The European Union’s Troublesome Plan to Clean Up Social Media

Jacob Mchangama, author of Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media (2022) is warning us of the EU's well-intended "Digital Services Act, enacted in November 2022. The stated purpose of the Act is to require social media platforms to

evaluate and remove illegal content, such as “hate speech,” as fast as possible. It also mandates that the largest social networks assess and mitigate “systemic risks,” which may include the nebulous concept of “disinformation.”

Mchangama is concerned that the EU is ignoring the likely consequences of the Act:

The European law, by contrast, may sound like a godsend to those Americans concerned about social media’s weaponization against democracy, tolerance and truth after the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enthusiastically supported the European clampdown on Big Tech’s amplification of what she considers “disinformation and extremism.” One columnist in the New Yorker hailed the Digital Services Act as a “road map” for “putting the onus on social-media companies to monitor and remove harmful content, and hit them with big fines if they don’t.”

But when it comes to regulating speech, good intentions do not necessarily result in desirable outcomes. In fact, there are strong reasons to believe that the law is a cure worse than the disease, likely to result in serious collateral damage to free expression across the EU and anywhere else legislators try to emulate it.

Removing illegal content sounds innocent enough. It’s not. “Illegal content” is defined very differently across Europe. In France, protesters have been fined for depicting President Macron as Hitler, and illegal hate speech may encompass offensive humor. Austria and Finland criminalize blasphemy, and in Victor Orban’s Hungary, certain forms of “LGBT propaganda” is banned.

The Digital Services Act will essentially oblige Big Tech to act as a privatized censor on behalf of governments — censors who will enjoy wide discretion under vague and subjective standards. Add to this the EU’s own laws banning Russian propaganda and plans to toughen EU-wide hate speech laws, and you have a wide-ranging, incoherent, multilevel censorship regime operating at scale.

The obligation to assess and mitigate risks relates not only to illegal content, though. Lawful content could also come under review if it has “any actual or foreseeable negative effect” on a number of competing interests, including “fundamental rights,” “the protection of public health and minors” or “civic discourse, the electoral processes and public security.”

The DSA appears to be a blank check written to powerful actors, inviting them vigorously assume the the role of nannies for others, to make sure people in EU all talk properly to each other, as determined and enforced by governments. This is an invitation for powerful actors to embrace unrestrained government-enforced censorship. What could possibly go wrong?

Mchangama warns of the spill-over effect. The Act only applies to the EU on its face, which is bad enough, but it could affect those all over the world, including in the U.S."

The European policies do not apply in the U.S., but given the size of the European market and the risk of legal liability, it will be tempting and financially wise for U.S.-based tech companies to skew their global content moderation policies even more toward a European approach to protect their bottom lines and streamline their global standards. . . . The result could subject American social media users to moderation policies imposed by another government, constrained by far weaker free speech guarantees than the 1st Amendment.

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Oliver Burkeman: Don’t Compare Your Lifetime to the Infinite Lifetimes of the gods

From the day we are born, we only get about 1,000 months of life on average. That might make us feel a bit cheated. Why must we DIE? Oliver Burkeman reframes:

Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything IS, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given—as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all.

― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

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Camille Paglia Discusses Transgender Issues

I've followed Camille Paglia for many year, always finding her opinions deeply explored, courageous and clearly stated. An excerpt from CPYU:

Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women’s studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

In a democracy, everyone, no matter how nonconformist or eccentric, should be free from harassment and abuse. But at the same time, no one deserves special rights, protections, or privileges on the basis of their eccentricity. The categories “trans-man” and “trans-woman” are highly accurate and deserving of respect. But like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, I reject state-sponsored coercion to call someone a “woman” or a “man” simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it. We may well take the path of good will and defer to courtesy on such occasions, but it is our choice alone.

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University of Missouri School of Journalism Embraces Censorship.

University of Missouri School of Journalism has announced that it is engaging in censorship based on comically vague criteria. Excerpt from City Journal:

One of the top journalism schools in the country endorses restrictions on free speech. The University of Missouri’s School of Journalism currently enforces a sweeping newsroom diversity policy that aims to eradicate “reporting that is racist or sexist in fact or in connotation” and to “eliminate nationalistic, racist, sexist and other demeaning remarks . . . whether said in seriousness or jest.” The policy applies to the university’s six affiliated news outlets, which are often staffed by faculty and students.

When asked, the journalism school refused to provide any definitions or examples of a “demeaning” remark. But recent incidents suggest that university students and faculty can encounter severe repercussions if they criticize the Black Lives Matter movement, hang flags in support of the police, or challenge gender ideology. The School’s vaguely defined policy allows university faculty and administrators to enforce speech restrictions as they see fit....

If one refers to the horrifically vague Newsroom Diversity Policy, one can see that the school is laser-beam discriminatory when it comes to students seeking work on-air. The university is proudly lispist, hissist and stutterist.

Criteria for air work will include clarity of diction; enunciation and elocution; well-modulated pitch and tone; lack of lisp, hiss, stutter, thickly accented speech or distracting mannerisms; correct inflection; and interpretation of delivery.

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