This is the culmination of a process that began at least a decade ago.
One of the most important (albeit least reported) developments of 2023 was the launch of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into full effect in late August and which we covered in the article, The EU’s Mass Censorship Regime Is Almost Fully Operational. Will It Go Global? The goal of the DSA is to combat — i.e., suppress — mis- and disinformation online, not just in Europe but potentially across the world, and is part of a broader trend of Western governments actively pushing to censor information on the Internet as they gradually lose control over key narrative threads.
Here’s how it works: so-called Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Search Engines (VLSEs) — those with more than 45 million active monthly users in the EU — are required to censor content hosted on their platforms deemed to be illegal by removing it, blocking it, or providing certain information to the authorities concerned. Platforms are also required to tackle hate speech, dis- or misinformation if it is deemed to have “actual or foreseeable negative effects on civic discourse and electoral processes, and public security” and/or “actual or foreseeable negative effects in relation to gender-based violence, the protection of public health and minors and serious negative consequences to the person’s physical and mental well-being.”
Besides take-downs and outright suspensions, other familiar tools at the disposal of tech platforms include de-monetisation, content demotion, shadow-banning and account visibility filtering. The European Commission has primary, but not exclusive, regulatory responsibility for VLOPs and VLOSEs. The same requirements now also apply to all other online service providers, though responsibility for execution and enforcement lies not with the Commission but national authorities.
Staying Mum
So far, the platforms, including even Elon Musk’s X, appear to be adhering to the EU’s rules on disinformation. If they weren’t, they could face serious economic consequences, including fines of up to 6% of global turnover, as well as the looming threat of warrantless inspections of company premises. The X platform (formerly known as Twitter) may have left the EU’s voluntary code of practice last summer and in December was hit with a probe over disinformation related to Hamas’s October 7 attack, but its actions — or rather lack of actions — since then suggest it is indeed complying with the rules.
As Robert Kogon reports for Brownstone Institute, (granted, not the most popular source of information on NC, but this is another solid, well researched piece by Kogon on a topic virtually no one else is talking about), “while Musk and the Twitter Files are so verbose about alleged ‘US government censorship,'” they “have remained suitably mum about EU censorship demands”:
[I]t is strictly impossible that Twitter has not had and is not continuing to have contact – indeed extensive and regular contact – with EU officials about censoring content and accounts that the European Commission deems “mis-” or “disinformation.” But we have heard absolutely nothing about this in the “Twitter Files.”
Why? The answer is: because EU censorship really is government censorship, i.e. censorship that Twitter is required to carry out on pain of sanction. This is the difference between the EU censorship and what Elon Musk himself has denounced as “US government censorship.” The latter has amounted to nudges and requests, but was never obligatory and could never be obligatory, thanks to the First Amendment and the fact that there has never been any enforcement mechanism. Any law creating such an enforcement mechanism would be obviously unconstitutional. Hence, Twitter could always simply say no…
Far from any sign of defiance of the Code and the DSA, what we get from Elon Musk is repeated pledges of fealty: like the below tweet that he posted after meeting with EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton in January. (For an earlier such pledge in the form of a joint video message with Breton, see here.)
Now, the European Commission has its sights set on the EU’s parliamentary elections, to be held in June. “Integrity of election[s] is one of my top priorities for DSA enforcement, as we are entering a period of elections in Europe,” Breton the Enforcer toldPolitico last September.
Elections in Slovakia in September were supposed to offer a dummy run, but the results were underwhelming, at least as far as the Commission was concerned. The left-wing populist and social conservative party, Direction–Social Democracy (Smer-SD), led by former Prime Minister Robert Fico, took the largest number of votes and was able to form a coalition government with like-minded parties. Fico had promised to cut all aid to Ukraine, which he says is governed by neo-Nazis, as well as block its ascension to NATO.
The Commission is determined to up its game, however. Last week, it published a set of guidelines for Big Tech firms to help Brussels “secure” the upcoming elections from foreign interference and other threats. The guidelines recommend “mitigation measures and best practices to be undertaken by Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines before, during, and after electoral events,” and are explained as necessary in order to prevent things like fake news, turnout suppression, cyber threats and attacks, and, of course, Russia’s malign influence on European public opinion, particularly regarding Ukraine.
“In the European Union we speak about the Kremlin, which is very successful in creating narratives which can influence the voting preferences of the people,” said EU Vice-President for Values and Transparency, Věra Jourová, in a recent interview with the Atlantic Council, a neocon think tank that knows a thing or two about disinformation having played a leading role in the ProporNot fiasco that baselessly outed hundreds of alternative news websites as Russian propagandists including this one. “And lying, just lies… Disinformation in order to influence elections in a way that the people in Europe will stop to support (sic) Ukraine.”
