> must prioritise complaints raised by "trusted flaggers"
That's the real concern here. Speech must be handled very carefully, but now we're elevating some specific people to be 'more equal' than others? Who are these people, and why do they get more say? I can see that opening a can of worms.
I don't live in the EU, but just like that well intentioned but shortsighted cookie law, the rest of us will have to deal with the fallout of that for a long time to come.
This is the trend of the past decade. More and more people are expected to work as replaceable drones without any real career advancement, or a shot at affording retirement, house, or family/kids. But the social pressure resulting from this is cleverly redirected. Instead of being passionate about starting their own business (and competing with the former employer), they are now passionate about policing what others can say or do. Instead of creating a new cool product, they create rules that others must follow in fear of being canceled.
This costs nothing on the corporate expense sheets, but makes the society increasingly more toxic.
Well you might address it also the way you have mentioned but there is a tiny issue. European culture and its laws are highly problematic in regards to todays behaviour and income that large internet companies profit from (spying on users and use their data essentially against them - even for just showing the ads). Today there is just no way to make your own 3rd party OS / search engine / social network (regardless if it would be better) as development is too expensive on the other side you dont have financing from the same murky practices that were just too new when current giants (and even those have monopoly so there is literally no way to finance yourself) came out.
Yes, they were first but now they are strangling everybody.
And this is not only true for EU, same goes for USA. Someone will have to do something about it but with the power of home lobbying I dont believe that the States will do anything meaningful. On the other side, EU needs to protect its market.
The purpose of this is to ensure that organizations like the European equivalents of RIAA and MPAA have basically one click disable buttons (not strictly required, but how most sites will implement it) for content they claim infringes their copyrights, or is otherwise illegal. This would also be used by organizations that track down child porn etc.
As for who is a trusted flagger: "The status of trusted flaggers under this Regulation shall be awarded, upon
application by any entities, by the Digital Services Coordinator of the Member State in which the applicant is established where the applicant has demonstrated to meet
all of the following conditions: (a) it has particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting,
identifying and notifying illegal content; (b) it represents collective interests and is independent from any online platform; (c) it carries out its activities for the purposes of submitting notices in a timely, diligent and objective manner. "
I.E. if you can convince your local government that you should be one, bam you are one, and online platform the EU needs to expedite processing of any notices you make.
On the other end of the spectrum, the companies are required to allow you to appeal takedowns and account suspensions/terminations (for TOS or illegal content reasons, not for non-payment reasons) for a 6 month period. Further, if you appeal a takedown or account suspension and the company rejects your appeal, the law will allow you to take the matter to binding arbitration. If the user wins, the company pays all costs, and must reinstate the content or account. If the user loses, they only pay their portion of arbitration costs. (The company's portion are just part of doing business in the EU).
This makes it very difficult to host any sort of "borderline" content in the E.U. If someone decides they don't like your decision on a contentious matter, and a court agrees with them, you're the one who'll take the fall for making the wrong call.
> That's the real concern here. Speech must be handled very carefully, but now we're elevating some specific people to be 'more equal' than others? Who are these people, and why do they get more say? I can see that opening a can of worms.
Well, who are the people that censor all other kinds of media? As far as I know movies are censored (Motion Picture Production Code, Motion Picture Association film rating system), music is censored (Parental Advisories), TV is censored (TV station licenses), radio (radio station licenses) is censored, news paper are censored (I can't find the exact reference).
The roof hasn't fallen because of existing censorship, or am I missing something?
To be clear, movie and music ratings aren't censorship. Moreover, only broadcast television and radio are censored (perhaps because radio waves are a public platform?). I'm not going to argue that censoring broadcast is ideal or valid, but I'm certainly less sympathetic to the plight of massive media companies than I am to millions of private citizens.
> To be clear, movie and music ratings aren't censorship.
To the extent they are incorporated with schemes that limit access to the rated content imposed by powerful entities outside of the transaction, they are part of schemes of censorship. (Public censorship schemes that incorporate movie ratings, and thus delegate to movie raters the role of public censor, are common.)
> I'm not going to argue that censoring broadcast is ideal or valid, but I'm certainly less sympathetic to the plight of massive media companies than I am to millions of private citizens.
Censorship by a third party equally impacts the rights of the parties on both sides of a potential transaction; broadcast media censorship restricts the freedom of both massive media companies and millions of private citizens.
> To the extent they are incorporated with schemes that limit access to the rated content imposed by powerful entities outside of the transaction, they are part of schemes of censorship. (Public censorship schemes that incorporate movie ratings, and thus delegate to movie raters the role of public censor, are common.)
No doubt they are part of "schemes of censorship" in some literal sense, but if someone publishes a rating and another chooses to use that rating as the basis of censorship, the onus is still squarely on the part of the censor and not the rater.
> Censorship by a third party equally impacts the rights of the parties on both sides of a potential transaction; broadcast media censorship restricts the freedom of both massive media companies and millions of private citizens.
You're conflating several things. Yes, censorship by a third party has similar effects to government censorship, but we treat them differently because the government is a special entity (ultimately because it enjoys a monopoly on violence and force). There are legitimate questions about when a third party becomes so powerful that it can unilaterally affect government (as with social media companies being a vector for the manipulation of elections), but this is the purview of anti-trust as I understand it (and I strongly support anti-trust action against social media corporations for precisely this reason).
