The EU's attitude to American tech firms is weird. On the one hand, they have extrajudicial private entities they outsource censorship requests to ("trusted flaggers"), which the companies have to follow at the threat of massive fines and which therefore creates the incentive to ban quickly.

On the other hand, there is stuff like this where they created another arbitrary "voluntary" mechanism to punish the companies for banning too much. I think ultimately the EU just wants a set of rules to use as a pretense to levy fines on big tech.

You assume that the EU acts in a coherent manner.

I think that premise is wrong - there are many interest groups, and by luck/lobbying/reaching critical mass/... they manage to put one of their interests into a law.

The problem is that the EU politicians do not want the think about the problem. They want to outsource it and make someone else to pay it.

But there is no solution. Any censorship is always subjective.

Also trusted flaggers bans cannot be disputed easily. Meta rather just takes whatever trusted flaggers have flagged, real or not, and it is not their problem. It is a problem between the EU citizen and anonymous trusted flagged with no accountability.

The next step is of course corrupted trusted flaggers who can take down business pages, whatever, for a payment.

There are no fines at all in this story.

The EU fines are not enough to get the US tech companies to change, or even leave completely. But they are enough to continually fund the EU regulatory bureaucracy itself. So this arm of the government really only exists to preserve itself.

I would be interested to see how many EU government jobs the US tech fines are supporting. Maybe Meta or Google is indirectly the largest employer in Brussels?

There are no fines, this is about having recourse when big tech randomly bans you. Which you will remember, is a very common outcry on this very page.

This is just an uninformed EU rant.

EU is an organization of bureaucrats. They want rules, first and foremost. Rules that they can lord over you and that justify their continued existence. What those rules are about is a secondary matter.

It's almost as though they want to be the government making the rules, rather than sitting back and letting the likes of META do whatever they want. The imperfect approach comes down to the reality of politics.

I think the censorship framing is quite manipulative. It is removal of unlawful content.

Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?

If no, then where do you draw the line? Why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to decide instead?

> The EU's attitude to American tech firms is weird.

At the core, what the difference is is how "free speech" is interpreted. In the US? Unless you literally fake-call "fire" or call for Luigi'ing someone, it's protected free speech, even if it's a bunch of Nazis holding tiki torches and showing the Hitler salute [1].

In Europe? We have been through 1933-1945. Almost every country in continental Europe was either occupied by Hitler's Germany or lorded over by one of his allies (e.g. Spain's Franco, Ante Pavelic in what would be Yugoslavia or Mussolini in Italy). An awful, awful lot of people died thanks to these regimes, and our collective learning from that history is to either ban such speech entirely or at the very least ostracize its followers. The Eastern Bloc countries who had been occupied by authoritarian pseudo Communism in the decades after WW2 added the Communist symbols (e.g. Red Star) for the same reason. Generally, we do not want a repeat of these eras.

Now with social media, we saw Americans (and people of other non European countries, but mostly Americans) openly post symbols we see as symbols of hate, we saw them call for a repeat of what happened between 1933 and the 1990s, and US platforms did barely anything against that. We tried the soft way as we almost always do, announced "hey we don't like that", platforms didn't get it under control (and some, like post-Musk Twitter, openly announced they DGAF)... and similarly to GDPR or USB-C, we acted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally

As an EU citizen I am glad there's at least some overwatch and control over these companies. I don't trust them at all. In the US unregulated capitalism is fine: everything and his mother are for sale. Here, not so much.

Ironically if there is a single population that will immensely benefit from socialism, is the United States. Yet they are raised in fear of the very doctrine that would save them.