List of Demands
Here is, word for word, the full list of the EU’s demands for the platforms, interspersed with a few observations and speculations of my own (italicised and in brackets). The platforms are instructed to:
“Reinforce their internal processes, including by setting up internal teams with adequate resources, using available analysis and information on local context-specific risks and on the use of their services by users to search and obtain information before, during and after elections, to improve their mitigation measures.”
(This may sound eerily familiar to the US government’s censorship efforts revealed by the Twitter files, but there is a key difference: the processes in the US were largely covert and informal, with nothing in the way of legal consequences in the case of non-compliance. By contrast, the EU’s DSA ensures that the processes are not just overt and legally authorised, they are backed up with the very real threat of substantial economic sanctions).
“Implement elections-specific risk mitigation measurestailored to each individual electoral period and local context. Among the mitigation measures included in the guidelines, Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines should promote official information on electoral processes, implement media literacy initiatives, and adapt their recommender systems to empower users and reduce the monetisation and virality of content that threatens the integrity of electoral processes. Moreover, political advertising should be clearly labelled as such, in anticipation of the new regulation on the transparency and targeting of political advertising.”
(The first sentence serves as a reminder that these processes will be applied not only to EU elections. As the Commission’s announcement on X makes clear, it also plans to “protect the integrity” of 17 national or local elections across Europe this year. What about elections in other regions of the world? For example, the US’ general election in November, on which so much rests, including quite possibly the future of NATO. Clearly, the European Commission and the national governments of many EU member states have a vested interest in trying to prevent another Trump triumph).
“Adopt specific mitigation measures linked to generative AI: Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines whose services could be used to create and/or disseminate generative AI content should assess and mitigate specific risks linked to AI, for example by clearly labelling content generated by AI (such as deepfakes), adapting their terms and conditions accordingly and enforcing them adequately.”
(The EU has just passed its AI Act, one of whose ostensible purposes is to tackle the threat posed by AI-generated videos and other recordings. As high-quality deep fakes are becoming harder to desire, this is a growing challenge. For the moment, the Commission is relying on the DSA to address these risks for the upcoming EU elections).
“Cooperate with EU level and national authorities, independent experts, and civil society organisations to foster an efficient exchange of information before, during and after the election and facilitate the use of adequate mitigation measures, including in the areas of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI), disinformation and cybersecurity.”
(As readers no doubt appreciate, this level of collusion between government and big tech platforms — the ultimate public-private partnership — aimed at controlling the message throughout an election period, is exceedingly dangerous. Even the EFF, which has praised many aspects of the DSA, warns that “Issues with government involvement in content moderation are pervasive and whilst trusted flaggers are not new, the DSA’s system could have a significant negative impact on the rights of users, in particular that of privacy and free speech.”)
“Adopt specific measures, including an incident response mechanism, during an electoral period to reduce the impact of incidents that could have a significant effect on the election outcome or turnout.”
“Assess the effectiveness of the measures throughpost-election reviews. Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines should publish a non-confidential version of such post-election review documents, providing opportunity for public feedback on the risk mitigation measures put in place.”
(This last point feels as though it is intended to give this vast entreprise a veneer of respectability through the use of expressions such as “non-confidential” and “public feedback,” presenting the illusion that these processes will all be happening out in the open and with the direct involvement of the public, which couldn’t be further from the truth).
Not everything about the DSA is bad, however. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for example, has praised many aspects of the regulation, including the protections it provides on user rights to privacy by prohibiting platforms from undertaking targeted advertising based on sensitive user information, such as sexual orientation or ethnicity. “More broadly, the DSA increases the transparency about the ads users see on their feeds as platforms must place a clear label on every ad, with information about the buyer of the ad and other details.” It also “reins in the powers of Big Tech” by forcing them to “comply with far-reaching obligations and responsibly tackle systemic risks and abuse on their platform.”
But the EFF says it also “gives way too much power to government agencies to flag and remove potentially illegal content and to uncover data about anonymous speakers”:
Democracies are in many ways like the internet. In both cases, it may take a thousand cuts to demolish their foundation, yet each cut contributes significantly to their erosion. One such cut exists in the Digital Services Act (DSA) in the form of drastic and overbroad government enforcement powers.
A Long Time Coming
The DSA is the culmination of a process that began at least a decade ago. Following the 2014 Maidan Square uprising, the US, NATO and the EU began attacking those who denounced it for what it was> a coup d’état. It was not long before the EU’s vast bureaucratic superstate was wheeled into place for a new propaganda war with Moscow.
