Elon Musk has until the end of Wednesday to respond to demands from Brussels to remove graphic images and disinformation linked to the violence in Israel from his social network X — or face the full force of Europe’s new social media rules.
Thierry Breton, the European Union commissioner who oversees the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA) rules, wrote to the owner of X, formerly Twitter, to warn Musk of his obligations under the bloc’s content rules.
If Musk fails to comply, the EU’s rules state X could face fines of up to 6 percent of its revenue for potential wrongdoing. Under the regulations, social media companies are obliged to remove all forms of hate speech, incitement to violence and other gruesome images or propaganda that promote terrorist organizations.
Since Hamas launched its violent attacks on Israel on October 7, X has been flooded with images, videos and hashtags depicting — in graphic detail — how hundreds of Israelis have been murdered or kidnapped. Under X’s own policies, such material should also be removed immediately.
Getting rid of misinformation is great.
Getting rid of accurately reported, gruesome images because of a government mandate flies in the face of the core principles of free speech. And it would cause real damage to the world.
Remember that it was only when the world actually saw images of the Nazi concentration camps that the world actually believed it. They’d heard about it for years, but it was largely ignored.
You should read before you post.
You’re speaking against the propaganda fueled groupthink, that’s a bannable offense.
Or what lol. Rich people are above the law.
I’m glad to see for once the fines are proportional to revenue, and not a fixed amount. 6% hurts.
Will it hurt though? How are they going to collect the 6%? Do US based banks cooperate with the EU on this kind of thing? What happens if Musk just tells them to go fuck themselves?
Probably a lot of Xi tter customers headquatered in EU. They can say to their own banks to not send money.
how can settle for that?
when normal people spend years in single cell rooms for small offenses Lmao 🇺🇸🦅😎
This is in the EU, so your emojis don’t make sense. But you are right, rich people get off way too easy the world over.
Xitter is a corporation that doesn’t live in the EU
Sorry, completely off topic and not the place, but …
your comment is perfectly complemented by your username above it.
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You’re thinking of profit. Revenue is all money coming in before expenses. Revenue is still a big number even if they’re losing money.
Also it’s 6% of turnover, not revenue. And world-wide, not just the EU.
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This is not toothless…well it is a bit in that they constantly warn instead of imposing the fines but 6% of revenue has fuck all to do with net profit(which is always positive or else it would be a loss).
EU can only penalize him on revenue (not profit) in the EU. So likely small fries compared to the billions of dollars of devaluation and advertiser revenue he’s already squandered on his crusade.
He won’t, we all know he won’t. He’d sooner get Twitter banned from Europe than actually try to improve his platform.
The intent is to ruin twitter. That was why he used $22B of Saudi money to buy it.
Is his goal to get the app banned from Europe?
I could see that being the business plan.
Is this the thing that finally makes Musk feel some pain? You can’t wiggle out of this one, EU law is pretty tight on this stuff.
Any phrase, request or threat in the from of “do X or be subject to the rules” is inherently flawed.
Why not skip the asking part and go straight to the enforcing the rules part because they’re, you know; the fucking rules.
Freedom of speech must stand. If it’s not true, counter it with more speech. Governments shoulder never have the power to block speech nor curate speech.
So what’s slander?
Or else what? Small fine? You’ll never see him.
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Joke’s on Brussels - 6% of a negative number is not a disincentive.
Should be 6% of his personal net worth as most optimistically reported.
Revenue =/= profit
Revenue will never be negative.
I can think of an occasion… when the Beatles tried to open a clothing store which didn’t do well, and when it went out of business, fans ended up stealing everything in the building down to the fixtures. Having to pay to renovate the building after the business has closed… that counts as negative revenue to me.
Well your counting wrong in that case, they operated at a loss judging from your story but their revenue was all the money that went through the company.
Then take their servers. Just chuck them in the back of a removalist van and pay some mexicans to drive it to your garage.
Umm… why? Why are they censoring the truth?
This is how people don’t take war seriously. All they do is hear about it, but don’t see the gruesome reality.
Traumatizing ≠ making people take war seriously.
Believe it or not, journalism and educating people is much more than uploading graphically disturbing images to some website and leave it as is.
Traumatizing ≠ making people take war seriously.
That’s actually not true, and most people who watch these videos aren’t ‘traumatized’, so it’s not really an argument.
Believe it or not, journalism and educating people is much more than uploading graphically disturbing images to some website and leave it as is.
Who said it isn’t? They should include the footage with their articles. This way people can see instead of just being told.
If they don’t want to look, then there should be explicit content warnings.
There have been plenty of studies about gore and death content that suggest they cause trauma similar to PTSD. Some people are affected more than others. On X you’re pretty likely to be presented with some extremely violent images right now if you go looking for information about what is happening, so you can’t really avoid it other than to avoid X entirely. Plenty of these images and videos aren’t even related to this conflict, and are just misinformation / ragebait.
Can you show me what studies you’re talking about?
I have a feeling you’re referring specifically to studies that focus on people who are paid to moderate this content. If you share what studies you’re talking about we can know for sure.
You really don’t need to look further than the clinical data on PTSD. A sufficient amount of any form of trauma can cause mental health issues including but not limited to PTSD. Watching an execution video has a large potential to cause a severe trauma response, especially if the victims are people you know or love, or are members of your community.
Plenty of real world examples of content moderation teams at social media companies suffering from their exposure to extreme content.
Traumatizing people is one of the core goals of terrorism, because it does damage.
Thanks for not linking to a single study like I asked.
Sorry, but I won’t take you seriously until you do. You mentioned ‘studies.’ Show us them.
I’ve seen studies that disprove your studies.
