The EU’s Investigation Of ExTwitter Is Ridiculous & Censorial
from the bureaucrats-should-not-be-determining-speech-policy dept
People keep accusing me of criticizing Elon Musk because I “hate” him. But I don’t hate him, nor do I criticize him out of any personal feelings at all, beyond thinking that he often is hypocritical in his decision making, and makes decisions that defy common sense and logic. But when he does the right thing, I’m equally happy to call it out positively.
And while I’ve seen some people cheering on the EU’s new investigation of ExTwitter under the DSA (Digital Services Act), I think it’s extremely problematic and hope that Elon fights it. As we’ve explained, the DSA — while more thoughtful and careful in its approach than most US legislation about social media — remains a tool that can be abused for censoring speech.
Supporters of the DSA kept insisting to me that it would never be used that way, while wink-wink-nudge-nudging that if it didn’t magically stop ill-defined bad content online then it had somehow failed.
And thus, it was quite notable when the EU’s unelected technocrat enforcer, Thierry Breton, started threatening ExTwitter and other Silicon Valley companies earlier this year. The most notable thing was that Breton lumped together illegal content (which the sites are required to take down) and “disinformation,” which (in theory!) they’re not required to take down, but are supposed to have some form of best practices for responding to.
Breton lumped the two together, falsely suggesting that websites were required to remove disinformation under the DSA, which would be quite problematic, given that there is no agreed upon definition of disinformation, and often there are extremely conflicting beliefs about what is and what is not disinformation.
And, yet, this new investigation seems focused on exactly that, among other things:
- The effectiveness of measures taken to combat information manipulation on the platform, notably the effectiveness of X’s so-called ‘Community Notes’ system in the EU and the effectiveness of related policies mitigating risks to civic discourse and electoral processes.
This feels extremely heavy handed and really none of the EU’s business. Community Notes, while not a replacement for a full trust & safety effort, is a really unique and worthwhile experiment (and one that I’d like to see other sites implement as well). How exactly does one judge the “effectiveness” of the system and how is that the EU’s business?
Similarly, this seems really sketchy as well:
- A suspected deceptive design of the user interface, notably in relation to checkmarks linked to certain subscription products, the so-called Blue checks.
I mean, yes, Elon fucked up the whole “blue check as a marker of authority” concept by selling them, rather than using it as part of an actual verification system, but again, calling it “deceptive design” seems like a ridiculous statement, and suggests that the EU now feels it’s reasonable to critique product choices by companies.
Even if we think Elon’s choices around this were dumb and wholly counterproductive, that really shouldn’t be for the government to step in and decide.
And, of course, by kicking off this investigation over such silly things, it really undermines what might be legitimate concerns and areas of investigation, making the whole process — and the DSA itself — appear to be less credible.
Still, I can’t help but close this story with a bit of a “told ya so” directed at Elon. Remember, weeks after announcing his intention to purchase Twitter, Elon sat down with Breton and gave a full throated endorsement of the DSA approach. At the time, we warned him that if he really supported free speech, he’d actually be speaking out about the risks for free speech under the DSA (something old Twitter did in pushing back against earlier drafts of it). But instead, he told Breton that he agreed with this approach. And now he’s its first victim.
I hope that he has ExTwitter fight back against this intrusion, as that would help make it clear that the DSA’s rules should not get this deep into the level of tinkering with content on a site or with random features of a site the EU dislikes.
Filed Under: community notes, deceptive design, dsa, elon musk, free speech, investigation, thierry breton, verification
Companies: twitter, x
Comments on “The EU’s Investigation Of ExTwitter Is Ridiculous & Censorial”
Just for the sake of argument: when the UI says “Verified account” and it really is not and the actual description is hidden behind several clicks, it may be considered deceptive.
Better yet, just today i saw someone on BlueSky posting this
Was it a glitch? A cost cutting measure? An attempt to boost the revenue chaos be damned? No idea.
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The foreseeable, inevitable, and intentional result of gutting trust and safety?
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By a guy who bought a social media platform seemingly to boost Nazis?
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I think you got this one a tiny bit backwards, I think it should be:
“An attempt to boost the chaos revenue be damned?”
It's what Elon wanted
If you recall back before this law was past, Elon was all for it.
They’re still calling it “verification,” Mike. It is clearly not verification of anything beyond the ability to send Elon $8 a month.
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Yeah, they literally changed the definition of what “verified” means, from “We verified this perdson’s identity” to “We verified they paid us money”, without choosing an alternate descriptor. There’s probably a decent argument that this is deceptive in some way.
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Honestly, you can see this clearly from what I’ve seen (disclaimer: I ditched the platform after the disastrous rebranding and wasn’t a regular user for a while before that so I’m going mainly from evidence elsewhere). The notes are going to be ignored by the people who most need to understand them, and they can be used to pretend that the platform’s doing something about their worst while actually platforming them.
It’s the EU’s business because the hate and bullying don’t stay on that platform. It’s hard to say what the correct balance is, but “we can have Nazis so long as someone says those people are Nazis” is a problem, and if you want to do business in the EU they’re going to prefer not having open Nazis.
I’m not fan of the EU’s approach in some of these situations, but it’s definitely their business and it’s been obvious since the start that Community Notes is an attempt to appear to be acting (that Elon himself has can be freely ignored) that action itself.