At the start of 2015, Anne Applebaum (wife of the Polish ex-Minister for Defence, Radosław Sikorski, who famously thanked the US for the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines), set up a unit within the Washington Center for European Policy Analysis called the Information Warfare Initiative. Its founding mission was to counter Russian information in Central and Eastern Europe.
Months later, the European Council tasked the EU’s then chief diplomat, Federica Mogherini, with preparing a plan of “strategic communication” to denounce the Russian disinformation campaigns relating to Ukraine. The end result was the establishment of the EEAS Strategic Communication Division, whose functions include “leading the work on addressing foreign disinformation, information manipulation and interference” as well as “analys[ing] the information environment in order to enable EU foreign policy implementation and protect its values and interests.” That was in April 2015.
After 2016, the EU took its fight against disinformation to a whole new level following the triumph of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. In June 2018, the Commission launched its Code of Practice on Disinformation, which was “voluntarily” signed by all of the major online social media platforms and search engines. In June 2022, almost exactly four years later, the Digital Services Act became law. Just over a year after that, on August 25, 2023, the deadline by which all VLOPs and VLSEs had to begin fully complying with the DSA passed. On that date, the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation lost its voluntary nature.
According to Jourová, Brussels is only interested in helping to establish the “facts”, not censoring people’s “opinions”:
“We are not censoring anyone’s opinions,” says @VeraJourova at the Atlantic Council about AI regulation in the 🇪🇺 EU.
“We desperately need to increase the resilience of the society against disinformation,” she explains.
But who gets to decide what actually constitutes mis- or disinformation for the EU’s roughly 450 million citizens (as well as arguably untold millions of citizens far beyond Europe’s borders)?
The European Commission.
That’s right, the EU’s scandal-tarnished, power-hungry executive branch whose top jobs, including that of its current president, Ursula von der Leyen, will be indirectly determined by the upcoming EU elections. It is the 705 Members of the European Parliament chosen by EU citizens this June who will ultimately have the final say on who fills the Commission’s roles.
The performance of the current Commission and Parliament is hardly what you would describe as vote-winning. The current Commission President Von der Leyen is under investigation on multiple fronts, including by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, for her refusal to disclose the content of her whatsapp conversation with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla during pre-negotiations for up to 1.8 billion Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 vaccines. It was one of the biggest procurement contracts in EU history. VdL has also faced accusations of conflicts of interest over her husband’s role as scientific director at US biotech company Orgenesis, which received hundreds of millions of euros of EU subsidies on two separate occasions.
Von der Leyen now wants the Commission to take a central role coordinating EU weapons procurement. She even cited her office’s success in procuring COVID-19 vaccines as a model to follow. Her Commission has also provided unbridled support to Israel while the IDF commits genocidal war against the people of Gaza. It has sabotaged the EU’s economic future through its endless backfiring sanctions on Russia while consistently putting US interests first. As economic conditions have deteriorated, the response from both the EU Commission and many member governments is almost always the same, as Conor Gallagher reported recently:
More wage suppressions, more market-friendly reforms, more social spending cuts, and more privatization. It was only a few months ago that the New York-based private equity firm KKR, which includes former CIA director David Petraeus as a partner, reached a controversial agreement to buy the fixed-line network of Telecom Italia. Now the Italian daily La Repubblica is declaring that “Italy Is For Sale,” in which it describes plans for 20 billion euros worth of privatizations, including more of the state rail company Ferrovie dello Stato, Poste Italiane, Monte dei Paschi bank and energy giant Eni. The plan is reportedly necessitated by the country’s tax cuts. The roughly 100 billion euros Rome has burned through in order to address the energy crisis surely hasn’t helped either. And this was happening with the suspension of the EU debt brake.
Acceleration of a Long-Term Trend
In a recent op-ed in Berliner Zeitung, a retired German judge described the DSA as a “trojan horse that presents a façade of respecting democratic principles@ while doing the exact opposite. He concludes that the EU’s mass censorship regime poses an “existential threat” to freedom of speech and the freedom of press, which are the corner stones of any genuine liberal democracy.:
The EU Commission sets the standard by which disinformation is judged. However, this means that politically unsavoury opinions, even scientifically argued positions, can be deleted, and not only that: if it is classified as unlawful, there are social consequences.
One inevitable result is that citizens begin self-censoring to align their messages on the platforms with what is currently acceptable within the corridors of power…. The cornerstone of any free society — the perpetual exchange of intellectual and political ideas, even with opposing opinions — will therefore crumble.
