6 ms·

Musk: "EU offered secret censorship deal to X. We didnt accept

24 points by ta12653421 2y ago

immibis 2y ago
Musk accepts many secret censorship deals from many countries, including EU countries. The fact that he rejected one is uninteresting. https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-elon-musk-twitter-has-approved-83-of-censorship-requests-by-authoritarian-governments.html https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...
- cwillu 2y ago
  Presumably the EU hasn't threatened to jail twitter employees if he doesn't comply.
  - TheLoafOfBread 2y ago
    Paradox of tolerance it seems.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > Musk accepts many secret censorship deals from many countries, including EU countries. This news article is interesting because it underlines the hypocrisy of these self-described paladins of free speech and makes it clear these complains and criticisms are nothing more than baseless and fraudulent grandstanding.
  - mountainstar 2y ago
    [flagged]
- beardyw 2y ago
  It is interesting that he commented on it. Perhaps he feels his image needs a boost, regardless of the business he represents.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- sidcool 2y ago
  This looks like a Community note.
diskopanzer 2y ago
[flagged]
- lm28469 2y ago
  Where do you draw the line? Terrorism? Porn? Child porn?
  - diskopanzer 2y ago
    CP are not words, that is a completely different area. Here, too, it is questionable whether this can be regulated by the state at all. But of course there is a need for investigative authorities who at least try to look into it. But do we necessarily need preventive censorship and breaking up E2E communication on WhatsApp? These are the ideas for regulating such things. There is no need to regulate legal pornography. With terrorism, e.g. propaganda, it is difficult. But in the end, the idea of freedom of information prevails. Of course, platforms should have the ability to regulate violent content (e.g. ISIS beheading videos), but we shouldn't give the state the ability to regulate that, because the definition of terrorism can be expanded very quickly if necessary.
    - lm28469 2y ago
      [flagged]
- rgavuliak 2y ago
  the: > people I've never voted for Is bullshit. What about government officials from parties you haven't voted for? Or even the ones in the party you voted for you didn't vote for with preferential votes? It's the same mechanism.
- chipdart 2y ago
  > I am so glad that the European Union wants to protect me from bad words. You're making it sound like disinformation campaigns driven by hostile state actors are free from any negative impact. In the meantime, false advertisement is already ilegal in any remotely civilized country, and boosting hate speech is obviously far more damaging to a society than buying subpar shampoo. > It's always good when people I've never voted for protect me from things I've never asked for. I don't know what you are talking about. Every citizen of a member-state of the European union votes not only for their representatives in the European union but also for their own government institutions, and all executive positions are either elected by members of the European Parliament or by representatives of all member-states.
NekkoDroid 2y ago
My guess on what he actually means is "The EU said we should ban the users for their obvious hatespeech and then they don't fine us, but we said no" Edit: after a bit of looking its about disinformation and transparency https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_3761 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_...
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  He's replying to a tweet by an EU official who says the Commission thinks X "misleads users", "fails to provide adequate ad repository" (whatever that means - something got lost in translation there) and "blocks access to data for researchers". Which is apparently illegal under the Digital Services Act. The bit about misleading users seems to be that the EU suddenly dislikes the blue check icon because blue checks used to be restricted to people who are "trustworthy" but now their "preliminary view" is that the presence of a blue check can "deceive users". https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1811699711591489637 https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1811699711591489637 In other words, none of the claims made by the EU are related to hate speech, which the EU has a habit of defining as any speech objecting to their policies anyway. Also ironic that the EU complains that X doesn't send everyone's data to academics. What happened to EU having the best privacy laws? This kind of micromanagement of product design is one of the reasons new products aren't launching in the EU.
  - __m 2y ago
    Which objection to their policies did they define as hate speech?
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      For example, EU countries have used such laws to ban criticism of their COVID policies.
    - ailef 2y ago
      There's no need to define it as hate speech, since the DSA purposely mentions a very vague "harmful speech/content" (not "hateful") which can in turn applied to whatever the EU sees fits. For example, any objection to the current policies w.r.t the Russian invasion of Ukraine can be censored due to the DSA and this has happened recently to a prominent Italian YouTube influencer (Andrea Lombardi). His tweets were censored for his opinions about the Ukraine war. How many other tweets are being removed which we don't know of because they are not coming from famous people who have channels to make themselves heard anyway?
Two4 2y ago
I think this sort of thing is going to become more commonplace, but I'm not sure I or anyone else can think of a better solution for now. Western-aligned powers have been dealing with this prickly aspect of unconventional warfare for some time now: opposing powers intruding into the collective consciousness of their populace to introduce well-designed, self propagating ideas that are harmful to their power base. This basic idea is nothing new, with propaganda being invented somewhere between communication and warfare on the human timeline. However, humanity has never been this connected to so many sources and proxies of information, each being a vector for malicious ideas to spread. The harmful ideas are best described as a meme in the Richard Dawkins sense. They are harmful to western-aligned powers because these ideas can be things like "democracy doesn't work", or "the government is conspiring against us", or "capitalism is failing". I'm especially fond of the last one, because I don't think it's necessarily untrue - but it's harmful to the powers that be nonetheless. These ideas are not presented so simply: there's usually several layers of indirection, and some sort of built in way of defending against opposing ideas that would cause the harmful idea to be abandoned - this can exploit fear, pride or the need for group identity to do so, for example. When dealing with unconventional warfare such as this, you have a couple of options as far as I'm aware: innoculate your own populace against harmful ideas; retaliate against opposing powers with your own harmful ideas; or mitigate and remove sources of harmful ideas. That's where events like these start unfolding. The EU is facing massive disinformation efforts and political interference from external actors, and its fundamentally threatening those in power and their power structures. They are attempting to do number 3 here, and they are running into opposition in the form of free speech absolutism. Whether this is part of a smarter defense built into this web of harmful ideas or just convenient cover, it still results into the survival of those harmful ideas. As the world continues on a trajectory of polarisation socially, politically and economically, I fear we may see more and more of this sort of thing, and it will definitely be abused to suppress good ideas, not just harmful ones. I'm sure it's happening already.
- untitledfolder 2y ago
  > I think this sort of thing is going to become more commonplace, but I'm not sure I or anyone else can think of a better solution for now. > When dealing with unconventional warfare such as this, you have a couple of options as far as I'm aware: innoculate your own populace against harmful ideas; retaliate against opposing powers with your own harmful ideas; or mitigate and remove sources of harmful ideas. That's where events like these start unfolding. Don't be so defeatest. There are numerous ideas for handling this problem. For instance X/Twitter's Community Notes, which is now being trialed on Youtube too last I heard. There's also efforts towards eliminating secrecy (which is sorely needed in any healty democracy). The whole mis/disinformation issue simply comes from a lack of trust (in government, authority, or generally any agency who has more legal flexibility than most people). In order to fix that, the easiest solution is for them to be transparrent about everything. Hypothetically, imagine if you could login to your government website and see a simple chart breakdown of how much money your [insert agency of intrest] had, how it was gained, and how and where it was spent. Frankly if any government in the world were to do that, it would influence others to ask "Why isn't my government transparrent like that?" and inevitably cause a knock on effect. Democracy was the first step, next is openness and transparency.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

