On Tuesday this week, the European Commission announced its first list of designated Very Large Online Platforms – or VLOPs – that will be subject to “content moderation” requirements and obligations to combat “disinformation” under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). As VLOPs, the designated services will be required “to assess and mitigate their systemic risks and to provide robust content moderation tools”.
Or as a subheading in the Commission announcement pithily puts it: “More diligent content moderation, less disinformation.”
As discussed in my previous articles on the DSA here and here, the legislation creates enforcement mechanisms – most notably, the threat of massive fines – for ensuring that online platforms comply with commitments to remove or otherwise suppress ‘disinformation’ that they have undertaken in the EU’s hitherto ostensibly voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation.
Unsurprisingly, the list of designated VLOPs includes a variety of services offered by all the most high-profile signatories of the Code: Twitter, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and TikTok.
But, far more surprisingly, it also includes several platforms that are not signatories of the Code and to which the Commission appears now to be extending the Code and DSA requirements unilaterally. The latter include Amazon, Apple (in the form of the App Store) and even Wikipedia.
The Commission has even designated the favourite messaging service of every filter-crazy preteen, Snapchat! Curiously, however, WhatsApp is not named.
Since many of the newly designated platforms are not publishing platforms per se, it is unclear how exactly the ”content moderation’ requirements will apply to them.
What will ‘content moderation’ mean for Amazon, for example? That user reviews containing alleged ‘disinformation’ will have to be removed? Or will books or magazines that the European Commission deems to be vessels or purveyors of ‘disinformation’ have to be purged from the catalogue?
The inclusion of the Apple App Store is perhaps even more ominous. Will its subjection to the Code and DSA requirements provide an indirect route for the EU to demand the removal of apps of non-designated platforms that the Commission deems channels of disinformation? Telegram, for example?
And what about Wikipedia? The DSA invests the European Commission with the power to impose fines of up to 6% of global turnover on VLOPs. But Wikipedia is a non-profit that is funded by donations. It does not sell anything, so it does not have any turnover. But presumably the Commission plans to treat its fundraising income as such.
Furthermore, Wikipedia is not a publishing platform, but a user-edited collaborative encyclopedia. If it is to be subject to the EU’s ‘content moderation’ requirements, what can this possibly mean other than that Wikipedia will have to remove user edits that the European Commission deems to be ‘mis-‘ or ‘disinformation’? The European Commission will thus become the very arbiter of encyclopedic knowledge and truth.
The European Commission’s list of designated entities, comprising 17 Very Large Online Platforms as well as two Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs), is reproduced below.
Very Large Online Platforms:
- Alibaba AliExpress
- Amazon Store
- Apple AppStore
- Booking.com
- Google Play
- Google Maps
- Google Shopping
- Snapchat
- TikTok
- Wikipedia
- YouTube
- Zalando
Very Large Online Search Engines:
- Bing
- Google Search
Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, translator and researcher working in Europe. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on Twitter. This article was first published by the Brownstone Institute.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I thought 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
The people pushing this on us probably haven’t even read 1984.
Read? Who reads? Watched! The times they are a-changing ! Keep up maximus! Sorry, Marcus
WhatsApp is owned by Meta, so by naming Meta they are also covering WhatsApp.
They haven’t named Meta. They’ve named a subsidiary (Facebook).
That’s presumably because the people who compiled the list had a really hard time coming up with anything on the internet that’s not Facebook. That’s still the same merry old gang of COVID measure pushers and climate change apostles. They haven’t grown more intelligent or less ignorant just because they switched targets.
From the article “Unsurprisingly, the list of designated VLOPs includes a variety of services offered by all the most high-profile signatories of the Code: Twitter, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and TikTok.”
Shares in VPN companies just skyrocketed. Everyone will get around these issues by pretending they’re not in EU countries.
I’m hoping we’re reaching the point where giant organisations hit ‘maximum overreach.’ This situation is getting so ludicrous that it can’t continue…
You wait, soon they’ll mandate GPS hardware on every device.
Who controls the various GPS systems? They ain’t private, I know that.
It’s going to become a cat and mouse game: the authorities will clamp down, the anarchist tech will respond. And modded phones will become a thing if GPS is mandated. Edward Snowdon (I think it was him, but it was a long time ago) in an interview demonstrated that phones carry a good deal of unnecessary tech in them that can be abused by the state.
As it stands, I have a flip phone that has WhatsApp. If I didn’t have family abroad – and thus need to use VOIP – I would be on a completely dumb phone. I binned my smart phone as soon as track and trace arrived. Fun toys were turned into instruments of state oppression.
There are definitely bad things afoot, but there are plenty of geniuses out there who are fighting it. I bought a ‘Nokia’ flip phone, using KaiOS, that was utter rubbish. I then bought a phone by TTFone, using Simplified Android, which has all the open source elements of Android and none of the Google spyware. It’s simple and absolutely brilliant – no GPS.
And for all that is said about ‘Young People’ (TM), they are a major buyer of dumb phones now. For all the gobby loons on Twitter, many are increasingly aware of state manipulation.
VPNs and VPN companies will then be licenced by the EU and the EU will obtain information about who has a VPN?
“Since many of the newly designated platforms are not publishing platforms per se, it is unclear how exactly the ”content moderation’ requirements will apply to them.”