This is all happening at the same time that both the Commission and some EU national governments are pushing the bloc toward direct conflict with Russia while calling for the establishment of an EU-wide war economy, all to be paid for no doubt by the EU’s hard-strapped citizens and businesses. All the while, Brussels is fast erecting its digital control system, first through the introduction of a bloc-wide digital identity program — which, like the digital vaccine passport system that preceded it, is being marketed as a purely voluntary scheme — followed some time later by a central bank digital currency.
The escalating war in Ukraine serves as a timely pretext for a brutal clampdown on basic democratic freedoms. But the EU would have probably reached this destination anyway, sooner or later. As a political project, the EU is fundamentally anti-democratic while its myriad failings have served as a convenient scapegoat to blame whenever national governments answerable to people have had to take unpopular decisions.
What Europe is now living through is an acceleration of a long-term trend, though this time the EU’s anti-democratic nature could have repercussions far beyond its own borders. Each crisis of this century has created a new opportunity for the Commission to tighten its grip while Europe itself grows weaker and weaker. As the veteran British journalist Peter Obourne once put it, “By a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.”
These big tech companies are going to be in a pickle. To stay compliant with the EU’s censorship, they’ll have to maintain a separate code base, because in the US the same behavior will likely result in falling prey to massive lawsuits due to the 1st amendment. Along with injunctions to prohibit the same behavior the EU demands.
Keep a close eye on the Kennedy v. Biden case. It will be in front of the SCOTUS and likely ruled on by next June.
voislav
There might be a question of standing. EU citizens can’t sue in US courts, so EU can do whatever it wants. Americans are not likely to get caught in the EU censorship net and the platforms will likely just reverse the few cases that create a ruckus.
Uncle Doug
“EU citizens can’t sue in US courts . . .”
Yes they can, if relevant requirements of standing and jurisdiction are satisfied.
Feral Finster
No, because private platform. Big Tech isn’t concerned about the EU law at all, AFAICT.
ChrisFromGA
If Kennedy wins his case in the SCOTUS the defendants (FBI, DoJ, CDC, and other government agencies) will be permanently ENJOINED from contacting, encouraging, or otherwise inducing Twitter, FB, and other social media companies to deprive Americans of their 1st amendment rights to free expression.
Now, these private companies might still censor on their own, granted. However, certainly, X with new management will not have any reason to.
(Ironically, Lina Khan is a much bigger threat to Facebook and Apple than this lawsuit, because she can hit them where they are most vulnerable – antitrust.)
digi_owl
Or US don’t care, as EU can now be leveraged to get around that pesky amendment…
Feral Finster
I would say that the US considers this entirely beneficial.
Sort of like how Five Eyes are used to get around those pesky laws prohibiting spying on US citizens, or how Sheriff Buford was The Law in Dis Heah County when it came to arresting civil rights protesters on any pretext, but just a private citizen exercising his God-given rights when it came to addressing the next Klonvocation.
WillD
Well, one solution is to move to a non-western country and then let people in western ‘censored’ countries access the platforms with VPNs, just like people do in other censored countries.
Gypo O'Leary
you bring up an interesting point. will EU government start hounding VPNs to provide user info so they can trace people who post the so-called ‘misinformation’ from EU IPs? Seems like a yes.
Possibly repercussions surrounding who VPN providers can allow to access which IP ranges?
AntonioB
after the attack on Wikileaks website, shot down by Amazon, and the cancellation of their VISA and Mastercard accounts in order to cut contributions, in … 2010, I closed all my accounts on american and european providers: “social networks”, hosting and servers providers, email providers. So I use no FB, no Twitter, no Instagram, have couple google fake accounts in case of need (some Android things) and otherwise use custom email, chinese and russian platforms for email, cloud, hosting, servers. Being a relative near neighbour of Russia I have been there countless time over the years and I have russian bank account, so I can pay for domains names, hosting, servers, cloud, with my MIR card.
So unless NSA cracks into russian banking systems and data companies I am not visible and not traceable. They know from my online writings like here that I have but they can do nothing excepted put me in jail without evidence and they can certainly not ask a russian provider to take down a site of mine in a russian datacenter.
What is fun is that replenishment of my russian bank account from my european bank is possible via a 2-steps exchange, with a middle currency of countries having ties with russian banking system, or double nationals. Anonymity can be added by using correctly some electronic non-national currencies (like washed remixed bitcoins, monero, etc).
Some countries have taken cautiously slowly growing distance from $, after the robbery of Russian central bank assets. They don’t want the same.
But then the answer to this from EU will be to cut segments of the web. If EU doesn’t want its citizens to read chinese or russian geolocated websites explaining things differently than the euro-american narrative, they will have to use a massive firewall.