24 points by ta12653421 2y ago

Musk accepts many secret censorship deals from many countries, including EU countries. The fact that he rejected one is uninteresting. https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-elon-musk-twitter-has-approved-83-of-censorship-requests-by-authoritarian-governments.html https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

cwillu 2y ago
Presumably the EU hasn't threatened to jail twitter employees if he doesn't comply.
- TheLoafOfBread 2y ago
  Paradox of tolerance it seems.
chipdart 2y ago
> Musk accepts many secret censorship deals from many countries, including EU countries. This news article is interesting because it underlines the hypocrisy of these self-described paladins of free speech and makes it clear these complains and criticisms are nothing more than baseless and fraudulent grandstanding.
- mountainstar 2y ago
  [flagged]
beardyw 2y ago
It is interesting that he commented on it. Perhaps he feels his image needs a boost, regardless of the business he represents.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
sidcool 2y ago
This looks like a Community note.

diskopanzer 2y ago

[flagged]

lm28469 2y ago
Where do you draw the line? Terrorism? Porn? Child porn?
- diskopanzer 2y ago
  CP are not words, that is a completely different area. Here, too, it is questionable whether this can be regulated by the state at all. But of course there is a need for investigative authorities who at least try to look into it. But do we necessarily need preventive censorship and breaking up E2E communication on WhatsApp? These are the ideas for regulating such things. There is no need to regulate legal pornography. With terrorism, e.g. propaganda, it is difficult. But in the end, the idea of freedom of information prevails. Of course, platforms should have the ability to regulate violent content (e.g. ISIS beheading videos), but we shouldn't give the state the ability to regulate that, because the definition of terrorism can be expanded very quickly if necessary.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    [flagged]
rgavuliak 2y ago
the: > people I've never voted for Is bullshit. What about government officials from parties you haven't voted for? Or even the ones in the party you voted for you didn't vote for with preferential votes? It's the same mechanism.
chipdart 2y ago
> I am so glad that the European Union wants to protect me from bad words. You're making it sound like disinformation campaigns driven by hostile state actors are free from any negative impact. In the meantime, false advertisement is already ilegal in any remotely civilized country, and boosting hate speech is obviously far more damaging to a society than buying subpar shampoo. > It's always good when people I've never voted for protect me from things I've never asked for. I don't know what you are talking about. Every citizen of a member-state of the European union votes not only for their representatives in the European union but also for their own government institutions, and all executive positions are either elected by members of the European Parliament or by representatives of all member-states.

