Twitter, Mozilla, Vimeo slam Europe’s one-size-fits-all internet content policing plan
- Reference: 1607599990
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/10/twitter_mozilla_eu_data/
- Source link:
The EU's Digital Services Act and the Democracy Action Plan aim to [1]ensure competition in the online market, particularly when it comes to dominant online platforms. However, Twitter and friends are concerned about the direction the EU is going when it comes to harmful content, and warn it may only increase the power of tech giants.
Drafts have indicated that the EU will focus on the removal of harmful content entirely. The open letter argues instead that a more flexible approach should be adopted in which the reach and impact of content is considered rather than “a solely stay up-come down binary.”
“Removing content cannot be the sole paradigm of Internet policy, particularly when concerned with the phenomenon of ‘legal-but-harmful’ content,” the letter [2]argues . “Such an approach would benefit only the very largest companies in our industry.”
The companies then go on to make the same point in several different ways. The current plan would “limit our online environment to a few dominant gatekeepers, while failing to meaningfully address the challenges preventing the Internet from realising its potential.”
The introduction of a “‘one-size-fits-all’ approach” would “fail to consider the vast array of differentiated services that make up our online environment risk having a disproportionate – and potentially crippling – impact on smaller players.”
Everything in moderation
Instead, they argue that the EU should “encourage a content moderation discussion that emphasizes the difference between illegal and harmful content and highlights the potential of interventions that address how content is surfaced and discovered.”
While it agrees with the up-down binary for illegal content such as terrorist and child sexual abuse images, the content platforms believe it is “both more sustainable and more holistically effective to focus on limiting the number of people who encounter harmful content.”
CEOs beg for America-wide privacy law... to protect their businesses from state privacy laws [3]READ MORE
How do you do that? Algorithms of course! “This can be achieved by placing a technological emphasis on visibility over prevalence, supporting measures towards algorithmic transparency and control, setting limits to the discoverability of harmful content, further exploring community moderation, and providing meaningful user choice.”
No doubt the EU would argue that after a decade of being told algorithms are the answer to the multitude of problems caused by online platforms providing a free and immediate publishing outlet to anyone on the internet, anonymously, only to see those problems constantly multiply, that a more sturdy response is required. But then maybe it’s just the wrong algorithms.
Twitter and friends aren't the only ones worried about what the rules may do: in September several internet infrastructure companies [4]pleaded with the EU not to lump them in with companies like Facebook, noting that “although the Internet is often perceived as a single technology, it comprises many different components at many different layers that each have a role to play in its functioning.”
Regardless, the publishing of the rules on December 15 is only the start of the process. They will then be reviewed, debated and redrawn by the European Commission and then put before the European Parliament for similar review: a process that could take years. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/19/eu_digital_strategy_next_five_years/
[2] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/crossroads-for-the-open-internet.html
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/10/us_privacy_law/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/09/eu_data_networks/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
But then maybe it’s just the wrong algorithms
No. The problem is the techno-utopian belief that you can find an algorithmic solution to what are really human problems. Life on the web is just as complex and difficult as life in society. So, just as the societal choice for policing can vary from police state through community based policing to free for all anarchy, so the choices for how societies regulate the web will be made. The web started like a free living anarchist commune, but as most such ventures collapse in real life due to existing within a corporate system to at least some extent, it's a bit naive to have expected it to always remain that way. The danger is that by stubbornly insisting too much on an anything goes approach, the backlash will be big enough to swing the pendulum too far towards the police state end.
Nobody knows all the answers, but we're certainly in a weird place at the moment where folk who can do little more than constantly shout about "freedom" also back scarily authoritarian politicians who misuse the massive power of state government to take freedom away from other people.
Who decides the definition of "Harmful"?
The whole issue of removing "harmful" content is a train wreck just waiting to happen.
Who decides what constitutes "harmful" content? The term "harmful" is so loose that just about anything could be viewed as harmful. Harmful to who? Harmful to a politician's career? The fact that "harmful" is very subjective. In today's SJW world where even technical speech such as master/slave is being censored by virtue signallers, all speech is doubtless harmful to someone.
Handing this kind of decisions to algorithms will only result in perfectly legal speech being arbitrarily censored. How do you fight such a removal? Who do you contact? What remedies are there?
The loose definitions and lack of accountability shows these laws up as what they are: a convenient method for the powers that be to remove anything they don't agree with. This is a censorship regime and nothing else.
Moderators can overcompensate
User posts on online blog: Blue is the new Green
Moderator: - Hey, that user is using Blue as a racist term... click click, there this little program will get rid of all articles with the word blue in it. What do you mean, what colour is the sky?
Re: Moderators can overcompensate
So you think future badness will be the fault of social justice warriors? A big jump from Google to the straw man of this.
Re: Moderators can overcompensate
> So you think future badness will be the fault of social justice warriors
You should interview Jordan Peterson.
All the things they are proposing are good - community moderation, transparent algoithms, etc. These are great ideas, but they have alll been rejected out of hand by the dominant players, because a) moderators are expensive, and b) if you make algorithms transparent then others can see how much you skew the results to favour your own interests and not the communites.
We cant be hurting the bottomline or the company's dominance now can we?
A friend in need is a friend indeed
I loved this bit:
"However, Twitter and friends are concerned about the direction the EU is going when it comes to harmful content, and warn it may only increase the power of tech giants."
Because Twitter is just the little fellow, the pal who's on our side?
Re: A friend in need is a friend indeed
Ironically Twitter reporting tolls get maliciously used (by various organised groups) to silence accounts that the complaining group disagree with.
Twitter should put its own house in order before moaning about censorship.
If algorithms are the answer, what is the real question?
Surely if algorithms are able to identify particular types of material to the degree where they can then enable
the "limiting [of the] number of people who encounter harmful content"
the "placing [of] a technological emphasis on visibility over prevalence” and
"[limiting] the discoverability of harmful content"
they can simply remove the flagged material in the first place, in line with the specific site's published, detailed content policy?
My point being that a site's content policy is what will allow people to make a meaningful, informed choice.
Indeed
The problem with one size fits all, stay-or-delete approach is in the decision making: it will lead to one person's, or one group's, idea of freedom of speech. Sooner or later, sooner most likely, some moderator will decide to go further rather than lighter and delete in the gray areas rather than taking a more delicate approach. And then that more heavy-handed application of the rules becomes the status quo.