USA by now uses limitations in the form of take downs at the domain name level. For instance Strategic Culture website in dot com was pulled by cancellation of the dot com domain name. But then they switched to dot su.
VPNs are of limited utility: some providers and some websites reject connections from IP pools known to be used by some main VPN providers.
so basically, internet itself is going to split.
The point is that EU will live in its own enclosure, and if its propaganda will be force feeded to its citizens, this have no impact on people outside EU.
Alan Roxdale
because in the US the same behavior will likely result in falling prey to massive lawsuits due to the 1st amendment
The censorship nexus operates though private company government cutouts. The American legal system is unwilling to recognize the concept so don’t expect the rule of law to apply to censorship online anytime soon.
Carolinian
So it only took a couple of generations for Europe–incubator of fascism–to be up to it’s old tricks. Personally I could care less if they want to censor X since I never use the thing. But it could be a case, to paraphrase, of first they came for X and then they came for me (or NC). If we Sophie Scholls of the digital age publish our pamphlets will they be trotting us off to the guillotine? Clearly Putin is on to something when he says the Ukraine war is all about the Nazis.
But if the Euros want to censor the news of their defeat will that change the defeat? The above sounds less like the revival of the 1930s than a kind of last gasp of something people came here to get away from.
voislav
I wouldn’t ascribe what’s happening in Europe to any particular ideology, or particularly unique to Europe. Elites around the world have been grappling with gradual loss of control over the information and this is just the latest round. US has been doing the same, albeit more covertly, with FBI directly approaching the platforms and the TikTok saga, Canada and Australia have new censorship laws in the works, and we won’t even go into India, China and others.
BTW, they’ve been after NC for years now, it has been deranked by Google for many years and we’ve had the whole Google Ads fiasco just a couple of weeks ago.
Feral Finster
Back in The Good Old Days, publishing news was hard. For one thing, you needed a printing press, which was expensive and required specialized staff to operate it. Not only that, but a printing press cost money for every sheet of paper printed, and you had to spend more money on distribution.
They say that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” but there’s more! Unless you planned to publish as an expensive and time-consuming hobby, you needed an income stream. You would get some money from subscriptions, but subscriptions are really a means to sell advertising. Dependence on advertising meant that there were some people the publisher had to keep happy, and others he could not afford to annoy.
Anyone who knows anything about local news knows this. At best, it’s a tightrope walk between giving subscribers the news they want to know, and not infuriating your advertisers. The result was a sort of natural censorship. Publishers had to think long and hard before they published anything that would brown the bigwigs off. The fact that a publisher was tied to a physical location and physical assets also made libel suits much easier.
The internet changed all that. Now, any anonymous toolio with a laptop and WiFi can go into the news publishing business by nightfall, and with worldwide distribution and advertising revenue, to boot. Marginal cost of readership is zero. Needless to say, this development has The People That Matter very concerned, and they are working hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle.
digi_owl
Or if one really PO-ed someone big, there would be a sudden fire…
upstater
>Now, any anonymous toolio with a laptop and WiFi can go into the news publishing business by nightfall, and with worldwide distribution and advertising revenue, to boot.
You mean like NC? The only megaphones are those owned by big tech. It is worse than print and alternative print 50 years ago. Hardcore left publications were widely circulated and mass market like Ramparts and Mother Jones held their own.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody heard it, did it make a sound?
JBird4049
The problem for Our Beloved and Benevolent Overlords is that the legacy mainstream media has been corrupted for so long that it is almost completely untrustworthy to most people regardless of their politics. Yes, oldsters tend to believe the propaganda, but many of them do not. It is as with Izvestia and Pravda where the purveyors of the truth were known liars who only said what the government wanted them to say; people read them to find out what was the government’s truth and therefore its edicts.
If nobody trust the New York Times, CNN, Fox, or MSNBC, they must block alternative sources.
As with the United States’ DHS, they must be very sure that they will remain in power permanently after creating such fine tools of control.
Carolinian
Or perhaps the importance of ideology was exaggerated the last time and WW2 was really about long entrenched oligarchies defending themselves–or so they thought.
America is different or was. Now our elites seem determined to create their own aristocracy in imitation of Europe. If true then the internet, where mere nobodies can have an impact, is standing in the way.
The prob for Big Brother is that computers empower and those nobodies may know a lot more about how they work than the politicians spouting about “a series of tubes.” The only way to really shut this down is to shut off the internet itself and that would, at this point, break a lot of capitalist rice bowls.
One should say though that Congress keeps coming up with ways to stymie the web and they keep being defeated and looks like the TikTok ban may not go down either. Perhaps this isn’t happening in Europe because the EU isn’t much of a democracy.
digi_owl
Meh, Congress is Westminster with an elected king. Same basic structure, and initially voting rights were only for landowners. USA was a oligarchy from the start as well.