NekkoDroid 2y ago

My guess on what he actually means is "The EU said we should ban the users for their obvious hatespeech and then they don't fine us, but we said no" Edit: after a bit of looking its about disinformation and transparency https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_3761 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_24_...

mike_hearn 2y ago
He's replying to a tweet by an EU official who says the Commission thinks X "misleads users", "fails to provide adequate ad repository" (whatever that means - something got lost in translation there) and "blocks access to data for researchers". Which is apparently illegal under the Digital Services Act. The bit about misleading users seems to be that the EU suddenly dislikes the blue check icon because blue checks used to be restricted to people who are "trustworthy" but now their "preliminary view" is that the presence of a blue check can "deceive users". https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1811699711591489637 https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1811699711591489637 In other words, none of the claims made by the EU are related to hate speech, which the EU has a habit of defining as any speech objecting to their policies anyway. Also ironic that the EU complains that X doesn't send everyone's data to academics. What happened to EU having the best privacy laws? This kind of micromanagement of product design is one of the reasons new products aren't launching in the EU.
- __m 2y ago
  Which objection to their policies did they define as hate speech?
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    For example, EU countries have used such laws to ban criticism of their COVID policies.
  - ailef 2y ago
    There's no need to define it as hate speech, since the DSA purposely mentions a very vague "harmful speech/content" (not "hateful") which can in turn applied to whatever the EU sees fits. For example, any objection to the current policies w.r.t the Russian invasion of Ukraine can be censored due to the DSA and this has happened recently to a prominent Italian YouTube influencer (Andrea Lombardi). His tweets were censored for his opinions about the Ukraine war. How many other tweets are being removed which we don't know of because they are not coming from famous people who have channels to make themselves heard anyway?

Two4 2y ago

I think this sort of thing is going to become more commonplace, but I'm not sure I or anyone else can think of a better solution for now. Western-aligned powers have been dealing with this prickly aspect of unconventional warfare for some time now: opposing powers intruding into the collective consciousness of their populace to introduce well-designed, self propagating ideas that are harmful to their power base. This basic idea is nothing new, with propaganda being invented somewhere between communication and warfare on the human timeline. However, humanity has never been this connected to so many sources and proxies of information, each being a vector for malicious ideas to spread. The harmful ideas are best described as a meme in the Richard Dawkins sense. They are harmful to western-aligned powers because these ideas can be things like "democracy doesn't work", or "the government is conspiring against us", or "capitalism is failing". I'm especially fond of the last one, because I don't think it's necessarily untrue - but it's harmful to the powers that be nonetheless. These ideas are not presented so simply: there's usually several layers of indirection, and some sort of built in way of defending against opposing ideas that would cause the harmful idea to be abandoned - this can exploit fear, pride or the need for group identity to do so, for example. When dealing with unconventional warfare such as this, you have a couple of options as far as I'm aware: innoculate your own populace against harmful ideas; retaliate against opposing powers with your own harmful ideas; or mitigate and remove sources of harmful ideas. That's where events like these start unfolding. The EU is facing massive disinformation efforts and political interference from external actors, and its fundamentally threatening those in power and their power structures. They are attempting to do number 3 here, and they are running into opposition in the form of free speech absolutism. Whether this is part of a smarter defense built into this web of harmful ideas or just convenient cover, it still results into the survival of those harmful ideas. As the world continues on a trajectory of polarisation socially, politically and economically, I fear we may see more and more of this sort of thing, and it will definitely be abused to suppress good ideas, not just harmful ones. I'm sure it's happening already.

untitledfolder 2y ago
> I think this sort of thing is going to become more commonplace, but I'm not sure I or anyone else can think of a better solution for now. > When dealing with unconventional warfare such as this, you have a couple of options as far as I'm aware: innoculate your own populace against harmful ideas; retaliate against opposing powers with your own harmful ideas; or mitigate and remove sources of harmful ideas. That's where events like these start unfolding. Don't be so defeatest. There are numerous ideas for handling this problem. For instance X/Twitter's Community Notes, which is now being trialed on Youtube too last I heard. There's also efforts towards eliminating secrecy (which is sorely needed in any healty democracy). The whole mis/disinformation issue simply comes from a lack of trust (in government, authority, or generally any agency who has more legal flexibility than most people). In order to fix that, the easiest solution is for them to be transparrent about everything. Hypothetically, imagine if you could login to your government website and see a simple chart breakdown of how much money your [insert agency of intrest] had, how it was gained, and how and where it was spent. Frankly if any government in the world were to do that, it would influence others to ask "Why isn't my government transparrent like that?" and inevitably cause a knock on effect. Democracy was the first step, next is openness and transparency.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]