11 ms·
The EU’s Digital Services Act is now in effect
- duringmath 3y agoIt's codified censorship.
- rpastuszak 3y agoHow do you mean?
- DoItToMe81 3y agoIt allows hosts on every level to be criminally charged for user content. It has come with a backdrop of powerful interests pushing for cross-border takedowns in the EU. It suggests allowing copyright enforcement firms and NGOs to arbitrarily take down content and the legal protection against abuse is intentionally written vaguely and open endedly.
- throwaway154 3y agoTime is finite. Censorship is already in place by those that seek to use yours. Whether this is 'better' is the debate. But that you a person is a product who's manipulation of is current is not. The new current is that of false agency.
- malermeister 3y agoThat's quite a take, can you back it up in any way?
- duringmath 3y agoWell it's the textbook definition of censorship i.e government deciding the content media platforms are allowed to publish/carry.
- beebeepka 3y agoI am not sure that's the case here. Also, has there ever been a time without censorship. Please keep in mind I am not interested in shallow right wing ideology crap. Big boys/gals always censor. Otherwise they wouldn't be big
- duringmath 3y agoThe difference is companies used to decide what piece of content to nuke now it's the government doing it which is a big no-no.
- beebeepka 3y ago[flagged]
- malermeister 3y agoSo instead of a private, unaccountable censor you now have a democratically elected one? How is that worse?
- duringmath 3y agoGovernment can put you in jail this is not a slope we want to grease. Private "censorship" is localized and fairly harmless.
- malermeister 3y ago> Private "censorship" is localized and fairly harmless. That, again, is a bold claim with nothing to back it up. Here's an example of private censorship with a political motivation: https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-leaked-internal-message-suggests-musk-ordered-leftwing-account-freeze-2023-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-leaked-internal-mess... Nobody elected Musk, and yet he just autocratically controls a major medium of communication now, with no democratic control mechanisms in place. Better not upset the owning class or you, too, will be silenced!
- dekken_ 3y agoOr, advertising is harassment.
- sylware 3y ago.... and they still forgot the technical plane: interop of big tech with small tech: noscript/basic (x)html browsers, IRC(TLS or not) bridges, email, etc.
- cpa 3y agoThe other component of the regulatory package, the DMA (Digital Markets Act), brings interoperability obligations. This aspect is arguably primarily related to competition rather than content moderation, which is why it falls under the DMA rather than the DSA (Digital Services Act).
- sylware 3y agoOk, DSA and DMA, but as far as I can remember, No DMA news on the actual technical interop grounds. What are the reasons of that? I wonder.
- di4na 3y agoWhat do you mean no news? The interop mandate is still in it?
- jeroenhd 3y agoThe DMA requirements for interop has a longer lead time. They won't go into full force until 6 March 2024. With the IETF still working out MIMI and MLS, that's not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion.
- sylware 3y agoWhat are those MIMI MLS? Why is it the first time I hear about this? What's extremely important is how modular is the technical interop, and above all modules (and not 748397498324 modules) must be reasonable to implement by one individual normal developers (well, for the crypto module, "normal" is not enough). Hope we don't get a remake of the "semantic web" which end up pushing forward the current abomination of web engines (including their SDK).
- jqpabc123 3y agoI won't lose any sleep over personalized ads being restricted. The negatives promoted by these far outweigh any real positives. And there are readily available alternatives without the most harmful side effects --- aka simple, context sensitive advertising.
- bt4u 3y ago[dead]
- oaiey 3y agoWhile I agree, I think it is a matter of perspective. For the industry a click rate of 0.00020 vs 0.00026 makes a big financial difference. (Numbers are obviously made up :))
- xethos 3y agoGreat. That one-second delay caused by the ad networks and creepy tracking scripts adds up too. I know it's not you, but any time someone tries this defense, they claim small percentages for [time / click-through rate] over the population add up, without acknowledging that it goes both ways.
- Forbo 3y agoHow much bandwidth and processing power is getting consumed? Not just serving it up, but on the client side too once it's delivered.
- frollo 3y agoI already agree with the DSA, there's no need to sell it to me
- ThomPete 3y ago[flagged]
- stop50 3y agoWhy? Its not perfect but its not that bad.
- ThomPete 3y agoIt's not necessary. There is already the necessary legal framework to this, but they have now turned it into regulation which is the legal version of compelled speech. There is a world of difference between. You can't do X vs. You have to do Y in this specific way. Which is what this act is going to result in. It's just another EU powergrab and it helps absolutely no one, least of all european citizens. You can't have innovation in an environment like this. It's already bad in Europe now it will be even worse. Only 3 parties will benefit from this. Lawyers, Politicians who can use it as leverage and NGOs who can drum up false narratives and get donor money. All it does is to protect the incumbents and burry everyone else in bureaucracy. But hey, by all means if EU wants to be even further behind US and China and not go through yet another decade of not building any significant companies then they should just go ahead.
- Mistletoe 3y agoWhat you call innovation, others might call everyone being miserable.
- b800h 3y agoThe ban on advertising targeted at things like sexual preferences will be interesting to watch. As some people have pointed out, Netflix for example seems to be very good at targeting people who are "questioning", anecdotally before they begin to consciously do so; the suggestion being that this isn't intentional. So if an AI decides that I'm likely to buy something LGBT if they offer it to me, despite using no label for the category, rather a token in the net, then does this break the rule? If so, can I ever responsibly use any form of AI-based targeting? EDIT to add ref: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66472938 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66472938]
- Nursie 3y agoThat is interesting, and kinda weird. Where is the line I wonder? If Netflix effectively says “you seem to like watching gay stuff, here’s more gay content”, is that wrong? Because it seems like that’s not Netflix targeting a user’s sexuality, just their viewing preferences. OTOH it’s pretty harrowing to hear about people in (for instance) Uganda who are outed by an algorithm and (whether it is correct or not) find themselves ostracised or worse.
