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.

07:38:25 up 15 days, 15:54, 2 users, load average: 2,93, 2,24, 1,65

every base is base 10

I participated in a discussion similar to this recently here on the German-language community: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/28281369/15510510

Topics that were raised there by various people, some by me (read the full discussion if you can read German):

• an “algorithm” is really just a way of manipulating data, it’s meaningless to say you are banning “algorithms” because all software is based on “algorithms”, even reverse-chronological sorting of things you’re subscribed to is an algorithm
• algorithms are mainly intended to keep people on the platform for as long as possible (but I raised the issue that I actually found old web forums more engaging than today’s Facebook)
• how do you define “an algorithm” legally? I suggested a definition based on transparency and objectivity, others raised the issue that this would mean that misinformation could be easily manipulated to be shown at the top, and that if you require “transparency”, the platforms will just disclose how their algorithms work instead of abolishing them

One important aspect that nobody raised in that discussion is that moderation is different from censorship.

I think you can publish on many ordinary (micro)blogging platforms through Tor, but you’ll need a valid email address.

So the problem is reduced to: how can you get a valid email address through Tor that is not linked to either a phone number, your real identity, your credit card, or another email address that has any of these pieces of information stored.

I have never needed to do this, but to my knowledge, there are email providers where that is possible. Another user linked to privacytools.io where I can find this list https://www.privacytools.io/privacy-email - so that may be a place to start.

Moderation = not showing things to people who do not want to see these things. If you are an LGBT person and do not want to ever see people calling you and people like you mentally ill, then hiding those things from you is moderation, completely legitimate, an important part of making the platform a more welcoming place. I don’t usually want to see people doing that either in my feed (and in fact I don’t, because I follow entirely different things on Facebook).

Censorship = not showing things to people even though they want to see these things. If a group of people who believe that LGBT people are mentally ill are talking to each other about these beliefs, then preventing them from doing so is censorship, it doesn’t make the platform a more welcoming place because the people it would make feel unwelcome weren’t seeing it anyway.

That is what I (and the linked blog post) am trying to say. You may still think censorship is in some cases a good thing, but I think it’s important to make the distinction.

I wasn’t actually expressing a substantive opinion on whether this policy change of Meta’s is a good thing or bad thing. The rules there are as arbitrary as anywhere else on the Internet; this slight shift does not make much of a difference.

But moderation is different from censorship: if you (or I or anyone else) do not want to read people writing about LGBT people being mentally ill, or calling me an idiot (and I certainly don’t, most of the time), or literally making any statement at all in the world, then none of us should have to. That doesn’t mean people who want to say these things to each other (necessarily) need to be prevented from saying them to each other; there are arguments for that too, but it’s a different issue.

That doesn’t contradict what I’m saying (“default behavior”), and also moderation is different from censorship.

Seriously, this is how the media is spinning this? “Facebook now allows people to post that LGBT people are mentally ill”?

The default behavior of any social media platform is to allow people to say anything they want. That’s what social media is for, to allow people to talk to each other. The things it doesn’t allow are, and ought to be, exceptions. Facebook has now decided that one of these exceptions will be slightly loosened. I somehow fail to see the big deal in this.

yes, gemeinnützig = serving the public benefit (literally approximately: gemein = common, nützig = useful, i.e. useful to the common good)

GmbH is just the (almost literal) translation of LLC.

wat

gGmbH = gemeinnützige Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung = limited liability company serving the public benefit

At least on mine, there’s an “About” link on the bottom left side on the web interface, click that and scroll to the bottom where you’ll get a list of blocked servers, then just uncollapse that and ctrl+f for “threads.net”.

Can this be explained by the fact that the Internet already has satisfactory answers to more and more questions, so there is less need to actively ask new ones?

I strongly agree with the point made in the linked article that censorship is when a sender wants to send something, the receiver wants to receive it, but a third party (government, social media platform, whoever) keeps them from doing so.

If I want to see “weird little ideas of rightwing weirdos” (or of leftwing weirdos or any others), I should be allowed to. If I don’t, I shouldn’t have to.

Personally I follow slightly more than 100 accounts plus less than 10 hashtags and feel I’m already getting plenty of things into my feed, nowadays I tend to unfollow things that post too many irrelevant things more than I follow new ones.

I mean in principle this is just a matter of moderation being different from censorship.

But really, an “algorithm tweak”? I am still wondering when or why who decided that we needed to have “algorithms” that someone could “tweak” on the Internet at all. The first kind of “social media” I ever used was web forums where the entire “algorithm” was thread bumping, and even if you insist that we need to have the structure of a microblog: Mastodon does fine without an “algorithm” beyond reverse-chronological sorting.

it’s so easy to host an ActivityPub server oneself, there’s really no excuse for a government agency not to be doing that instead of relying on ex-Twitter

YouTube’s content moderation policies forbid “content praising or justifying violent acts carried out by violent extremist, criminal, or terrorist organizations.”

well so since Luigi Mangione isn’t an organization, sounds like that isn’t covered by these “content moderation policies”? Right?

Obligatory reading:

• https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/
• https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship

This has to do with how copyright laws changed over time, for example there used to be a requirement in the US for works to have a copyright notice, or for copyright to be renewed, so some things that didn’t meet those requirements became public domain earlier than they could have if the copyright holder had cared about all the formalities.