> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said.
Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"
As much as we would like otherwise, law is a subjective tool. We implement objectivity as much as is feasible, e.g. using careful wording and precedent, but ultimately it would be a fool's errand to attempt to make it 100% objective/deterministic.
All this to say, we tend to oversimplify in our criticisms when more objectivity would have given us a result we agree with.
We tend to agree that we want laws to stop businesses from "tricking people". The specifics vary widely, but the goal itself is unavoidably subjective, so there will always be some subjectivity in its application.
There is no credible accusation that X itself is tricking people here, so your comment is a non sequitur. If particular accounts are posting fraudulent information, then go after those through regular legal channels. The platform is not the problem here.
In the United States we have a long, foundational legal tradition in support of Free Speech and free enterprise for this very reason.
The bar is set very high precisely because we know where things go when it's not.
This specific case wouldn't clear a low bar, much less a high one. I, too, have been turned off by Musk's behavior over the last year, but the idea that this case has nothing to do with that is risible.
There's at least a little bit of strawman-ing going on here.
The regulators are not insisting that blue checkmarks mean what they've always meant. Secondly xitter hasn't been transparent about changes to blue checkmarks. There was a long period of time when blue checkmarks were given or even forced upon credible sources at Elon's whim while he sold them to hucksters and frauds. Even if blue checkmarks had been that debased throughout their existence, there's still plenty of basis for regulators to find that they are deceptive.
The worst part isn't that a company makes up a designation and is forced to stick with it by regulators. A designation could have been designed from the beginning specifically to head off regulators.
The worst part is that it is simply a lie. Blue checkmark never meant "trustworthy source of information," and most people who had blue checkmarks were not trustworthy sources of information. Thierry Breton is spreading misinformation here, but that would not have ever been grounds to remove his checkmark.
Blue checkmarks were an arbitrary piece of gamified tat given by twitter when it felt like it, and now it's a paid piece of gamified tat that can be revoked whenever Musk feels like it.
At best checkmarks were "verified" accounts. That meant that most likely party with access to account had identifiable identity connected to it. Say celebrity or real business. For any given value of celebrity also big enough "influencer" counting.
Now would celebrities, influencer or company marketing accounts always be trustworthy sources? For more cynical almost never...
Nope, its just that the current Eu establishment doesnt like how its narrative about the Gaza genocide or the Ukraine War was challenged by including even its own press, so they want control and censorship. The countries that are pushing for this are persecuting people for protesting the Ukraine war or the Gaza genocide. Also there's the thing with the current Eu commission president's secret whatsapp chat with Pfizer lobbyists, which has become a major issue that reached the top European court recently.
And the EU is right. Elons blue check boosting logic absolutely violated those laws. Other companies played by the rules and made their systems DSA compliant. Elon did not, now he needs to pay.
> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said
I thought the blue check mark always indicated that account name on Twitter matched the person behind the account. That’s it. They eventually expanded that to include non-famous people.
Kyrie Irving (an NBA player known for conspiracies like flat earthism) had a blue check - no one would ever mistake him for a trustworthy source of information.
If English isn't your native language, that's okay - these are translated into every European language and you can select a translation here.
Article 25, clause 1:
> Providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates the recipients of their service or in a way that otherwise materially distorts or impairs the ability of the recipients of their service to make free and informed decisions.
These EU regulations tend to specify policies, not mechanisms to achieve them. Mechanisms to enforce the policy, however, are specified.
They are written like that precisely so you won't try to weasel your way around a requirement. If they had said "verified badges may not be sold" then you would try to say "this isn't a verified badge but a they-paid-us badge." By wording it vaguely, it cannot be weaseled.
And indeed, it is a they-paid-us badge... but it's designed to look identical to the verified badge, on purpose, because Elon knew verified badges were something people wanted, and people wanted them because they were a status symbol, and they were a status symbol because they indicated your account was in some sense more trustworthy than average. And Elon knew that.
I don't know whether people still see the badges that way today. Probably not, because all the sane people deleted their accounts and don't care. But it was the case, when the badges were introduced, that they were designed to trick people who didn't know they were now pay badges. You might think everyone knew that, but that's just because everyone in your bubble knew that because they're very online people. Would your grandmother know it?
The DSA ruling was wrong. The blue checkmark never indicated trustworthy sources of information. Even under previous Twitter management, verified accounts routinely posted misinformation and disinformation. Thierry Breton is either an idiot or lying to push a political narrative.