- b800h 3y agoI've definitely had situations on Spotify where I've been listening to Abba and the Scissor Sisters, and started to be offered playlists aimed at LGBT people, but this is musical-choice targeting. It just happens that I like stuff that gay people like.
- alias_neo 3y agoSpotify algorithms are complete trash. There was a period when, for some reason, it would recommend playlists related to getting "tarted up", "makeup on", being a "powerful woman" etc and recommending lots of music it thinks is for women. Though I do listen to a wide variety of music, there's nothing notable I'd say could encourage it to believe that. Generally I play metal and rock, grime, rap, hip-hop; but also classical, some pop and indie, occasionally "UK Top 50", "Coding Mode" and "Jazz Vibes" playlists and lots of children's bath time songs. I had to have a purge and its much better now but I still avoid the auto-playlists.
- nvm0n2 3y agoWorth remembering that this allows unlimited censorship of social media. What kind of things do they plan to censor? "Disinformation", broadly defined. The European Commission can now censor anything it wants, globally, and has already compiled lists of things it thinks are disinformation: Consider, for instance, some of the key “disinformation trends” listed in the EDMO’s recent 2023 briefing on disinformation in Ireland. They include “nativist narratives” that “oppose migration”, “gender and sexuality narratives” that touch on drag queens and trans issues as “part of a wider ‘anti-woke’ narrative that mocks social justice campaigns”, and “environment narratives” that criticise climate-change policies and Greta Thunberg. https://dailysceptic.org/2023/08/25/the-digital-services-act-will-give-the-eu-sweeping-new-censorship-powers-forcing-x-and-facebook-to-remove-content-that-challenges-mass-migration-transgender-ideology-or-net-zero/ https://dailysceptic.org/2023/08/25/the-digital-services-act... This gives the EU an extraordinary amount of power. The regulation of the DSA will be overseen by the Commission itself, not an independent regulator. What’s more, the DSA includes a ‘crisis-management mechanism’, added last year in a last-minute amendment. The Commission argued it needs to be able to direct how platforms respond to events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Apparently, in a crisis, the ‘anticipatory or voluntary nature’ of obligations on tech companies to tackle disinformation would be insufficient. Under the DSA, the Commission has given itself the power to determine whether such a ‘crisis’ exists, defined as ‘an objective risk of serious prejudice to public security or public health in the Union’. https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/23/the-eus-censorship-regime-is-about-to-go-global/ https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/03/23/the-eus-censorship-...
- personomas 3y agoWhat a nightmare. The state(s) are becoming total insane.
- 749339 3y ago[flagged]
- pjc50 3y agoWell, yes, that's why all that lot is in quotes. That's why you had a Daily Express article claiming that posters on the Tube reminding people to drink water in hot conditions were "woke"; ""anti-wokeness"" is yelling at clouds.
- johanneskanybal 3y agoAmerican tech companies ads is just pure evil, not a fan of over regulation but the current state is just bizzare to me.
- oaiey 3y agoIMHO, we are not in a state of overregulation in IT. We are certainly on a path towards having more solid regulatory framework (looking at privacy, post market cybersecurity and basic no-gos like here) but the road is still long and overregulation far away. We are just leaving the wild west. I work in medical device development, stuff like GDPR our regulatory team has for breakfast without much drama. It is normal for us, as it is for airplanes, cars, food processing, financial services, etc.
- personomas 3y agoThese laws are bad for a lot of reasons. One thing is certain: they will drive up prices. The Tech companies usually pass the costs on to comply with this stuff onto the users, naturally.
- oaiey 3y agoWe are now in de facto monopolistic behavior (think apple, Microsoft and Google or Azure, GCS and AWS) with permanent price raises of the richest companies in the world. Data interop can break this de-facto monopoly and allow competition.
- personomas 3y agoBy no means do I believe the problems stem from our corporations. Instead, the problems stem from the government, "social" policies, high taxes, etc. Our corporations are not the problem.
- anfogoat 3y agoThere's many great things in these laws that, in a vacuum, I'd love to have. Outside of the vacuum, I couldn't care less. The benefits absolutely pale in comparison to letting ghouls whom the mere existence of the Internet offends have any sort of say on anything remotely connected to anything that has even tangential proximity to the Internet. The greater the year and number of laws passed, the clearer it is that the only correct position on this is an absolute one. If there is a discrepancy between what is legal offline vs. online, and you feel you must correct it, then you can strip down the laws that govern the offline. There, solved. The threshold between governments and privacy on, and control of the Internet has been worn down low enough, and has been for over a decade. The only laws we need that have to do with the Internet are to curtail the power of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Anything other than that betrays all the things the EU says about privacy and fundamental rights as the marketing bauble it is. And an EU Commissioner saying "we're bringing our European values into the digital world" should scare people. It's a good time to remind everyone that part of these values is letting the Europol do whatever and then rewriting laws to reatroaticely protect them when they've found to be systematically violating them. And for Ursula specifically, those values are what drove her to try over and over again to curtail online freedoms regardless of having it made clear to her that her ideas are unwanted. The Commissioners might be democratically elected -- if you're willing to take the concept of representative democracy to its 100000000th degree -- but they're undemocratic in spirit. But sure, lets all focus on protecting ourselves from the fucking ads again.
- oaiey 3y agoSo the internet should be a lawless space. I would recommend you to talk to victims of doxxing, revenge porn, fraud and many other kind of internet based or enabled crimes. And if you assume the internet should find its own kind of technical solutions, then the solution will look like trusted computing. Then is removing freedom of violating the law, which is worse than having a restrictive law.