I think that premise is wrong - there are many interest groups, and by luck/lobbying/reaching critical mass/... they manage to put one of their interests into a law.
But there is no solution. Any censorship is always subjective.
Also trusted flaggers bans cannot be disputed easily. Meta rather just takes whatever trusted flaggers have flagged, real or not, and it is not their problem. It is a problem between the EU citizen and anonymous trusted flagged with no accountability.
The next step is of course corrupted trusted flaggers who can take down business pages, whatever, for a payment.
I would be interested to see how many EU government jobs the US tech fines are supporting. Maybe Meta or Google is indirectly the largest employer in Brussels?
Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? The EU budget is hundreds of billions of Euros. Even the largest fines so far would be a drop in the bucket compared to that. But more importantly it's the individual member states that invoke those fines (like Ireland with the €1.2B GDPR fine on Meta) not the EU itself.
This is just an uninformed EU rant.
Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?
If no, then where do you draw the line? Why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to decide instead?
Whether it is desirable censorship or not is generally a separate issue from whether or not it is censorship, unless, for example, you have previously adopted a rule that the particular actor committing the censorship shall not engage in censorship at all, in which case they are, of course, inherently the same question. (Where this gets hairy is when one likes to pretend that one has such a rule for a particular actor, but actually really would prefer that actor to censor certain things, which sometimes occurs with modern liberal democratic regimes, and especially frequently occurs with a particular North American one which has what superficially looks like a very strong restriction in that area in its Constitution.)
Yeah, that's called censorship. It's exactly the same thing everyone you accuse of censorship does. There is exactly zero difference beyond your support of the views/people being censored (and sometimes not even that).
>Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?
Yes. Yes.
>If no, then where do you draw the line? Why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to decide instead?
Well in my country that line has been drawn. It's just recurring and persistently ignored by the state, the justice system, and private entities.
When a constitution says explicitly "no type or form of censorship is permitted", that's pretty clear what it means. You ignoring it doesn't make that line less clear.
@JudiciaryGOP has been investigating European censorship since the EU tried to silence President Trump last August. In February, we subpoenaed tech companies for their communications with foreign censors in Europe and around the world. Today, we’re releasing a report with preliminary findings about the EU’s censorship regime. The EU’s censorship law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), requires platforms to censor so-called “misinformation” and “hate speech,” even when the content “is not illegal.” New documents obtained by the Committee show that European regulators distort these terms to require censorship of legitimate political discourse that is neither harmful nor illegal. In May, the EU hosted a DSA-focused “workshop” where platforms were asked to consider hypothetical “scenarios” involving hate speech online. Unlike other EU “workshops” with tech, the public was NOT allowed to watch this one. And the EU told the platforms to NOT share the “scenarios” with the public. What were they trying to hide? Turns out, the EU wanted to hide what it defines as “illegal hate speech” that must be censored: tweeting ordinary political rhetoric like “we need to take back our country.”
https://x.com/jim_jordan/status/1948730617803296910
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
The only question is "who gets to draw it"?
Why should it be foreign oligarchs and not our own democratic representatives?
To do so, ironically, constitutes "taking back our country" from autocrats abroad.
The arrogance of the House GOP trying to tell our democracy what is and isn't harmful is grating. You're not our colonial administrators. Abide by our rules or get out.
It's also ridiculous to claim that censoring the very desire to reclaim one's country, is reclaiming one's country, by virtue of who is doing the secret censoring.
> Who do House Republicans think they are that they can tell our democracy what is and isn't harmful? Abide by our rules or get out.
As a European I am very grateful to the Republicans for exposing how my own supranational rulers are controlling me, something which, again, they tried to keep secret, while preaching about "democracy".
Edit as reply:
> So your definition of "taking back our country" is... Americans telling us what we can and can't do in the best interest of their owners?
They're not telling us what we can and can't do. They're telling us what our rulers are keeping secret from us.
> Should the EU actually overstep, tech companies can take it to the open, public courts
I repeated how they kept the nature of censorship secret three times. You don't get to talk about "open, public courts".
> If you don't like the DSA, vote for MEPs that are opposed.
I will. But many won't, because they are being actively deceived by the EU into how the legislation works. How democratic is it when governments lie, and people vote based on those lies? For some strange reason, none of the many misinformation watchdogs picked up on this misinformation.
Should the EU actually overstep, tech companies can take it to the open, public courts, thanks to our actually functioning separation of powers. That is the beauty of democracy.
If you don't like the DSA, vote for MEPs that are opposed. You're never going to be able to control what's going on in your country if you give away power to wannabe colonialists abroad.
At the core, what the difference is is how "free speech" is interpreted. In the US? Unless you literally fake-call "fire" or call for Luigi'ing someone, it's protected free speech, even if it's a bunch of Nazis holding tiki torches and showing the Hitler salute [1].
In Europe? We have been through 1933-1945. Almost every country in continental Europe was either occupied by Hitler's Germany or lorded over by one of his allies (e.g. Spain's Franco, Ante Pavelic in what would be Yugoslavia or Mussolini in Italy). An awful, awful lot of people died thanks to these regimes, and our collective learning from that history is to either ban such speech entirely or at the very least ostracize its followers. The Eastern Bloc countries who had been occupied by authoritarian pseudo Communism in the decades after WW2 added the Communist symbols (e.g. Red Star) for the same reason. Generally, we do not want a repeat of these eras.
Now with social media, we saw Americans (and people of other non European countries, but mostly Americans) openly post symbols we see as symbols of hate, we saw them call for a repeat of what happened between 1933 and the 1990s, and US platforms did barely anything against that. We tried the soft way as we almost always do, announced "hey we don't like that", platforms didn't get it under control (and some, like post-Musk Twitter, openly announced they DGAF)... and similarly to GDPR or USB-C, we acted.
Ironically if there is a single population that will immensely benefit from socialism, is the United States. Yet they are raised in fear of the very doctrine that would save them.