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.
Good, hope they get banned in the EU so people will switch to competitors
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 Unless you search before 2024, searching reddit is literally useless, and that’s all going to be out of date so quickly
DuckDuckGo: Use us because Google is so evil they were banned in Europe
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
Damn.
Wish the rest of us could just ignore all laws & not face any consequences.
What a fucking joke this entire system is.
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. 🙄
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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.
Time for EU to simply ban Google then for non compliance.
I hate community notes, it’s a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability.
I also hate these big international tech companies. Forget too big to fail, these are too big to change. We are all techno peasants and they are our tech lords
I hate community notes, it’s a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability
And it lets certain communities brigade the notes with misinformation/disinformation to try and control the narrative.
I hate community notes, it’s a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability.
I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, but it can be harmful if done on a platform that has a significant skew in its political leanings, because it can then lead to the assumption that posts must be true because they were “fact checked” even if the fact check was actually just one of the 9:1 ratio of users that already believes that one thing.
However, on platforms that have more general, less biased overall userbases, such as YouTube, a community notes system can be helpful, because it directly changes the platform incentives and design.
I like to come at this from the understanding that the way a platform is designed influences how it is used and perceived by users. When you add a like button but not a dislike button, you only incentivize positive fleeting interactions with posts, while relegating stronger negative opinions to the comments, for instance. (see: Twitter)
If a platform integrates community notes, that not only elevates content that had any effort at all made to fact check it (as opposed to none at all) but it also means that, to get a community note, somebody must at least attempt to verify the truth. And if someone does that, then statistically speaking, there’s at least a slightly higher likelihood that the truth is made apparent in that community note than if none existed to incentivize someone to fact check in the first place.
Again, this doesn’t work in all scenarios, nor is it always a good decision to add depending on a platform’s current design and general demographic political leanings, but I do think it can be valuable in some cases. (This also heavily depends on who is allowed access to create the community notes, of course)
I get what you’re trying to say, they can incentivise accuracy and they do at least prompt people to be more accurate lest the community holds them to account. But what i don’t like is that there is no standard that the notes are held to and there is no accountability if either the original post or the community note are wrong.
I also don’t like that the social media publishers are pushing the fact checkers onto the community to be done for free, but at the end of the day they own the community note and can delete it if they don’t like it. We are doing their work for them and taking accountability away from them
Sorry if you replied to this already, but I wanted to add that what I meant to say is that they hide behind the accountability we give them
Ironically, for authoritarian communist countries that recorded high rate of newly minted billionaires in the past five years, China and Vietnam are doing something right cracking down on billionaires.
Very fair, the persecution of Jack Ma was very interesting. Haven’t heard of what happened in Vietnam though?
You shouldn’t need to be authoritarian to crack down on these systems though. I really liked what I saw Lena Khan doing in the US, what Brazil did to twitter or what Julie Inman Grant did here in Australia
There is a Vietnamese billionaire who is found guilty of scamming her victims. The court ordered her to pay what she stole within a deadline or else she will face execution. I don’t remember if she is ordered to pay either only a portion or all of what she scammed.
And that probably means she was late paying a kickback to a party boss.
It’s possible to to the right thing for the wrong reasons.
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When you stop to think, they really don’t offer us anything other than a named place we all agreed to meet
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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
Google is basically saying the EU couldn’t do its own subpar search and they’re not brave enough to try.
Fascism is good for business.
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Unbelievable 2025 is turning out to be a stellar year
wish the eu would just actually ban american companies there is really no need for them anyway
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.
It’s set to become mandatory, i.e. law. According to the article.
And this isn’t a free speech issue. It’s about disinformation. Folks can say what they want, but a political ad needs to clearly be a political ad. And disinformation can’t be profit motivated.
It’s all in the article you just linked. You can say what ever you want, but if it’s bullshit, Google will need to flag it or face fines.
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.
I said it isn’t law yet. And the article states that the law is forthcoming, and that Google does not intend to follow the forthcoming law.
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.
Sovereign citizens are really getting out of hand. Oh wait it’s google.
We need fact checkers more than community notes. Because disproving a claim takes a lot of time and skill, and notes will be abused for financial and personal gain in the long run. Perhaps it is also better to use the word content moderator instead of fact checker, as finding the ultimate truth isn’t possible, unless you just present a mathematical proof.
