and SpaceX assets completely overshadow X.
Its value could shrink to zero, and he’d still be one of the wealthiest folks on the planet.
I’m personally grateful that he’s standing on principle regarding free speech! So much that we get from “official” channels turns out to be fiction, or propaganda.
It's become apparent that the Israeli political/war/propaganda machine has an incredible amount of influence - far beyond anything I'd personally imagined could be possible. They've been able to effectively commandeer most of the West's "traditional" mass media, but social media is a huge problem for their narrative, as it allows people to see what is really happening, often in real-time.
I clearly see now the benefit to humanity or a system like Twitter, but it really worries me that Twitter/X is in the hands of a single billionaire, especially one with some very controversial views. I'm not sure what the solution is, but we (humanity) really need something free from the influence of government (foreign or domestic) and other bad actors.
Why make up blatant lies like this when mainstream media has been very critical of Israel for the past few weeks? The only exception is Fox News.
That said, I agree that the EU would try to censor it. I am not in favor of giving them the opportunity. Making false statements is not a crime.
Right now, the top story on the Israel-Gaza conflict on NBC, WaPo, NYT, and LAT is the IDF accidentally killing 3 hostages. Stories from the last week include multiple reports about potential Geneva Code violations. And in the weeks before the ceasefire, there was a constant drumbeat of opinion pieces calling for a ceasefire.
Yeah, such influence they have... /s
I find it amusing this has become common "knowledge" now, and everyone thinks it will shape his actions.
With Tesla and SpaceX printing money, why does everyone assume he cares about a few billion here or there? it's like you or I losing a few hundred.
Are they printing money?
It’s a private company, so he can do what he likes - gutting your own trust and safety team is not a consequence free move.
> How Twitter's Community Notes Accelerates Denialism About Hamas Atrocities Against Israelis
> The Community Notes feature was supposed to shut down conspiracy theories on X, formerly Twitter. Instead Elon Musk's preference for crowdsourced moderation is allowing malicious users to weaponize hatred, lies and disinformation about the October 7 Hamas attack
https://archive.is/j1Diy
Community Notes is just a subset of rank-based comment systems (e.g. Reddit and HN), and these are known to fail over time due to the commodification of votes. Even now you can go on certain forums and purchase a Community Note for a post for some hundreds of USD. It's not a substitute for moderation and everyone knows that if Hackernews defaulted to it instead of relying on dang that HN would fall apart.
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https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-files-complaint-against-eu-commissio... ("noyb files complaint against EU Commission over targeted chat control ad campaign")
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They are no better than the Russian and Chinese counterparts after all. You cannot deviate from the agenda without getting censored.
This is why the state determining the truth is so dangerous.
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""Content circulating online that can be associated to Hamas qualifies as terrorist content, is illegal, and needs to be removed under both the Digital Services Act and Terrorist Content Online Regulation," a Commission spokesperson said." [1]
Precedent in France is that this is understood to apply even if the content is published to denounce those facts.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67073956
The EU has been rent seeking on FAANG and US tech for a decade. They want control and money. Thanks for USB-C but they can keep their fucking cookie banners. This will create huge problems for the whole world when an arbitrary agency can "impose rules on content moderation" and "privacy[1]" and levy a huge fine. The US tech companies should form a bloc and force them to be reasonable
[1] Which I'm sure mean anti-privacy.
It doesn't sound like EU is really doing bad here.
- The EU has drastically scaled up regulatory requirements for tech businesses, starting with GDPR, running through the DSA, and probably eventually continuing through the AI Act and the proposed cybersecurity law. Because this is a community mostly centered around people who start or work at or invest in tech businesses, there’s a lot of frustration that the new regulations are making life harder.
- In this case, part of what the EU alleges is that Twitter is not doing enough to actively combat disinformation. People are concerned that what the EU wants in terms of combatting disinformation IS a speech-controlling agenda.
I’m not sure either argument is 100% correct, but I can understand why many are arguing that the EU regulations are going too far, both in terms of requiring too much work for too little gain, and in terms of jeopardizing Internet independence.
Let's have a test:
What's wrong with the following:
In 2020, the Netherlands passed a new law that stated that anyone that works in a job with an obligation to secrecy cannot be prosecuted for perjury for lawing in court under oath.
The example given by the government was, "Consider a lawyer and his client".
Forget for a moment that in this trivial example a lawyer could simply refuse to answer?
Figure it out yet?
Here's a hint, everyone in government has an obligation to secrecy, including prosecutors.
See the problem here? I'm sure that lots of hacker news people would.
With less informed, this creates a pretty big "EU bogeyman" trend.
The framework: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM...
It's extremely vague. It's more an understanding that "hate speech is bad so bad you should all draw a line... somewhere".
unchecked power is dangerous
Also i don't understand what you mean by 'judicial power'. The EU is not a state, it doesn't have judicial power and the legislative is shared between EC and EP
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Note that they are now starting a formal investigation, whose purpose is to determine whether there are indeed infringements or not.
The EU has broad discretion to start formal inventigations, but specifically CHOSE to begin litigation against X for specific reasons. I would expect a transparent governing body to provide a litany of information to the public about why they are choosing to take that action. If there is a lack of said information, that would lead one to suspect that information is being purposely concealed and/or that it is a targeted partisan political action.
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https://euobserver.com/eu-political/136630
The process of selecting the current leader was done in secret.
Even the single-option EU Parliament ballot with her name on it, was a secret ballot.
She replaced the previous leader who is on the record as saying, "Monetary policy is a serious issue. We should discuss this in secret, in the Eurogroup [...] I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious [...] I am for secret, dark debates."
Then she negotiated massive vaccine purchases from Pfizer that were far too large, and the deal was secret. People wanted to know what sort of negotiation process led to buying hundreds of millions of shots that then had to be destroyed because nobody wanted them, and it turned out she negotiated it via SMS and those messages were ... yep, secret. (in fact, destroyed). This came as no surprise because at the time she got the job she was under investigation in Germany for corruption, but the investigation stalled after phones that were confiscated turned out to have had all their data deleted before being handed over.
The EU insists that almost every website spam you with reams of boilerplate in the name of transparency, but systematically refuses transparency for itself.
I realize that would be tough to fact check, but I've lived in the EU for the last 6 years and "civil war" is a take from another universe, and really felt like projection.
Was he suggesting that Orban & Co's politics is going to invade the rest of the EU, with violence?
Can someone explain to me what one of the most influential people on the planet meant by that?
I respect so much of what Musk has accomplished but that left me at a loss for words.
And, sadly, I know many people that think the same. Maybe not a civil war per se but we're heading towards many internal conflicts. And the more we wait to solve things, the worse it'll be.
Oh the irony.
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