The EU has issued a warning to Elon Musk to comply with sweeping new laws on fake news and Russian propaganda, after X – formerly known as Twitter – was found to have the highest ratio of disinformation posts of all large social media platforms.
The report analysed the ratio of disinformation for a new report laying bare for the first time the scale of fake news on social media across the EU, with millions of fake accounts removed by TikTok and LinkedIn.
Facebook was the second worst offender, according to the first ever report recording posts that will be deemed illegal across the EU under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in August.
Nevertheless, Facebook and other tech giants, including Google, TikTok and Microsoft, have signed up to the code of practice the EU drew up to ensure they could get ready in time to operate within the confines of the new laws.
Twitter left the code of practice but it is obliged under the new law to comply with the rules or face a ban across the EU.
All journalists should get off of it today. Right now. Not tomorrow but now.
All the journos I am aware of are on substack/bluesky/whatever else they’re flocking to this week, and also on twitter, because of course they are.
Lol, funny watching the pawns go from one proprietary platform to another.
It’s like they’re all in on making someone else richer.
You are not smarter for using a different platform
Yeah, I’m smarter for not being taken advantage of to make someone richer.
Honestly, yesterday. As soon as the rebranding changed the past form of tweeting from twat the last thing of value on that platform was lost.
All the ones that have stayed have told everyone exactly what their real priorities are.
Melon Husk will probably treat that as a win. It’s confirmation that what he is doing is working and he’s aggregating the right (not as in “correct”) people on his platform.
I liked to follow certain niche content creators on Twitter but the platform has become unusable since Elon took over. Genuinely sad.
I’m really disheartened that most of the people I follow on twitter haven’t moved to other platforms, or if they did they decided to go to bluesky that is the same shit as twitter (or is bound to be in a few years).
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So your username is telling me you constantly create new accounts because you can’t deal with the consequences of your speech? Lame, stop hiding from it with alt accounts.
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Oh hey look, someone else who is pretending to not understand the paradox of tolerance.
Believing that certain marginalized groups of people aren’t human (and/or don’t belong in society, and/or don’t deserve equal rights) is not a defensible belief, and people who are actually tolerant will not tolerate that.
Tired of conservatives acting like they’re “just asking questions,” or behaving like they’re just presenting an opposing political viewpoint, and not advocating for genocide.
Rightwingers aren’t people.
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Have you ever read this quote:
“Wenn unsere Gegner sagen: Ja, wir haben Euch doch früher die […] Freiheit der Meinung zugebilligt – –, ja, Ihr uns, das ist doch kein Beweis, daß wir das Euch auch tuen sollen! […] Daß Ihr das uns gegeben habt, – das ist ja ein Beweis dafür, wie dumm Ihr seid!” - Rede vom 4. Dezember 1935
https://de.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels
That’s what you get for being tolerant towards intolerance. That was 88 Years ago and you think everybody still falls for that?
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Ignorant…
“Your intolerance of intolerance makes you the real bigot!”
Twitter is increasingly full of fascists. Fascists don’t deserve tolerance or respect. Of course there’s also all the Russian, Israeli, and United States propaganda bots, actual propagandists, plus myriad other reasons someone might object to the platform but yes, the strawman argument you fabricated is “clearly the only reasonable cause for criticism against Twitter”.
Looking forward to your next strawman.
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The Paradox of Tolerance disappears if you look at tolerance, not as a moral standard, but as a social contract.
If someone does not abide by the terms of the contract, then they are not covered by it.
In other words: The intolerant are not following the rules of the social contract of mutual tolerance.
Since they have broken the terms of the contract, they are no longer covered by the contract, and their intolerance should NOT be tolerated.
(Shamelessly copied from @itsOasus on Mastodon )
use cancel culture against somebody they disagree
LOL. Is “cancel culture” even a thing?
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Really? How? Who has been “cancelled”? What happened to them?
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How were they “cancelled”, though? Do awful people have a right to gobs of money and attention and a platform? If I get fired from my job for bad behavior, does that mean it’s not being fired, but “cancelled”?
By the way, nearly all the people that are supposedly “cancelled” still seem to have careers.
“Cancel culture” is just a big myth from the right.
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Typing search terms into Google does not an argument make. Neither does calling people lazy.
“Cancel culture” is not really a thing.
I don’t think he was saying that.
There are Twitter–>Fedi bots you can follow for most “notable” figures. Obviously you can’t interact with them and you’ll only see replies from other “notable” figures, but I see that as a bonus.
Can someone give me an example of when a country warned a company about their behavior/practices that actually made a change? Because to me, it seems the companies (Amazon/Twitter etc.) do whatever they want regardless of what country doesn’t like it.
The new laws under the DSA will enable “structural remedies” for consistent non-compliance, and it requires fighting disinformation. This is the EU telling him to shape up or risk forced divestment.