The trustworthy information that blue check marks indicated was not that the /contents of the message/ were objectively trustworthy, but that /a specific person was willing to be associated with the contents of the message/. That’s what was lost.
> Unlike Google, Meta, Apple and Amazon, which are publicly traded, X is owned solely by Mr. Musk. EU regulators are considering using a piece of the law that lets them calculate a fine based on revenue that also includes other companies Mr. Musk privately controls, like his rocket maker, SpaceX. That increases the potential penalty to well over $1 billion, one person said.
Is the NYT wrong here or is the EU? It's private but it's not "solely owned" by a longshot. Either way, this is some pretty amazing Calvinball even by EC standards.
Neither NYT nor the EU is wrong. Elon's companies are, to him, fungible, with employees able to be used in any company, like when Elon borrowed engineers employed at Tesla and SpaceX to work on Twitter when he bought it. These are all separate companies on paper, but Elon treats the workers as interchangeable. He acts as if they are all owned by him, so the EU is treating them as he treats them.
Most countries' company law has a clause that says if you violate company boundaries like this, they're effectively one company. Otherwise you could use this sort of thing to limit your liability well in excess of intended (the primary purpose of company law is to establish carve-outs in which you can perform business with limited liability).
While others certainly have a financial interest in it, it is not publicly traded and Musk solely controls it. For instance, he just unilaterally sold it to another of his privately held companies, xAI, for a valuation he made up.
Musk's privately held companies, and to a large degree Tesla as well, are all things he treats as effectively one big company that he controls; he'll take employees from one to another at will, he sells them to each other or spins them out at will in all stock transactions, etc.
The EU regulations allow seeing through such sham company boundaries that are all controlled by a single entity, and treating them as a single company.
I guess at some point the EU has to do something if they want companies to keep implementing these regulations under the calculus of “cost of implementation vs. cost of fines that arise from non-compliance”.
I would love to believe that some companies would follow these regulations even without severe threat, because they’re the right thing to do for users, but I know in a lot of cases it can take significant time, effort, and money to keep up with every regulation coming out of the EU
Once upon a time these companies valued their user base, afraid they would leave and find another way to use their time. I guess they’ve got the data that their users are all addicted and will never do that. At least until they push too hard.
Indeed. I'm European and I also see the EU's "banning of disinformation" as a form of censorship in gift wrapping. What about the government disinformation during covid? Did they punish anyone for that?
Vague and ambiguous laws like these against disinformation enable selective enforcement for the governments to make sure their PoVs go though the media and everything they deem inappropriate or a threat to their authority gets shut down.
Those in power in Brussels are afraid of communication channels they can't control as people become more and more dissatisfied and irate with their leaders, policies and QoL reductions, so they push laws like these plus the ones trying to backdoor encrypted communications in order to gain control over the narrative, monitor and crush any potential uprisings before they even occur.
EU isn't the only entity with regulations and interests. Which creates a lot of conflicts. Like free speech is limited in EU and less so in USA. Should company in USA implement EU restrictions on USA users? What if both EU and USA users are in the same chat. EU is going to go after Mask's other companies. In other words EU plays dirty as usual, just like with Russian's money. Same story with Telegram. At some point it will backfire.
That's also been the issue for decades with the financial industry: the fines and probability of getting caught are far less (and already 'priced' in) vs the big profits.
And if the shit really hits the fan, they know that the government is going to pay to rescue them with taxpayer money (just one example: financial crisis of 2008).
This is the first sentence in it, which links to the New York Times article the submission was changed to:
> European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against X, including a fine that could exceed $1 billion, according to a New York Times report yesterday.
There is another comment that answers "why" I assume dang doesn't have the time to answer all of these individually. But tl;dr it's in the guidelines for posting on the site why this happened.
if i had to guess: NYT was the original source of the news and Ars is just reporting on NYT reporting. Or alternatively, Ars is frequently really slanted and disingenuous to the point of dishonesty fairly often
Good, it is a start. And much better would be for those EU politicians, journalists and other people to move to Mastodon, Pixelfed, and similar independent platforms. That would make a much better example.
I can't understand why government offices for many countries are still on Twitter. At least Germany has their own mastodon service, but my home country Finland still uses Twitter.
I understand why everyone is one Twitter - because people and important people/orgs are there. What I don't understand is, why not also publish the posts on a Mastodon account. You don't have to engage there, but at least don't force people to use Twitter.