The other conflated issues are "freedom to speak" vs "freedom to hear". Yes, restrictions on the content of broadcast media corporations limits the "freedom to hear" of millions of citizens as it does with restrictions on social media; however, restricting social media also infringes on millions' freedoms to speak.
Indeed, when you consider that the volume of communication in a social media network is combinatorial, the impact on regulations is far greater than for restrictions on traditional broadcast media.
> You're conflating several things. Yes, censorship by a third party has similar effects to government censorship, but we treat them differently
My post was discussing whether censorship occurred and whose freedom was affected. While it did mention certain explictly public schemes, it nowhere argued that other schemes should be treated as government censorship, so you are inventing a position here for the sole purpose of claiming it is in error and a conflation of different things.
>> You're conflating several things. Yes, censorship by a third party has similar effects to government censorship, but we treat them differently
> My post was discussing whether censorship occurred and whose freedom was affected. While it did mention certain explictly public schemes, it nowhere argued that other schemes should be treated as government censorship, so you are inventing a position here for the sole purpose of claiming it is in error and a conflation of different things.
You brought up the 'third party vs government' dynamic; I was merely mentioning that it's distinct from the dynamic of 'freedom to speak' vs 'freedom to hear'. I specifically never claimed that you were arguing that we should treat third parties the same as the government. No need to speculate about my motives.
> You brought up the 'third party vs government' dynamic
No, “third-party” contrasts with the parties involved in the transaction (mostly the source, which may exercise self-censorship, which does not restrict the freedom of the participants the way third-party censorship does.)
The government would be an example of a third-party censor, not something distinct from it.
Fair enough, I misunderstood your meaning; thanks for clarifying. The "'freedom to listen' vs 'freedom to speak'" concern still stands (i.e., no, restricting private citizens' speech on social media platforms doesn't have exactly the same effect as limiting the content that broadcast media corps can publish on the airwaves).
Censored for children only. I don’t think anyone over 18 is subject to the censorship. That is disregarding laws specifically targeting pornography, of course.
Imposing a proof burden on someone to view content is a restriction of their freedom even if they meet the requirement and have access to the required proof.
I was distinguishing between "rating films" with "restricting access", but yeah, the content of the films doesn't matter--it's censorship whether the content is LGBT+ or Al Qaeda beheadings. The pertinent question is whether a third party is obligated to show you that content. As it relates to social media companies, my position is that if a company is exercising the right to censor (effectively to curate content) then they must also take responsibility when they curate illegal content, such as child pornography or intellectual property--they don't get to have it both ways.
Similarly, I don't think your local theater's prohibition on minors viewing 'adult' content compares favorably to a large social media company which steers and manipulates so much communication that it can unilaterally sway national elections. The latter is an issue of national sovereignty.
Like I said, I'm not going to die defending censorship of Hollywood or CBS or whomever, but I am much more concerned with the rights of ordinary citizens who only recently got the right to communicate in any sort of broadcast fashion (still nowhere near the power that the media industry enjoys).
The internet was such a big deal because groups of people could finally interact without the mediation and filtering of a large (typically corporate) entity determining what's "fit to print". You don't have to search very hard to find the bounds of acceptable thought from corporate-sponsored media, even pre-internet. I don't think I'm alone in feeling constrained and frustrated with that situation. Sure, it's not a North Korea situation, but it's not great either.
There are some very real problems with unfettered access to communication, and I don't think we've solved them yet. I am very concerned that this law will have a range of unintended negative consequences, and I don't think defending our existing (flawed) structure really proves that it'll all be fine.
Specifically we're talking about moving from a model of centralized media control (eg: media companies and the conglomerates that own them) to one where a select group of people get to manage the filtering of content on the largest platforms. That seems like something that will be almost impossible to manage properly, and ripe for (at a minimum) political manipulation.
Trusted flaggers sounds to me like crazy people who spend all day reporting content because they are obsessed or have absolutely nothing to do. Having a system like this in place would lead to bad outcomes.
No these are organizations that an EU government has granted special status to:
"The status of trusted flaggers under this Regulation shall be awarded, upon application by any entities, by the Digital Services Coordinator of the Member State in which the applicant is established where the applicant has demonstrated to meet all of the following conditions: (a) it has particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting, identifying and notifying illegal content; (b) it represents collective interests and is independent from any online platform; (c) it carries out its activities for the purposes of submitting notices in a timely, diligent and objective manner."
edit: Yeah, NGOs and also MPAA/RIAA style associations will probably be the most common entities.
Who are these people, and why do they get more say?
I assumed their level of "trustworthy" comes from them consistently flagging content or issues of the platform and those reports being valid, as some sort of reputation system, and not some users being selected for more arbitrary reasons.
Vanilla reputation systems don't optimize for "validity"; rather, they optimize for consensus--whatever opinions are popular get hyper-reinforced in tight feedback loops. If you believe that our society is irredeemably racist, then a vanilla reputation system will optimize for racism. Basically, the reputation system can't dictate what is valid--that has to be determined outside of the reputation system. In other words, set a clear, objective standard for "valid" content and use a reputation system that holds moderators accountable to that external definition of "validity".
That's the real concern here. Speech must be handled very carefully, but now we're elevating some specific people to be 'more equal' than others? Who are these people, and why do they get more say? I can see that opening a can of worms.
I don't live in the EU, but just like that well intentioned but shortsighted cookie law, the rest of us will have to deal with the fallout of that for a long time to come.