The only thing that kept things “sane” may have been the need to look better than the “police state” out east, or maybe the hoi poloi may start asking some pointed questions.
Carolinian
Many of the wealthy in the last Gilded Age came from nothing. Whereas in England it might take several generations to proceed from brewer to His Majesty to some kind of nobility. In reality the US has had a lot of social mobility compared to Europe and most especially the super class conscious UK.
And our revolution may have somewhat hypocritically served the then property owners but it nevertheless put dynasticism aside in a very open debate over the perils of a king. They would be shocked by the liberties given to our current presidents.
Revenant
Not true – the British aristocracy was very adept at coopting new money and thrusting young men, either by selling titles or marrying heiresses. There are plenty of brewing and industrial dynasties, for example, that got there in one generation like the Guinnesses, and their intermarriage with the Tennants who made their money from inventing chlorine bleaching. As for the bankers, the Rothschilds arrived penniless as Victoria was crowned and were lords of great estates by the time she died.
digi_owl
More like western capitalists are up to their old trick on home turf, after having run out of targets in the global south.
Kouros
European monarchies have a long history of very strong control and censorship of the press. British too. And even with the 1680s revolution, certain habits havent died and even got transplanted accross the Atlantic. But not that many. It is more manipulation than censorship.
Thusly, will reports from US media (MSM) contradicting European “facts” be censored or not???
Listening to the comentariat and looking over published press this spring in Romania, I could see that they were at odds to a lot (most of) of information coming from US and British press, which Alex Mercouris and Brian Bereletic almost exclusively use for their analyses.
The Rev Kev
I first heard the phrase “the European hegemony” in an old Star Trek episode. But over the past few years it is like watching it come into shape before us. Yes, the censorship campaign is really coming along but it is not just because of the upcoming elections. They were always going to do mass censorship throughout the entire EU and this war and the elections are the excuses that they want to use. I grew up on stories of WW2 Europe where in the occupied countries and even in Germany itself, people would tune their radios to the British radio stations to find out what was actually going on while making sure the neighbours did not hear them lest they be reported. Now it looks like the grandchildren of those people will have to use a clandestine VPN to get news on what is happening in the world which they cannot get anymore in Europe.
digi_owl
Been expecting the net to “balkanize” for a long time, much like the phone network of old. The one thing that has stopped it from happening was perhaps that USA could use it as a propaganda outlet, and thus benefited from access being wide open.
Now however that freedom is coming back to bite them, and so a clampdown builds momentum.
jobs
What’s next after this? Censoring talk about censorship?
MFB
I regret to notify you that you no longer possess the right to ask that question.
Please wrap yourself in a sheet and crawl slowly to the cemetery, so as not to cause panic.
jobs
Justification: allegations the EU censors free speech are now classified as misinformation.
Rubicon
The only question we want answered is “WHY?” Why are the EU nations censoring multiple millions of people who no longer have a rebel bone in their body.
These big tech companies are going to be in a pickle. To stay compliant with the EU’s censorship, they’ll have to maintain a separate code base, because in the US the same behavior will likely result in falling prey to massive lawsuits due to the 1st amendment. Along with injunctions to prohibit the same behavior the EU demands.
Keep a close eye on the Kennedy v. Biden case. It will be in front of the SCOTUS and likely ruled on by next June.
There might be a question of standing. EU citizens can’t sue in US courts, so EU can do whatever it wants. Americans are not likely to get caught in the EU censorship net and the platforms will likely just reverse the few cases that create a ruckus.
“EU citizens can’t sue in US courts . . .”
Yes they can, if relevant requirements of standing and jurisdiction are satisfied.
No, because private platform. Big Tech isn’t concerned about the EU law at all, AFAICT.
If Kennedy wins his case in the SCOTUS the defendants (FBI, DoJ, CDC, and other government agencies) will be permanently ENJOINED from contacting, encouraging, or otherwise inducing Twitter, FB, and other social media companies to deprive Americans of their 1st amendment rights to free expression.
Now, these private companies might still censor on their own, granted. However, certainly, X with new management will not have any reason to.
(Ironically, Lina Khan is a much bigger threat to Facebook and Apple than this lawsuit, because she can hit them where they are most vulnerable – antitrust.)
Or US don’t care, as EU can now be leveraged to get around that pesky amendment…
I would say that the US considers this entirely beneficial.
Sort of like how Five Eyes are used to get around those pesky laws prohibiting spying on US citizens, or how Sheriff Buford was The Law in Dis Heah County when it came to arresting civil rights protesters on any pretext, but just a private citizen exercising his God-given rights when it came to addressing the next Klonvocation.