Presumably one of the design aims is that content moderation requirements can be dictated as needed on a whim by the EU to suit whatever their current evil agendas are.
Pretty much why things are couched in vague terms
It’s pretty certain that there’s not much design involved here, just a brainstorming session among a few EU civil servants which probably went a bit like this:
A: We have to compile a list of large internat platforms. Any ideas?
B: Facebook!
A: Yeah, I already got that. Any other ideas?
C: If we already have Facebook, what else do they want?
A: No idea, but we need more than one.
B: Can’t we list Facebook twice?
Google Maps is on this list although that’s decidedly not a content-publishing platform. But the iOS/ Apple map service isn’t, despite that’s also large and also provides maps with advertising on them. Presumably, that’s because the intellectual giants who compiled the list simply don’t know that that’s something different.
That’s a very charitable view. In my experience when people are drafting wordings that endow them with powers they make sure it is as broad and vague as possible so they can make it up as they go along
Like many intelligent people, you seem to severely underestimate just how stupid and ignorant most people actually are. Nice anecdote illustrating that:
Years ago, one of the inner Reading Spoon’s sported signs stating All our beef is sourced from the British Isles. This arose my suspicion because I knew that – at that time – the really cheap beef was coming from Ireland and I was wondering if this the British Isles was really supposed to be camouflage for Really cheap Irish beef served here. Out of curiosity, I asked one of the serving girls for that – obviously a student of UoR and thus, supposedly educated. She turned round and shouted the following question to her colleague in the kitchen: “Which part of Ireland belongs to England, the north or the south?”[*].
[*] The east, obviously, That’s why there once was an Easter Rising. 🙂
Well intelligence is applied in a very patchy manner. I know lots of people with better cognitive skills than I possess who would probably struggle with that question. The concept of a meaningfully rounded education and applying one’s intellect to important things like basic history and the composition of the United Kingdom seem to have been lost, if they ever existed – present company excepted.
Somewhere in the EU there are smart people who are highly motivated to preserve and enhance the power of EU institutions and their own pet political agenda – they will be thinking very carefully about how best to do that. At least, that is my guess. I don’t know much about the public sector. My experience of the private sector is that rich firms buy clever lawyers who are highly cynical.
I don’t know how this is elsewhere but at least in Germany, EU institutions are (in-)famous for being used to get rid of embarrassingly incompetent career politicians (like Martin Bangemann or Ursula von der Leyen) who have too much clout in their parties to ignore them.
Probably here in the UK too. It’s hard to fathom whether the (albeit short lived) success of the covid scam was down to some really clever manipulators, or a really stupid population, collective insanity or some combination of the three.
Warrants repeating here: Communication over the internet is just communication. The only reason why everybody and his dog wants to monitor and regulate communication over the internet is it seems technically feasible. The ‘democratic’ governments of the EU member states would absolutely love to have 24×7 AV CCTV in every toilet, every bedroom, every living room, every kitchen and every garden. But not to prevent crimes, mind you. So disposed people will continue to be free to trade and consume drugs, to assault and harrass whoever they deem a suitable vicitim, to steal everything from shops they can lay their hands on etc. Just speech some politician disapproves of is to be sought out and eliminated, because democracy just doesn’t work right when people are permitted to have political opinions.
Barrrrrr! Is that succinct enough!?
Where is the outrage?
Andrew Bridgen: silenced
Robert Kennedy Jr: censored
EU:censoring.
Can anyone explain what is going on?
If you don’t agree with a view, start a debate.
What are ‘they’ worried about?
To one group of people it is “disinformation”. To another group it is simply an alternative explanation of something. ————My idea is that the EU stinks. To another person they are all sweetness and light. We are both entitled to our opinion and the opinion of the majority was that we should leave this tyranny. ————The idea that a political body (EU) can decide which books are allowed to be sold on Amazon is beyond a diabolical disgrace. ——To all you Remainers I say you are a bunch of brainwashed dreamers. If you were not convinced to leave this Authoritarian Regime in 2016 isn’t it time you woke up? This is simply latter-day book burning.
Latter day book burning is so far happening in Canada and these mis-/disinformation policies originate – as usual – from the US democrats and the politically associated NGOs. Of course, the EU as body capable and entitled to make political decisions still only exists in your mind. Poltical decision-making at EU level rests with the (so-called) democratically elected governments of the EU member state whose representatives vote on them. To which degree you’re actually articulating a (misguided) opinion about something that would be well worth of properly targetted criticism or are just fighting a US domestic politics proxy word war by repeating the standpoint of the other American party would be a good question. The continued leave/ remain trolling (seven years after 2016, that’s nothing but trolling) certainly suggests that.
So, who is that fines Poland half a million Euros a day for daring to keep using coal? Or do Poland just democratically decide to fine themselves? ———-I am replying to the article about EU censorship. Which it seems you think does not exist. —–That isn’t “trolling”.
EU’s latest epiphany!
It seems we need social media platforms, podcasts and other internet vehicles which do not actively intend to broadcast in the EU and can declare that they will not be restricted by EU censorship. We might need a law in the UK that sets out the position that any UK based output from an organisation can be exempt from EU censorship if it declares that it will not accept it. Then, provided we roll back on our own censorship regime, we can return to being a world-class beacon for free speech.
Maybe the EU Commission is a source of dis/mis-information.