Didn’t a year ago or so, Some European lawmaker made a vague hint in support of something that involved regulations on social media, and Elon replied “go fuck yourself” verbatem?
Play hardball, or surrender and give them what they want. there’s no compromise or middle ground with these techbro fascists
Fine the heck out of them then. If they don’t pay the fine ban em. Plenty of alternatives out there. More competition in the search engine market would be better anyways.
Not too big of a fan of banning companies as the hurdles should be decently high… Especially if many people rely on their service but if they won’t comply with our jurisdiction long term I see this as the only option as fees can not be order of business to pay
Start criminal proceedings to imprison the leadership responsible for non-compliance. Seize their assets to pay for any fine.
Why do we accept that all solutions to corporate crimes should be fines and kiddie gloves?
Because our legal system is made in a way where they technically are not a crime
Google has told the EU that it will not comply with a forthcoming fact-checking law.
Perfect time to implement sky-high fines for non-compliance.
Ah, but that’s why US Big Tech is splooshing cash all over President Felon and hoping he saves them from evil communist European consumer protections.
Yep, they’re hoping Trump will pressure the EU to get rid of their pesky consumer protections. They don’t even make any profits for billionaires!
Yes, the EU will certainly kowtow to him and bend the knee. 🙄
I mean Putin’s weaselly little far right lackeys are scarily close to being in government in a few European countries now (or already are, Hungary and Slovakia). So who knows
The good news is that, when Putin goes, they’ll go too. There are some other dependancies that you can easily work out.
I’m not convinced Putin isn’t an immortal Reptilian
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Given that we are going full authoritarian fascist now, perhaps the EU should ban Google, given the US tik tok precedent.
What a twist. In the 90s, the internet forced countries to wake up to the new modern era. It was a combination of American companies wanting both to expand and provide goodwill.
And now, this new era is going to tell American companies to fuck off.
Democracies around the world rightly shouldn’t tolerate the blatant corruption and manipulative business practice of American tech companies.
America itself seems fine with it.
Oh wait, you said Democracies right. My bad.
Commence operation “find out”!
If the links in the article are accurate, this doesn’t seem to be a “law”, but this thing: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-disinformation
Anyone know more about it than I could quickly find? Is this in any way legally enforceable?
Obviously, I believe that governments have no legitimate business whatsoever telling us on the Internet what we can talk about, say to each other, etc.; but I would still like to know more about this particular attempt by the EU to do so anyway, so would appreciate more information.
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It isn’t law yet though, and it is the current iteration that Google won’t follow. We have yet to see how they will react if it actually becomes law. My guess is that they will, begrudgingly, bend the knee.
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Yeah, I definitely misread the article, my bad! I doubt the EU will let it stand when it’s enacted.
The DSA contains provisions for combatting disinformation and as a very large online platform google is required to implement suitable practices. The DSA is a regulation, that is, immediately applicable law in all of the EU. As is usual for laws it’s written pretty generically and abstract, though, so the commission is also publishing more detailed documents that companies can use as check-lists.
In essence, the difference between the tax code and the finance ministry publishing a paper on accounting best practices. You’re free to ignore the latter but that will likely make your life harder than it needs to be.
Damn.
Wish the rest of us could just ignore all laws & not face any consequences.
What a fucking joke this entire system is.
They don’t have a problem giving someone 100 years for a quarter bag of weed though. For a first time offense.
Oh that was long ago. it’s for not having a baby if you’re female now. Megacorps run usa and now the worst (which is best for some reason) ceo in the history of man will again be president and continue the clear path to government dismantling
I want to live in a world where the EU bans Google, but we all know the EU will just roll over and accept this.
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picking up the sarcasm
The rich are trying to pivot the Trump vicory into world domination before we can organize and dethrone the oligarchy.
Google/Meta helping to spread misinformation is a big part of that.
I wish I was kidding.
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
The evidence so far is that the primary response of the heinously rich when they fear for their lives is to spend more or much more on their security and their politicians rather than to change their evil greedy behavior at all. Those looking for any real solution to oligarchs need to consider this fact when evaluating what should be done.
Or fortune… but you can’t take it with you so your point still stands.
Honestly, the most humane and least distasteful solution is to dispossess the billionaires of their billions. Not a drop of their blood need to be shed, should this be done.
Too bad the billionaires just bought the government of the United States
Let me know when you figure out how to peacefully redistribute the wealth of people who want to rule the world
Good, hope they get banned in the EU so people will switch to competitors
I would love that. I still use google products, because I was too lazy to switch, a ban would give me the incentive to move to another platform
DuckDuckGo: Use us because Google is so evil they were banned in Europe
They use bing tho. I personally like Qwant as they fall under GDPR and are european. Also they are working on building an independent search index.