Well, one solution is to move to a non-western country and then let people in western ‘censored’ countries access the platforms with VPNs, just like people do in other censored countries.
you bring up an interesting point. will EU government start hounding VPNs to provide user info so they can trace people who post the so-called ‘misinformation’ from EU IPs? Seems like a yes.
Possibly repercussions surrounding who VPN providers can allow to access which IP ranges?
after the attack on Wikileaks website, shot down by Amazon, and the cancellation of their VISA and Mastercard accounts in order to cut contributions, in … 2010, I closed all my accounts on american and european providers: “social networks”, hosting and servers providers, email providers. So I use no FB, no Twitter, no Instagram, have couple google fake accounts in case of need (some Android things) and otherwise use custom email, chinese and russian platforms for email, cloud, hosting, servers. Being a relative near neighbour of Russia I have been there countless time over the years and I have russian bank account, so I can pay for domains names, hosting, servers, cloud, with my MIR card.
So unless NSA cracks into russian banking systems and data companies I am not visible and not traceable. They know from my online writings like here that I have but they can do nothing excepted put me in jail without evidence and they can certainly not ask a russian provider to take down a site of mine in a russian datacenter.
What is fun is that replenishment of my russian bank account from my european bank is possible via a 2-steps exchange, with a middle currency of countries having ties with russian banking system, or double nationals. Anonymity can be added by using correctly some electronic non-national currencies (like washed remixed bitcoins, monero, etc).
Some countries have taken cautiously slowly growing distance from $, after the robbery of Russian central bank assets. They don’t want the same.
But then the answer to this from EU will be to cut segments of the web. If EU doesn’t want its citizens to read chinese or russian geolocated websites explaining things differently than the euro-american narrative, they will have to use a massive firewall.
USA by now uses limitations in the form of take downs at the domain name level. For instance Strategic Culture website in dot com was pulled by cancellation of the dot com domain name. But then they switched to dot su.
VPNs are of limited utility: some providers and some websites reject connections from IP pools known to be used by some main VPN providers.
so basically, internet itself is going to split.
The point is that EU will live in its own enclosure, and if its propaganda will be force feeded to its citizens, this have no impact on people outside EU.
The censorship nexus operates though private company government cutouts. The American legal system is unwilling to recognize the concept so don’t expect the rule of law to apply to censorship online anytime soon.
So it only took a couple of generations for Europe–incubator of fascism–to be up to it’s old tricks. Personally I could care less if they want to censor X since I never use the thing. But it could be a case, to paraphrase, of first they came for X and then they came for me (or NC). If we Sophie Scholls of the digital age publish our pamphlets will they be trotting us off to the guillotine? Clearly Putin is on to something when he says the Ukraine war is all about the Nazis.
But if the Euros want to censor the news of their defeat will that change the defeat? The above sounds less like the revival of the 1930s than a kind of last gasp of something people came here to get away from.
I wouldn’t ascribe what’s happening in Europe to any particular ideology, or particularly unique to Europe. Elites around the world have been grappling with gradual loss of control over the information and this is just the latest round. US has been doing the same, albeit more covertly, with FBI directly approaching the platforms and the TikTok saga, Canada and Australia have new censorship laws in the works, and we won’t even go into India, China and others.
BTW, they’ve been after NC for years now, it has been deranked by Google for many years and we’ve had the whole Google Ads fiasco just a couple of weeks ago.
Back in The Good Old Days, publishing news was hard. For one thing, you needed a printing press, which was expensive and required specialized staff to operate it. Not only that, but a printing press cost money for every sheet of paper printed, and you had to spend more money on distribution.
They say that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” but there’s more! Unless you planned to publish as an expensive and time-consuming hobby, you needed an income stream. You would get some money from subscriptions, but subscriptions are really a means to sell advertising. Dependence on advertising meant that there were some people the publisher had to keep happy, and others he could not afford to annoy.
Anyone who knows anything about local news knows this. At best, it’s a tightrope walk between giving subscribers the news they want to know, and not infuriating your advertisers. The result was a sort of natural censorship. Publishers had to think long and hard before they published anything that would brown the bigwigs off. The fact that a publisher was tied to a physical location and physical assets also made libel suits much easier.
The internet changed all that. Now, any anonymous toolio with a laptop and WiFi can go into the news publishing business by nightfall, and with worldwide distribution and advertising revenue, to boot. Marginal cost of readership is zero. Needless to say, this development has The People That Matter very concerned, and they are working hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle.
