The EU Inquisition

Paul MacDonnell has a rather depressing piece in The Critic about EU censorship plans. Depressing because the usual suspects are certain to press for something similar in the UK. They probably already are.

The EU’s proposed Digital Services Act (DSA) bills itself as an update to the Union’s decade-old rules governing online commerce. But its promise of “measures which have consumer protection at their core” is misleading. Behind the consumer-protection facade lies a threat to freedom of speech in Europe. First, the DSA will hand powers of online content-moderation and regulatory enforcement to the European Commission and new national regulators. There will be a platform censor or “digital services coordinator” in each of the EU’s twenty-seven member states. Second, it will grant NGOs and identitarian organisations priority consideration when they object to content which offends their “collective interests”. And third, defining digital platforms as posing a “systemic risk” to public order and democracy, the DSA will force them to report annually their own mitigation activities. To avoid massive fines, platforms will likely save government censors the trouble of ordering the removal of content, by doing so themselves.

Well worth reading in full unless you are really determined to be cheerful.

The criteria for licensing trusted flaggers include: that they should have “expertise…in detecting illegal content” and that they “represent collective interests”. They will likely be NGOs, humanities and social sciences institutes, think-tanks, charities, and groups representing singular identities. Who exactly will be their “collective interests”? Won’t they be motivated to please them by going after increasingly innocuous content in an ever-expanding search for speech that offends them? This regulation will encourage motivated, licensed activists to aggravate social media’s digital free-surface effect.