I could see the EU backing down a few years ago, but these days they have watered down any actual advantage in search by filling their results with ads and low quality content. Not that I use Reddit any more, but a good Reddit search engine would probably be better for a lot of use cases.
Then you got people like Musk using their websites as foreign influence platforms to restore Nazis into power so I’d imagine there’s an appetite for not being so reliant on the increasingly belligerent US media oligarchy, which itself is the victim of Fox News and Murdoch.
Plus everything is already enshittified anyway so easy to create better.
Luckily google bought exclusive rights to query Reddit
Except reddit is all ai-generated bullshit now. Unless you search before 2024, searching reddit is literally useless, and that’s all going to be out of date so quickly
Reddit search engine? Hell nah I want more federated communities. Reddit has a contract with google anyways that blocks out foreign web crawlers.
That’s what I mean. Their own native search that only searches Reddit. I’m not saying it would be great, just better than Google for many uses cases.
This isn’t me talking up Reddit—I haven’t been back in over a year. This is me trashing Google.
Google is basically saying the EU couldn’t do its own subpar search and they’re not brave enough to try.
I like this. I don’t think I need a large company fact-checking anything tbh. They already got too much influence and power, I don’t need them to control the narrative even more.
Unbelievable 2025 is turning out to be a stellar year
And not a single bit of this would matter at all if YOU PEOPLE* would just know a damned thing!
*present company excepted, of course.
In other words, a company, acting on behalf of its own shareholders, tells a government, which represents 100% of the citizens in a given territory, to shove its legislation where the sun doesn’t shine. And not only is this not inherently absurd, but it also stands a significant chance of succeeding in getting the government to comply.
A government … only in theory does. Like a church represents God, because humans are too dumb to understand him directly.
“Fact-checking” is preserving a certain model of censorship and propaganda. “No fact-checking” is moving to a new model of censorship and propaganda.
Both sides of this fight prefer it being called such, so that one seems against misinformation, and the other seems against censorship, but they are not really different in this dimension. They are different in strategy and structure and interests, but neither is good for the average person.
“Fact-checking” is preserving a certain model of censorship and propaganda. “No fact-checking” is moving to a new model of censorship and propaganda.
Dude, facts are facts or they are not. There is no rejection of fact checking that will result in more truths being exposed to the world, only less.
Facts are facts, and nothing a human says is a fact, it’s a projection of a fact upon their conscience, at best.
And those doing the “fact checking” are humans, so they are checking if something is fact in their own opinion or organization’s policy, at best.
These are truisms.
There is no rejection of fact checking that will result in more truths being exposed to the world, only less.
This is wrong. People like to pick “their” side in power games between mighty adversaries, and to think that when one of the sides is more lucky, it’s them who’s winning. But no, it’s not them. If somebody’s “checking facts” for you and you like it, you’ve already lost. Same thing, of course, if you trust some “community evaluations” or that there’s truth that can be learned so cheaply, by going online and reading something.
You give authority to define “facts” to a fact checking institution. That institution may not be sufficiently independent. Because of meddling the institution spreads lies under the claim they would be facts and declares actual facts as lies.
Just think about a fact checking under the authority of Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, AIPAC…
this is mostly an american take, and most of the rest of the world tends to disagree with this “free speech absolutism”
it’s the slippery slope fallacy
No, it is not the slippery slope fallacy. If you create an instrumemt that obligates fact checking, you have to give someone authority to define what are facts and what arent. And as this is obligatory by law, these fact checkers are subject to supervision or are directly part of the government.
So now the government gets to decide what are facts and what are not. Which can easily be abused. Especially as disinformation through so called fact checkers can move as fast as any other disinformarion.
So at the very least you need to create a sanction regime, e.g. criminal punishment for the abuse of the fact checking, as well as a right for people to have the fact checking checked and challenged, if they think it spreads lies against them. This way you can have it analysed by courts, as the most neutral authority in a state of law.
I dont get how people in Europe, where i live by the way, especially with the experience of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco fascism, as well as all the Warsaw pact authoritarianism, GDR surveillance, red scare policies in the Western countries during cold war, etc. are just treating this so lightly.
Authoritarian regimes based on lies and forbidding the truth are not some abstract. They are both an extensive reality of the recent past as well as looking at Orban, Melloni, Wilders, Merz and many others they are reemerging right now.
If you create an instrumemt that obligates fact checking, you have to give someone authority to define what are facts and what arent
yeah… and some things are just straight up facts… this is literally the perfect example of slippery slope
That’s a solvable problem, not a reason to reject fact checking as a concept.
So if the US would make obligatory fact checking under a Trump administration. How would you solve that problem?
In the end it always boils down to the current administration getting to decide what the facts and what the disinformation is.