Or if one really PO-ed someone big, there would be a sudden fire…
>Now, any anonymous toolio with a laptop and WiFi can go into the news publishing business by nightfall, and with worldwide distribution and advertising revenue, to boot.
You mean like NC? The only megaphones are those owned by big tech. It is worse than print and alternative print 50 years ago. Hardcore left publications were widely circulated and mass market like Ramparts and Mother Jones held their own.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody heard it, did it make a sound?
The problem for Our Beloved and Benevolent Overlords is that the legacy mainstream media has been corrupted for so long that it is almost completely untrustworthy to most people regardless of their politics. Yes, oldsters tend to believe the propaganda, but many of them do not. It is as with Izvestia and Pravda where the purveyors of the truth were known liars who only said what the government wanted them to say; people read them to find out what was the government’s truth and therefore its edicts.
If nobody trust the New York Times, CNN, Fox, or MSNBC, they must block alternative sources.
As with the United States’ DHS, they must be very sure that they will remain in power permanently after creating such fine tools of control.
Or perhaps the importance of ideology was exaggerated the last time and WW2 was really about long entrenched oligarchies defending themselves–or so they thought.
America is different or was. Now our elites seem determined to create their own aristocracy in imitation of Europe. If true then the internet, where mere nobodies can have an impact, is standing in the way.
The prob for Big Brother is that computers empower and those nobodies may know a lot more about how they work than the politicians spouting about “a series of tubes.” The only way to really shut this down is to shut off the internet itself and that would, at this point, break a lot of capitalist rice bowls.
One should say though that Congress keeps coming up with ways to stymie the web and they keep being defeated and looks like the TikTok ban may not go down either. Perhaps this isn’t happening in Europe because the EU isn’t much of a democracy.
Meh, Congress is Westminster with an elected king. Same basic structure, and initially voting rights were only for landowners. USA was a oligarchy from the start as well.
The only thing that kept things “sane” may have been the need to look better than the “police state” out east, or maybe the hoi poloi may start asking some pointed questions.
Many of the wealthy in the last Gilded Age came from nothing. Whereas in England it might take several generations to proceed from brewer to His Majesty to some kind of nobility. In reality the US has had a lot of social mobility compared to Europe and most especially the super class conscious UK.
And our revolution may have somewhat hypocritically served the then property owners but it nevertheless put dynasticism aside in a very open debate over the perils of a king. They would be shocked by the liberties given to our current presidents.
Not true – the British aristocracy was very adept at coopting new money and thrusting young men, either by selling titles or marrying heiresses. There are plenty of brewing and industrial dynasties, for example, that got there in one generation like the Guinnesses, and their intermarriage with the Tennants who made their money from inventing chlorine bleaching. As for the bankers, the Rothschilds arrived penniless as Victoria was crowned and were lords of great estates by the time she died.
More like western capitalists are up to their old trick on home turf, after having run out of targets in the global south.
European monarchies have a long history of very strong control and censorship of the press. British too. And even with the 1680s revolution, certain habits havent died and even got transplanted accross the Atlantic. But not that many. It is more manipulation than censorship.
Thusly, will reports from US media (MSM) contradicting European “facts” be censored or not???
Listening to the comentariat and looking over published press this spring in Romania, I could see that they were at odds to a lot (most of) of information coming from US and British press, which Alex Mercouris and Brian Bereletic almost exclusively use for their analyses.
I first heard the phrase “the European hegemony” in an old Star Trek episode. But over the past few years it is like watching it come into shape before us. Yes, the censorship campaign is really coming along but it is not just because of the upcoming elections. They were always going to do mass censorship throughout the entire EU and this war and the elections are the excuses that they want to use. I grew up on stories of WW2 Europe where in the occupied countries and even in Germany itself, people would tune their radios to the British radio stations to find out what was actually going on while making sure the neighbours did not hear them lest they be reported. Now it looks like the grandchildren of those people will have to use a clandestine VPN to get news on what is happening in the world which they cannot get anymore in Europe.
Been expecting the net to “balkanize” for a long time, much like the phone network of old. The one thing that has stopped it from happening was perhaps that USA could use it as a propaganda outlet, and thus benefited from access being wide open.
Now however that freedom is coming back to bite them, and so a clampdown builds momentum.
What’s next after this? Censoring talk about censorship?
I regret to notify you that you no longer possess the right to ask that question.
Please wrap yourself in a sheet and crawl slowly to the cemetery, so as not to cause panic.
Justification: allegations the EU censors free speech are now classified as misinformation.
The only question we want answered is “WHY?” Why are the EU nations censoring multiple millions of people who no longer have a rebel bone in their body.
Can anyone here explain this?