The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) comes into force today, obliging “very large online platforms” to swiftly take down what unelected European Commission bureaucrats decide to define as ‘disinformation’.
As Laurie Wastell points out in the European Conservative, the DSA obliges online platforms to swiftly take down so-called disinformation. From today, the EC has at its disposal an aggressive enforcement regime, such that if Big Tech companies fail to abide by the EU’s ‘Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation’, which requires swift censorship of mis- and disinformation, then they can be fined up to 6% of their annual global revenue, investigated by the Commission, and potentially even prevented from operating in the EU altogether.
So, who is to say if something is misinformation? In the case of social media platforms operating within the EU, the EC is the arbiter of that, since it is the Commission that will decide if platforms like X and Facebook are doing enough to combat it. (It is the EU’s executive body, the EC, that is invested by the DSA with the exclusive power to assess compliance with the Code and apply penalties if a platform is found wanting.)
And what kind of speech is the DSA expected to police? The Code defines disinformation as “false or misleading content that is spread with an intention to deceive or secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm”. That sounds innocent and apolitical enough. Yet the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO), which was launched by the EC in June 2020 and aims to “identify disinformation, uproot its sources or dilute its impact”, appears to adopt a much broader, deeply politicised understanding of the term “misleading content”.
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.
Clearly, what is common to such narratives is not that they constitute disinformation in the sense outlined in the Code — that is, “false information intended to mislead”. Rather, they represent opposition by members of the public to unpopular policies favoured by European elites — in this case, mass migration, transgender ideology and Net Zero.
In the words of EC President Ursula von der Leyen, it is vital that companies censor disinformation of this kind to “ensure that the online environment remains a safe space”. Safe for whom, one wonders — politicians or citizens?
Well worth reading in full.
Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Communications Officer of the Free Speech Union.
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Most people tend to forget the nazis party was the nazi socialist party, socialism,far left not right!
And now it’s happening again with censorship primarily backed by Germany!
True, but we hardly need to invoke Hitler. Surely, the better and more immediate comparison is with the communists, among whose first actions on seizing power in Russia was to close down all Liberal, Conservative and otherwise critical newspapers.
Today’s Left manages the process through an abuse of “regulation”, but it comes to the same thing: shutting people up and shutting discussion down. And this is happening in the name of a crazed, neo-Marxist agenda, the full outlines of which are unmistakably – and at last – surfacing from the fog of lies – hence the hysteria and increased oppression.
The aim is “world government”, and the method of attaining it a marriage of global markets, corporatist economics and mass immigration into the west, pretending that Europe and North America are no more than the “capital cities” of the “world community”.
Current technology, with its endless possibilities for the centralised surveillance of individuals, has been seized on as a means of coordination and control; criminal behaviour is winked at and dissent is criminalised – according to the classic Marxist formula.
Meanwhile, small business is asphyxiated with red tape, penalised for backsliding on political orthodoxy and bought out – how many small independent schools, family run restaurants, fully private nursing homes or eccentric, creative shops are left to us today? Very few.
And it is increasingly clear that this process of nationalisation by stealth, by the back door is intentional and part of the wider plan of “modernisation”. The intellectual class of the west, with this globalist, Marxisant agenda is committing a classic “trahison des clercs”; and it is doing so through unopposed control of the “commanding heights” of culture: education, government and business, now acting in tandem and leading to poverty-stricken disaster.
When I was younger a lot of us read the writings of Solzhenitsyn, it is a great pity that those of that generation that fathered the present never understood what they read and started us on the road to unmitigated barbarity.
When you remove all the freedoms from the individual, you no longer have control over them.
My ref to the nazi party was just to outline the fact that the words ‘far right’ are bantered about too regularly these days and many lefties don’t even realise, just like the nazis, they are far left!
Btw, I didn’t mention Hitler
Of course, my dear sir, I agree in every particular – and I hugely appreciate the rhetorical flair involved in your reference, because nothing narks the ghastly Marxists so much as comparing them with their great rivals in wickedness.
On the other hand, if we do keep mentioning the Nazis (or their leader), does this not risk helping the process, so useful to the left, of covering over their own direct responsibility for dictatorship and genocide?
Either way, we are clearly singing from the same hymn sheet and we must keep recruiting for the choir – partly by emphasising all the agreement amongst ourselves that we can – because otherwise the west as a whole is finished.
And on the left, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Brezhnev, Kim II Sung, Mugabe Etc. All drank from the cup of power and became intoxicated. Power in an individual only cultures cruelty. The west is very much on a course for self destruction, encouraged and guided by their own governments, whilst the rest of the world meet to discuss how they can profit from this unexpected windfall for their standings in the world economically and politically.
Don’t forget our very own War Criminal and pro compulsory jabber. His hand is very much behind all that is rotten today.
May he and his ilk rot in Hell.
Absolutely.
