Large platforms like X, Facebook and Instagram are now required to be compliant with the EU’s draconian Digital Services Act censorship law, which appears set to become the global standard and enable the European Commission to censor the internet. Dr. Normal Lewis writes about the seemingly unstoppable reforms in Spiked.
Not many people know that November 16th 2022 was the day that freedom of speech died on the internet. This was the day the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) came into law. Under the DSA, very large online platforms (VLOPs) with more than 45 million monthly active users – like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – will have to swiftly remove illegal content, hate speech and so-called disinformation from their platforms. Or they will face fines of up to 6% of their annual global revenue. Larger platforms must be DSA compliant by this summer, while smaller platforms will be obliged to tackle this content from 2024 onwards.
The ramifications of this are immense. Not only will the DSA now enforce the regulation of content on the internet for the first time, but it is also set to become a global standard, not just a European one.
In recent years, the EU has largely realised its ambition to become a global regulatory superpower. The EU can dictate how any company worldwide must behave if it wants to operate in Europe, the world’s second-largest market. As a result, its strict regulatory standards often end up being adopted worldwide by both firms and other regulators, in what is known as the ‘Brussels effect’. Take the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a privacy law which came into force in May 2018. Among many other things, it requires individuals to give explicit consent before their data can be processed. These EU regulations have since become the global standard, and the same could now happen for the DSA.
The EU’s enforcement of GDPR has been somewhat tentative. It has issued only about €1.7 billion in penalties since 2018, according to the Economist, which is peanuts in an industry that generates more than a trillion euros in revenue annually. But the EU seems to have learnt from this: the DSA has enormous enforcement capabilities built into it. The European Commission expects its internal industry watchdog to have over 100 full-time staff by 2024. Plus, contract workers and national experts will be expected to supervise Big Tech’s operations, too. It amounts to what EU internal-markets commissioner Thierry Breton calls a “historic moment in digital regulation”. The VLOPS are expected to fund this enforcement operation themselves, paying up to 0.05% of their global annual turnover each year to the Commission.
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”. Given the EU’s willingness to weaponise the ‘rule of law’ against its ideological opponents, such as Poland and Hungary, the potential this gives the EU to abuse this mechanism is worrying indeed.
Not only does this give the EU immense powers for censorship, it also represents a profound technocratic evasion of democratic accountability. The unelected European Commission is forcing Big Tech to police the internet to rein in what the EU deems to be unacceptable speech or disinformation. In so doing, the Commission has empowered itself to impose its values on the rest of us. If this draconian censorship were being enforced by a national government, we would at least be able to vote it out. But this is an altogether different scenario.
Depressing stuff. Worth reading in full.
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ESG is a contrived subject that belongs firmly within the Sociology field and therefore should be added to the curriculums of those places of “learning” within the tertiary sector that feel the need to peddle this crap.
If your business is dealing with interest rates, or making cars, or building homes or whatever then ESG is none of your workload and would certainly eat in to expensive management time whilst providing sweet F A in return for god knows what cost.
Those companies that feel the need to jump on the ESG bandwagon are simply proclaiming that they are badly managed. In these cases “go woke, go broke,” is just reward for management incompetence.
ESG, another disease of the age. A virus which kills poorly businesses.
You gotta laugh.
Curricula – but apart from that,yes.
Indeed. My apologies.
No need to apologise, huxleypiggles:
https://www.grammar-monster.com/plurals/plural_of_curriculum.htm
‘The plural of “curriculum” is “curricula” or “curriculums.”’
‘Both “curricula” and “curriculums” are accepted plurals of “curriculum.”’
The noun “curriculum” has a Latin root, which is the derivation of the plural “curricula.” “Curriculums” (which adheres to the standard rules for forming plurals) is also an accepted plural.’
I prefer “curriculums”. Some people don’t care which is used:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/dr-wordsmith-makes-a-house-call-at-the-tower-of-babel-1099283.html
Wordsmith writes: When it comes to the behaviour of foreign plurals in English, there are two schools of thought. One maintains that you should stick to foreign rules – that the plural of “poltergeist” is “poltergeister” and the plural of “curriculum vitae” is “curricula vitae”. And the other – the Jack Straw school of thought, perhaps – thinks that immigrant words should obey English rules while they are here, and that the plural of “stadium” should be “stadiums” and not “stadia”.
Dear Dr Wordsmith, And which school of thought do you belong to?
Dr Wordsmith writes: I belong to a third school, the A-Plague-On-Both- Your-Schools School, whose motto is: I couldn’t give a monkey’s.’
Many thanks. I too prefer the proper use of words, punctuation and grammar and in this instance I should have used “curricula” but as usual I was posting in haste (
).
On the topic of laughing, I did enjoy this mini clip. Let’s hope they’re verbalizing the general consensus, haha..
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/celtic-fans-sing-you-can-shove-your-coronation-up-your-a-347611/
That’s wonderful. Thanks Mogs.
Consolidation of a diverse banking market into a select few big players. Guess it will make CBDC’s easier to roll out.
Here in the UK we have seen similar consolidation with the energy market with a reversion to more or less the same old ‘big six’.
Net Zero appears to be concentrating the power and the wealth away from smaller players and into the hands of the elites.
“Net Zero appears to be concentrating the power and the wealth away from smaller players and into the hands of the elites.”
So for the Davos Deviants it’s all coming together nicely.
BlackRock does not permit anything that does not support ESG and DIE – they pull the strings
Well, it sure didn’t help.
But that bank now folded so quickly because the Feds signalled through their ridiculous SVB actions that your deposits are only safe with JPM and some other too big too fail banks and that at a ridiculous 100% regardless of deposit size: a bailout of the ultra-rich.
That’s why large deposits now flee regional banks and go the the biggies.
And the biggies then get to pick them up for free, as is custom for a fascist large company oligarchy.
The Bear, Stearns&co. takeunder actually served as the blueprint for these steals and the ones to come.
I doubt they have the self-awareness to understand, but highly paid executives charged with managing woke programs should probably be feeling nervous right about now.
Took most of my savings out of the bank and bought some property. Savings are just numbers on a spreadsheet and can be devalued at the whim of the market. I don’t want to be a victim of contagion and offered 60p in the pound. Like with the hoax pandemic, I don’t trust the authorities