I see where you’re coming from but I’m going to side with the EU on this one. Despite the whining of the right about bias, the original meaning was just a confirmation of identity, so you knew you were talking with X person or a representative. All of a sudden, the meaning changed to “someone paid for this” without any confirmation of identity? That’s deceptive. At the very least, it’s no longer fit for its original purpose.
If Elon had discontinued the old system and brought in a new one, that’s one thing. But, he tried changing the meaning of the old one, and even gave popular users who refused to pay him “free” checks to give the false impression they’d paid him to promote the service. That’s fraud, even before you get to the issues with the checks being promoted and used by scammers and hate groups.
When the actual product is advertising, deceptive design means deceptive advertising, which there is a legitimate legislative interest in preventing.
'But I agreed with you, why are you going after me?!'
Elon: Curse you leopards for your sudden but inevitable betrayal!
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You can occasionally say stuff like this, but your poasting history reveals the truth: you’re a Democratic Party operative who hates Elon Musk b/c he fired your degenerate censor friends like child groomer Yoel Roth.
We see you, Mike.
Re: Please don't feed this troll
Please do not feed this blatant troll. Flag them and move on.
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So aside from all the other mental problems you have, you also have a multiple personality disorder? Don’t you think it is time for you to seek professional help?
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Tell me you don’t understand the royal we without telling me.
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Neighbors in the loonie bin? I’m surprised they let you have an internet connection tbh.
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Thank you, I’ll add to my notes that you also suffer from delusion of grandeur.
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Are you royalty? If not, then the royal we doesn’t apply.
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Demons! Demons everywhere!
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We? You got a turd in your pocket, or something?
Given that all of these EU moves are designed primarily to punish US entities (simply because they are US-based), I think the EU is looking like a lost cause.
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Russia more your speed?
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What a disgusting and pathetic comment.
Perhaps the reader is simply stating their preference for a post-Brexit Britain w/ full sovereignty restored…
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Nobody is actually stupid enough to believe that the people of the UK, save for the wealthy, are better off for Brexit though.
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Di’t “Sir” James Dyson run away as sokn as Brexit was confirmed?
Yes, I know he did return, but he bolted.
So what do they do when the EC pushes disinfo? Or is it just a platform problem, and not an original-speaker problem?
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I accuse you of criticizing Elon Musk because you cherished the left-wing censorship that Twitter once provided for you and that he took away in the transition to X. The poster child for that was Twitter censoring the Babylon Bee for satirizing Dr. Rachel Levine, a public political figure who is a man posing as a woman, as “Man of the Year”.
You claim to support freedom of speech. But you have a very conveniently constricted view of what freedom of speech is. You readily step in to decry governmental efforts to suppress speech, but you very much support censorship (that is not moderation) of viewpoints you hate by large private generic speech platforms. You support the government “asking” private platforms to censor viewpoints that the government wants silenced.
The 1st Amendment says
Because you want certain viewpoints to be silenced, you (and the usual echo chamber here) want to represent freedom of speech as something the government grants, so that people should have no expectation of free speech on private platforms. But as can be clearly read, the 1st Amendment regards freedom of speech as something that people intrinsically have – the government doesn’t grant it, rather the government may not take it away. And in a country that has freedom of speech as a foundational value, even private platforms should respect the free speech of their users and not censor viewpoints they don’t like, even though their own free speech right allows them to do so.
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Twitter makes the rules, and if you violate the rules, you get punished. Anyone who has a problem with that, has a problem with private property rights and the first amendment.
Stop projecting.
Cite an example. No, whatever was in the Twitter files doesn’t count.
There’s no evidence of that. What the Twitter files showed was that governmental organizations reported potentially malicious content and actors, the same way that anyone can.
If Twitter can ignore more than 50% of the requests(and they were just requests) with no consequences, the government weren’t making them do anything.
There’s that projection again.
You finally revealed the crux of the matter: you want to be free to be an asshole online with no repercussions.
Well, too bad, kiddo. That’s not how the first amendment works, and you can whine about all you want, but speech on privately owned platforms is a privilege, not a right.
If you don’t like that, make your own platform where you can spew all the nonsense you want.
Hell, even Trump understood that very fundamental point. Why can’t you?
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Because he is a sociopath.
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This is a very funny and ironic reply, because literally every single thing you say in response is considered and countered in the original post. As a programmer, I feel like saying “goto start” so we can run around this loop forever.
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No, the original post is nothing but unsubstantiated claims and strawmen.
But thanks for trying to counter without actually countering.
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goto start
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People without arguments always use goto statements because they lack the skill to function.
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You’re making a lot of programmers look like Nazis with your misuse and abuse of programming terms.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
Your accusations aren’t worth the electrons wasted on displaying them because there’s less than zero real-world evidence behind them.
It’s musk
He’ll probably just cut off the EU. He’s threatened to cut off non-accommodating countries before and I don’t doubt that he would.
This is where you ultimately lose me. Every critique of EM paints him not only as petty, but also lazy against anything he doesn’t care about and more than once undercutting the people who do care about what he doesn’t. Despite cataloging and linking to much evidence to the contrary on this very website, you still seem to want to believe Free Speech is one of those things.
You claim that other people think you hate Musk, when I vividly remember you were optimistic about Musk’s chances on buying Twitter even though many red flags were raised at the time. You do put in your due diligence, and I appreciate it. Just don’t kid yourself: You’re an idealist, not a pragmatist, and people can tell.