Er, no, not by name, quite true – but I hear he had a vague connection with the “Nazi socialist party”. Accidental synecdoche? I mean, it’s not the end of the world, but RumpoMidwinter has a point.
It may be of some electoral advantage to UK/EU centre right challenger parties to include and widely promote a manifesto promise to write into law the equivalent of the US First Amendment – protection of free speech.
It really doesn’t matter if you personally use Far right!!1 or Far left!!2 to express that you really, really disaprove of something.
Bit of real-world information: Presently, a somewhat hot political topic in Germany is a proposal by a Green MdB (German equivalent of MP) to encourage pensioners to move out of their homes so that families with children can live there instead. This pretty obviously really refers to migrant families with large numbers of children. Absolute total Nazis, those German Greens, aren’t they?
Where are the moved out ones to live? I presume in a concentration camp, and then a death camp and problem solved!
Do the Green not understand history at all? Their intellegence is severely challenged.
Of course, the voters of the EU will be able to make their judgement on this when they next vote for the EU Commission. After all, that is one of the advantages of being in a democracy, isn’t it?
When was the last time you voted for someone’s appointment to a civil service position?
NB: In theory, you’re right about democracy. The electorate is supposed to vote for candidates to all public offices in a democracy. But such a democracy doesn’t exist anywhere in western Europe.
Roubles is taking the P.
The Swiss manage it best,but imperfectly.
Clearly sarcasm still exists. This is exactly why the UK left the EU, although some of our politicians still fail to carry out our wishes on that front.
A very telling aspect of this authoritarian clamp down is that it only applies (for now) to “very large online platforms”
It reveals everything about the attitude of established power towards free speech. Basically, free speech is all well and good so long it has no impact.
So you can say what you want as long as not many people can hear it and you don’t influence too many people.
This is very typical of soft dictatorships which is obviously what the EU has become.
And the way things are going, the ‘very large online platforms’ will own and/or control the smaller ones, making them susceptible to the same controls…
Yes; large online platforms now – podcasts next?
One wonders if the Tower of Babel is an earlier example in history/legend of what’s happening now. Did humans spread out ultimately because they were all obliged within the tower to speak the same way and censor themselves? We live in a digital Tower of Babel thanks to global communications.
Forty years ago, it simply wasn’t possible to communicate as fast and as affordably as we can now, so communications and discussions couldn’t be cut off at the knees at the push of a button. The other thing the futurists back then didn’t anticipate – but science fiction writers did – was that there would be corporate middle men working with governments to control the ‘flow’ of the ‘great’ new technologies and how they’re used.
The technologies haven’t ‘democratised’ anything. Websites such as The Daily Sceptic, newspaper websites, discussion forums and the like are all at the mercy of the whims of unaccountable corporations and governments. It’s never been easier for someone in government to notice what’s being said about them, dislike it and have that person destroyed. It’s a matter of a phonecall and one of those Twitter weirdos who contact corporate overseers will accuse the site and people who run it of racism, climate ‘denial’ and a host of other things, which potentially will swiftly lose them their website’s host, their email provider, their bank accounts and even those of their family and friends.
In theory, you don’t need a middle man to have cloud storage: you an buy a cloud hard drive of your own to link to your wifi (although you require an ISP) and with a little work, you can control your boiler or security cameras or light switches without having to go through someone like Hive. But people are lazy and are willing to sacrifice their security for supposed convenience.
The high tech future we live in is a corporate chimera. In reality we’re walking into luxury prison cells, locking the door ourselves on the inside and passing the keys through the gap to the prison warder!
Thus demonstrating that the EU is basically an enlarged East Germany with Erick Honecker tendencies.
Merkel is an Ossi …. that is all that you need to know,.
Merkel is a political has-been enjoying her gold-plated retirement.
Given my belief that people’s personalities, deeds and contentment (personal happiness or otherwise) become writ in their faces, as they age, I take great pleasure in my doubt that Merkel enjoys much of anything.
Same goes for Bliar,
A diet of wasps for Global Government.
Yes because her parents were two of the very few who moved to East Germany.
THIS is shocking, truly evil, add it to the list of EU evils, to be repeated and repeated. These are Communist tactics, China’s grubby paws all over it and the same in the US.
EUSSR bans Free Speech
Interesting piece of EU legislation. How they think they can control American big business is rather beyond me, I assume they will attempt to issue fines, but these will never be paid. EU-US trade will probably stop.
In simplistic terms I suggest these social media sites just ditch the EU completely, but due to the nature of the internet this is very difficult. What will probably happen is that EU ISPs will have to not transmit the content to their subscribers, this in itself is the most severe censorship imaginable. It will also be vastly expensive, but that has never worried the EU bureaucrats has it?
It will end in disaster for the EU, well worth standing back and watching the resulting civil unrest.
Ministry of Truth
This presumes that there are people who are infallible, can never be wrong, who make decisions about ‘disinformation’.