The question is whether they will make good on it, or who blinks first.
Berlaymont doesn’t blink. They also don’t bluff. It’s a civil service born as the administrative arm of a trade cartel, as a company you can safely assume that anything they’re saying is an offer you can’t refuse.
Apple has been taking a rightful beating by the EU, for one.
the EU has been making a change for many years now.
in the EU we now have free roaming, standardized charging ports (you’re welcome, by the way) to which even apple had to follow suit, standardized charging bricks, protection from unwanted cookies, data safety laws, online purchase protection, right to return, and so on… i can make the list longer but i think you get the picture.
Only when a large enough market passes legislation that actually has teeth. Look at the GDPR.
True, and that’s the kind of enterprise to which in Italy we gave the collective name of mafia.
Musk has already left millions of dollars in advertiser funds on the table in the name of “free speech”. He’s not going to comply.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The EU has issued a warning to Elon Musk to comply with sweeping new laws on fake news and Russian propaganda, after X – formerly known as Twitter – was found to have the highest ratio of disinformation posts of all large social media platforms.
Facebook was the second worst offender, according to the first ever report recording posts that will be deemed illegal across the EU under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in August.
Nevertheless, Facebook and other tech giants, including Google, TikTok and Microsoft, have signed up to the code of practice the EU drew up to ensure they could get ready in time to operate within the confines of the new laws.
The 200-page report is an account of the work the large platforms have done in the first six months of 2023 to prepare for compliance with the new law and lifts the lid on the behind-the-scenes efforts made by Facebook and others to crack down on Russian propaganda, hate speech and other disinformation.
“The Russian state has engaged in the war of ideas to pollute our information space with half truth and lies to create a false image that democracy is no better than autocracy,” said Jourová.
YouTube, owned by Google, told the EU it had removed more than “400 channels involved in coordinated influence operations linked to the Russian-state sponsored Internet Research Agency”.
The original article contains 788 words, the summary contains 233 words. Saved 70%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
The original article contains 788 words
Damn this must be Elon’s favourite article
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oh this’ll really do it this time. disinformation. galling.
NOTE:
We all probably want Musk to ‘Shut it down’, or EU to force him to shut it down.
But isn’t that exactly what certain countries have been asking for, for a long time now??
Protests are usually coordinated via Twitter,
There are far better platforms to organize a protest on, like basically anything with e2e encryption.
“Better” is not always quite as easy.
Sometimes large public reach is incredibly important (and sometimes even more important than e2e encryption). So yes, for many things having a private medium is the way better choice, but for others the tradeoff between that and having a large reach works differently (and yes, obviously a super-secure, unmonitored medium with huge reach would probably be the best for many things, but I’m not aware of such a thing).
As an example, the 2011 Egyptian revolution was to a large degree organized over Twitter. There’s a lot to be said about the suboptimal tool you can use versus the perfect tool that doesn’t help.Twitter is not long for this world. It’s hemorrhaging users. The majority of active accounts that remain are Elon’s fan club and bots. BlueSky will replace it as a town hall.
I agree with the demise of twitter and I hope that it will be swift. I’m just saying that technical quality is not always the deciding factor.
On a related note I see no reason to suspect bluesky to take a significantly different trajectory. Jack and Elon share a lot more of the relevant/problematic views that might be obvious at first.
Because Jack knows it’s bad business to do what Elon’s doing. Jack is more cunning and will likely cultivate this just as he did with Twitter and then sell it again. The cycle repeats
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WERE. Twitter is dead.
Why is it bad when China does this but laudable when the EU does it
How are they similar?
bOth SidEs BaD
Well for one they both have laws that social media must remove what they consider disinformation. It was a huge controversy when reddit et al agreed to abide by Chinas rules, and now people are attacking them for not abiding by the same rule from the EU.
I never knew images of Winnie the Pooh is considered misinformation in China. Oh wait, no its not, they’re just banning it because Xi Jinping’s ego is so fragile that it can’t even handle some harmless memes making fun of him.
To me, that’s the perfect example of the difference between what China is doing and what the EU is doing.
So you’re ok with banning political speech so long as you can post pictures of a cartoon bear?
In what world is political speech considered misinformation. Misinformation by definition is something that doesn’t reflect actual facts. Political speech is just opinions.
If you believe certain political speeches overlap with the definition of misinformation, why would you even defend such a thing?
In what world is political speech considered misinformation
When someone declares it misinformation, like trump calling every story he didn’t like “fake news”. It’s really fashy and the people applauding the EU for this today will end up regretting it later.
Well, then that’s another major difference between what the EU is doing and what China is doing. No person would have the power to singularly decide what is misinformation.
Even if we ignore the bad faith shit you tried to pull: Because the EU is cool and China is a dictatorial piece of trash.
Oh no, people are saying stupid shit on a discussion platform. Someone bring in the government to shut it down!!!
