Commission opens formal proceedings against X under the Digital Services Act (opens in new tab)

But that doesn't remove the content. It just sticks a label underneath it. And it's only on the most popular tweets.

>It simply works.

Does it? Because I've seen it used to spread all sorts of bullshit, including against Musk/X.

One case that comes to my mind when Musk wanted to make blocking to work the same as muting, and the false claim of it being against Apple's App Store rules was added as context.

It's a pretty bad dark joke, but considering it illegal? Especially by an american company, freedom of speech and all that?

Bloody hell, that was an _example of a Tweet that they were okay with, in training material_?!

Chat control was struck down last month and was never going to go through anyways as just having a cursory understanding of technology is enough to understand that banning end to end encryption is infeasible.

And chat control being struck down was in part on the grounds of respecting rights around private correspondence so you're just spreading factually wrong information for no good reason.

There's the commission and the parliament. The commission comes up with ideas for laws and the parliament says if they're okay or not.

If your government is working properly, there should be a small part of it trying to ban encryption, and a part of it trying to keep encryption legal. It's an adversarial system. Encryption will be an unpopular subject here, so let's talk about zoning instead: a small part of the government should be representing builders by trying to make it legal to build anything anywhere, and a small part should be representing land speculators by trying to make it illegal to build anything anywhere.

To people downvoting the above, you should inform yourselves better: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-violation-priv... . The EU Commission has been trying to ban end-to-end encryption, which is functionally equivalent to a ban on private online communication.

>A mere 3 years! This is, in fairness, quite proactive by EC standards.

Isn't that just because EU rules have quite long transition periods to give companies time to comply with the new rules? GDPR had a two-year transition period before enforcement, and even then there was tons of complaints towards the end of the two-year period on how there just wasn't enough time to comply.

Commissioner Breton sent a stark warning to Musk, that was arrogantly brushed off in typical Musk fashion. Musk is now going to be schooled in very expensive fashion as to how being a billionaire does not make you above the laws, in Europe at least, and this is probably why the proceedings were launched, although in all likelihood the EC does not have all its ducks in a row in terms of organization, staffing and processes to enforce the DSA and DMA just yet.

And about time. The EU (and the US even more so) has been pretty ignorant about the way hostile anti-democratic regimes wage war against free and democratic societies.

For dictatorships a misinformation campaign is both way more effective and cheaper than a single Mig fighter jet. This asymmetric war was already a big problem, but the oligarch Musk might have been too loud a siren for the sleepy lawmakers that believed that democracies will survive no matter how much you are killing its base.

- yes, there are all kind of problems people are rightly upset about.

- yes, politicians have traded trust for political results.

- yes, the US/EU has also failed by opting for "Real Politik" instead of values.

- no, a whattabouttism doesn´t help our societies. Instead, fight to preserve and improve what we inherited.

- no, helping to fuel distrust undercuts the fabric of our societies.

Because he didn't fire everyone in the first week.

The EU learned from GDPR, that member countries cannot be relied to enforce the law when some like Ireland have deliberately positioned themselves as a tax (and now GDPR) shelter for multinationals. That's why DSA and DMA enforcement is centralized in Brussels.

> For me it was at best a slight help if I was trying to find a celebrity that had impersonators.

Yes, that is literally what it was designed for, and the only thing it was useful for.

It’s now, I suppose, useful for identifying people to avoid, but it’s no longer useful for preventing impersonation.

> For me it was at best a slight help if I was trying to find a celebrity that had impersonators.

That's exactly why it was useful. Major institutions and public figures have impersonators, some satirical and others intentionally misleading. The check made it easy to sift what actually came from someone and what was either lies or satire.

On that front it hasn't gotten too bad because the grey and gold checkmarks exist.

Now blue checkmarks are a sign to ignore the tweet because it's someone who's just paid to boost their signal. Of course this has rendered the thread of replies to a given tweet unusable since the top posts are all posts by people who have paid to be seen rather than posts with more likes or retweets (actual signals of value/popularity).

It was actually a great system. All those Elon free crypto giveaway scam accounts could make a profile that looked exactly like Elon Musk, but they couldn't get that blue check. It was great when it was a completely neutral system to state only "this account is who it says it is." But then they ruined it by removing the checks from people with unpopular political opinions, even though they were in fact the official account of that person, and then it became seen as a sort of political endorsement from Twitter.

Oh, this procedure will be running for years. Expect a few rounds of "we're not complying / we are complying / oh no you're not" as well, each of which taking over a year.

Because X will have gone bankrupt and bust worldwide by then?

It doesn't have to anything with elites. EU just likes to virtue signal on climate change and new technologies by introducing regulations to keep status quo. Keeping jobs for the sake of only keeping jobs doesn't make any productive sense.

The European Commission is not elected by EU citizens btw.

Maybe they saw something on youtube that said Von Der Leyen is going to the ISS? That's about the only way I can see "EU launches comission" make any sense. ;)

For example, they were happy about social media platforms censoring or otherwise suppressing content which opposed the COVID19 vaccine mandates; they didn't raise any alarms there while there was actual substantial manipulation of the algorithms involved...

But now that X has mostly removed filtering and manipulations from the algorithms, they begin proceedings against it! Just because they don't like the kind of content that people posted. They don't want people to have equal voice.

They seem largely focused on "illegal content", specifically referencing the Oct 7 attack on Israel:

> concerned the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas' terrorist attacks against Israel

> The compliance with the DSA obligations related to countering the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, notably in relation to the risk assessment and mitigation measures adopted by X to counter the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, as well as the functioning of the notice and action mechanism for illegal content in the EU mandated by the DSA, including in light of X's content moderation resources.

At least in the US, footage of a terrorist attack is not illegal. In fact, it often serves important journalistic and public interest purposes. Twitter is an important source of first-hand coverage of conflicts such as the Israel/Hamas conflict and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. EU safetyism threatens to interfere with this important function.