I don't have a problem with public bodies being on Twitter, but they should definitely be on somewhere else too. They need to be where the people are, and people are going other places.
No one is truly independent when it comes to politics. Everyone belongs to a political tribe, and if you don't, you are against whatever tribe you are currently engaging with.
I am not sure how that is a reaction to the grandparent, but we also don't fall into the same us-versus-them trap that divides the US. I think most people in the EU agree on several basic principles regardless of their political preferences:
- If you get sick, costs should be covered by universal health insurance.
- If you lose your job, there should be a safety net.
- When you retire, there should be a decent pension.
- Everybody should have access to good education.
- We don't want war.
- We don't want to be powerless against megacorps.
In other words, there is much more that is binding us than what is dividing us (in my country, pretty much every party from extreme left to populist right agrees on these things). For those things that we don't agree on, we should find compromises.
I left Twitter 10 years ago because I believe it is toxic.
Now to everyone applauding those kind of things with a "the enemies of my enemies are my friends" logic:
I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years HN will be inaccessible from the EU because it promotes non compliant and dangerous software. If you don't believe me, read the EU Cyber resilience act. It is slowly paving the way to this.
> I left Twitter 10 years ago because I believe it is toxic.
So everyone should leave, or the people with the mandate to protect EU should solve the issue with the platform in place of putting the responsibility in the users?
It's amazing more people don't understand this. In a free society people have the right to say things that are stupid, wrong, toxic and just plain false. If you live in a society where the government assumes the power to control what you are allowed to say you no longer live in a free society, period. This holds true whether you're talking about the EU's assault on free speech or the Trump administration's assault on free speech when it comes to criticizing Israel. It's amazing so many are willing (and eager!) to surrender their freedoms to what they perceive as benevolent overlords with their best interest at heart. What they fail to understand is that once you have lost the ability to speak freely, you inevitably lose all of the other freedoms that go along with it. Your benevolent overlords now possess the power to arbitrarily classify anything they don't like (especially that which threatens their power) as "misinformation" or "dangerous speech" or whatever other euphemism they invent to silence you. Just because you may today happen to agree with the people who decide what you are allowed to say doesn't mean you will agree with them tomorrow. And tomorrow you won't be able to object, because your ability to speak freely will be gone.
I think you are confusing the right to say things with a right to not be subjected to consequences for what you say.
I think in US as in EU if you say something that is breaking a law you have to pay the consequence. The difference may be in EU having more laws and US less that are concerned with consequences.
Readit News
Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"
All this to say, we tend to oversimplify in our criticisms when more objectivity would have given us a result we agree with.
We tend to agree that we want laws to stop businesses from "tricking people". The specifics vary widely, but the goal itself is unavoidably subjective, so there will always be some subjectivity in its application.
The bar is set very high precisely because we know where things go when it's not.
This specific case wouldn't clear a low bar, much less a high one. I, too, have been turned off by Musk's behavior over the last year, but the idea that this case has nothing to do with that is risible.
The regulators are not insisting that blue checkmarks mean what they've always meant. Secondly xitter hasn't been transparent about changes to blue checkmarks. There was a long period of time when blue checkmarks were given or even forced upon credible sources at Elon's whim while he sold them to hucksters and frauds. Even if blue checkmarks had been that debased throughout their existence, there's still plenty of basis for regulators to find that they are deceptive.
And in any case, the fine does not seem to be about the blue checkmarks at all.
Deleted Comment
The worst part is that it is simply a lie. Blue checkmark never meant "trustworthy source of information," and most people who had blue checkmarks were not trustworthy sources of information. Thierry Breton is spreading misinformation here, but that would not have ever been grounds to remove his checkmark.
Blue checkmarks were an arbitrary piece of gamified tat given by twitter when it felt like it, and now it's a paid piece of gamified tat that can be revoked whenever Musk feels like it.
Now would celebrities, influencer or company marketing accounts always be trustworthy sources? For more cynical almost never...
Dead Comment
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/eu-says-elon-mus...
And the EU is right. Elons blue check boosting logic absolutely violated those laws. Other companies played by the rules and made their systems DSA compliant. Elon did not, now he needs to pay.
> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said
I thought the blue check mark always indicated that account name on Twitter matched the person behind the account. That’s it. They eventually expanded that to include non-famous people.