This is easily abusable and for instance Goerge Orwell predicted such problems with the “Ministry of Truth” in his book 1984.
you seem to think that this would be some arbiter of truth with no recourse, but we have courts that deal with defamation all the time, and the scientific method… these are all tools we use to, as a collective, come to conclusions about objective (or as realistically close to) truth as we can get
And we keep the government out of finding scientific truths for good reasons. Independence of science is crucial. Also scientific trith is not absolute. No scientist worth his salt will say “x is true and y is false”. They would say “we have strong evidence to support x and we have strong evidence that y is not the case under all tested circumstances.”
Courts move slow and only in acvordance with the lae. For instance in my country politics decided to define Afghanistan as a secure country of origin by law, to make it impossible for people to seek Asylum from there. That was the legislative opinion of “fact”. And that also was while the Taliban was retaking large swaths of the country and months later took full control. Iirc. it was only stopped when the constitutional court decided much later, that clearly this is wrong.
I am not against fact checking. But if you mandate it by law, you must observe the adherence to the law. And for that you ultimately need to grant the government the definition of what is true and what is not, simply in order to measure the adherence to the law by.
It’s not that I don’t understand those concerns, I just don’t think those are reasons to reject the concept, nor the obligation to make an effort.
How would you solve that problem?
I doubt I have the necessary understanding of the nuance to propose any good solution. That’s not evidence that one doesn’t exist, however. And if the folks who should be responsible for such things are choosing to abdicate that responsibility, I’m going to need a better reason than “because it’s hard.”
stands a significant chance of succeeding in getting the government to comply.
<EU> Яндекс it is or you can Bing It.
It felt miraculous for me that, for a while, tech companies appeared to comply to regulation (doing the bare minimum, as slowly as possible, but it kinda worked).
My hypothesis is that they now except political support from Trump administration and to pressure the EU?
My hypothesis is that they now except political support from Trump administration and to pressure the EU?
Yes. We will now export our fascism, making it essentially just the same imperialism we’ve been engaged in forever.
To be fair, you haven’t invented fascism.
Although, in France we have a sort of proverb that says that what happens in the US happens here 10 years later. I hope we will manage to dodge what’s coming at us, this time…
Me too!
Bingo. Trump already started playing with his corporate finger puppets, emboldening some, threatening others.
Same reason Zuckerberg, surely the expert on the matter, had this weird rambling about “masculine energy” very recently. What a Trumpian phrase.
They probably wouldn’t have had to if the school system hadn’t dropped language arts from most curriculums ages ago. Students now are getting a markedly shitter education and don’t even know they’re being fucked over.
It’s by design, the politicians only need 28% to win, easier to scrape those votes off the bottom of the barrel of knowledge
What really stings is watching groups and communities which historically have been supportive of each other getting fragmented by overt social media operations. It’s asinine and just makes it easier to marginalize and oppress the people that most frequently need a voice.
Our country is now run by Twitter and Truth Social, and too many people are already lost to social media disinformation campaigns (counter-intelligence)
Feel like that speech would have meant more when he still had the power to do anything about it. Instead of going to war against this oligarchy he chose to cash his political capital on a rushed pull out of Afghanistan, and to kill a bunch of Palestinians.
I chose to see this as a glass half full situation. I hope that in four years we see this speech as a starting point in which the Dems run on a platform of economic populism.
You may call me overly optimistic. However, the reason I am even remotely hopeful is that the very rich (and the media they own) are fully realigning with the GOP. This means Democrats will receive far less large donations in the future, and things will get shaken up, whether leadership likes it or not.
Instead of going to war against this oligarchy he chose to cash his political capital on a rushed pull out of Afghanistan
I don’t see how this is laid on Biden since Trump agreed to the withdrawal and timeline, and then R relentlessly hammered Biden for not getting on it, then relentlessly hammered him for the problems related to rushing it.
I agree with the rest of your comment.
don’t see how this is laid on Biden since Trump agreed to the withdrawal and timeline
Trump made the original withdrawal date and Biden arbitrarily stuck to it when he came into office.
He was under no real obligation to stick to the timeline and it was a betrayal to every Afghan citizen that worked with us. I don’t really care what Republicans bitch and moan about.
Fair opinion I guess, but I think there are plenty of things you can cleanly give Biden shit about before you get all the way down to complying with the troop withdrawal schedule that Trump committed us to.
Eh, I guess it’s a matter of opinion. To me knowingly finishing your opponents mistake is worse than making an honest one yourself.
I may be a little biased though, as I have had the opportunity to provide healthcare to a few of the Afghan interpreters that were lucky enough to evacuate and make it state side.
I work in orthopedics and rehabilitation, so they had all been pretty banged up, missing limbs, or had lower limbs injuries that affected their mobility. But their personal injuries were nothing compared to how much uncertainty they faced about not knowing about the well being of extended family and friends still in Afghanistan, a home they will likely never have the chance to ever visit again.
All fair points, but what do you suppose the Taliban would have done to those same people and more if the US had not pulled out when Trump told them we would?