Kyrie Irving (an NBA player known for conspiracies like flat earthism) had a blue check - no one would ever mistake him for a trustworthy source of information.
1. Are companies permitted to charge for badges under DSA?
2. Is there an example of another social media that EU officials have identified as being compliant with DSA?
If English isn't your native language, that's okay - these are translated into every European language and you can select a translation here.
Article 25, clause 1:
> Providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates the recipients of their service or in a way that otherwise materially distorts or impairs the ability of the recipients of their service to make free and informed decisions.
These EU regulations tend to specify policies, not mechanisms to achieve them. Mechanisms to enforce the policy, however, are specified.
They are written like that precisely so you won't try to weasel your way around a requirement. If they had said "verified badges may not be sold" then you would try to say "this isn't a verified badge but a they-paid-us badge." By wording it vaguely, it cannot be weaseled.
And indeed, it is a they-paid-us badge... but it's designed to look identical to the verified badge, on purpose, because Elon knew verified badges were something people wanted, and people wanted them because they were a status symbol, and they were a status symbol because they indicated your account was in some sense more trustworthy than average. And Elon knew that.
I don't know whether people still see the badges that way today. Probably not, because all the sane people deleted their accounts and don't care. But it was the case, when the badges were introduced, that they were designed to trick people who didn't know they were now pay badges. You might think everyone knew that, but that's just because everyone in your bubble knew that because they're very online people. Would your grandmother know it?
But then again this has always been true.
Dead Comment
Is the NYT wrong here or is the EU? It's private but it's not "solely owned" by a longshot. Either way, this is some pretty amazing Calvinball even by EC standards.
Musk's privately held companies, and to a large degree Tesla as well, are all things he treats as effectively one big company that he controls; he'll take employees from one to another at will, he sells them to each other or spins them out at will in all stock transactions, etc.
The EU regulations allow seeing through such sham company boundaries that are all controlled by a single entity, and treating them as a single company.
You’re right. Controlled would be correct, as it invokes the legal concept of common control. (No idea if it’s a thing in the EU.)
Call it by its name. It’s lawfare.
The EU is trying to coerce X to limit freedom of speech for everyone worldwide, including Americans.
Talk about a nice NATO ally eh, trying to lawfare your constitutionally granted freedoms away?
I would love to believe that some companies would follow these regulations even without severe threat, because they’re the right thing to do for users, but I know in a lot of cases it can take significant time, effort, and money to keep up with every regulation coming out of the EU
They care about maximizing profits from you.
If you're hoping companies are going to "do the right thing for you" on their own, you're probably going to be disappointed.
Dead Comment
Vague and ambiguous laws like these against disinformation enable selective enforcement for the governments to make sure their PoVs go though the media and everything they deem inappropriate or a threat to their authority gets shut down.
Those in power in Brussels are afraid of communication channels they can't control as people become more and more dissatisfied and irate with their leaders, policies and QoL reductions, so they push laws like these plus the ones trying to backdoor encrypted communications in order to gain control over the narrative, monitor and crush any potential uprisings before they even occur.
And if the shit really hits the fan, they know that the government is going to pay to rescue them with taxpayer money (just one example: financial crisis of 2008).
This is the first sentence in it, which links to the New York Times article the submission was changed to:
> European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against X, including a fine that could exceed $1 billion, according to a New York Times report yesterday.
These are the Hacker News guidelines (you’ve been on here for 18 years, perhaps time to give them a read): https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.
This isn’t creepy, this is in line with the rules.
- If you get sick, costs should be covered by universal health insurance.
- If you lose your job, there should be a safety net.
- When you retire, there should be a decent pension.
- Everybody should have access to good education.
- We don't want war.
- We don't want to be powerless against megacorps.
In other words, there is much more that is binding us than what is dividing us (in my country, pretty much every party from extreme left to populist right agrees on these things). For those things that we don't agree on, we should find compromises.
Now to everyone applauding those kind of things with a "the enemies of my enemies are my friends" logic:
I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years HN will be inaccessible from the EU because it promotes non compliant and dangerous software. If you don't believe me, read the EU Cyber resilience act. It is slowly paving the way to this.
HN is already blocked in China.
So everyone should leave, or the people with the mandate to protect EU should solve the issue with the platform in place of putting the responsibility in the users?
I think in US as in EU if you say something that is breaking a law you have to pay the consequence. The difference may be in EU having more laws and US less that are concerned with consequences.