US sanctions EU government officials behind the DSA
(mastodon.social)78 points by pojntfx 3 hours ago
78 points by pojntfx 3 hours ago
Really abhorrent how the current US government is spinning this into their tried and true "free speech" crusade despite it being mostly irrelevant. The DSA's core goal is transparency, shown clearly in the X ruling.
> The ‘blue checks’ charge is about consumer deception. X changed the rules about how it does verification in a way that allowed impersonation and scams to flourish. [...] As the Commission put it, the DSA “clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place.”
> The ‘ads transparency’ charge stems from the DSA’s requirement that platforms must maintain a public archive showing what ads the platform ran, who paid for them, and other information. X fell drastically short of meeting this requirement
> The third thing the EU penalized X for is not giving researchers better access to public data. This enforcement is not about the DSA’s more famous and controversial requirement for platforms to hand over internal data. It’s just about information that was already publicly available on X’s site and app.
It's clear why the tech monopolies want to keep their secrets in the dark. There is a democratic consensus that what they're pulling either is illegal - or should be illegal. E.g. Scam advertisements, overt editorial practices by selective (de)amplification and/or monetization and looking the other way about bots and third-parties leveraging their systems for spreading political propaganda.
Transparency is their enemy. Free speech is their irrelevant but emotion-laden argument. Europeans see straight through it - the questions is, do the Americans?
I find it deeply cynical that representatives of a federalized union call upon another union to disband in favor of national identity. It is a transparent ploy to sow division within another competing union for geopolitical gain.
Yeah, but geopolitics is a chaotic system and the US foreign policy has failed at pretty much everything for decades now - these are the people who managed to cement Taliban control of Afghanistan and appear to be losing the economic race of the 21st century to a literal communist party.
If they're saying this to undermine Europe, their track record suggests that it might strengthen Europe. If it is coming from the US State Department they are so bad at international politics that there is a pretty good chance that the path to thwarting them is following their plan. The most powerful era of Europe was literally when they had lots of small but technically and socially advanced countries competing with each other. It was literally a world-conquering combination that put them centuries ahead of everyone else. In some sense the reason the EU exists is to try and hold the Germans back; talking about breaking it up is one of those careful-what-you-wish-for requests.
Imagine the response to the EU calling for Texas leaving the US via that weird defunct line in their constitution.
Maybe breaking up the US would be a good idea. The blue states are funding the American government which is led by the people mostly popular in the red states. But you won't see EU politicians set up a well-funded plan to actually do it.
America has turned into a ridiculous cartoon of itself in such a short time frame.
The world hegemon caught doing cynical thing, news at 11.
Is the idea here to normalize what the Trump administration is doing as “what any hegemon would do”? As far as I’m aware, the US largely avoided using its power to directly prosecute one man’s personal vendettas?
The EU did not call upon the US to disband because of fines levied against Volkswagen. Nor did the EU say that the Clean Air act was only enacted to attack the European car industry.
Instead the EU levied their own fines against VW and BMW including a €875 million fine in 2021. When can we expect the US to slap X with a multi-million dollar fine?
You are deliberately missing the point. The EU would have continued to conveniently ignore VW diesel emissions had the US, a competing power, not pointed them out.
> Instead the EU levied their own fines against VW including a €875 million fine in 2021.
Only because the US found them out. The EU was quite happy with VW until then, and liked to act all smugly superior about emissions.
> When can we expect the US to slap X with a multi-million dollar fine?
For what exactly? What US laws have X, under Musk, broken?
Sanctions in this context mean visa restrictions (travel ban to US). So not financial sanctions. Just thought it would be a good thing to clarify.
Europe is struggling with an energy crisis because of its sanctions against Russia. I'm sure those Iranian and Venezuelan oil fields willook awfully enticing after the Americans break down more and more American-European trade ties. Who knows, maybe a sizable oil investment might convince the Iranians to stop contributing to the Ukrainian invasion.
The day will come when we ban Steve Bannon, Elon Musk and JD Vance from the UK, and I think for the first two at least, the day is getting closer.
(I personally expect Vance to be banned from the UK - along with Denmark and Greenland - as soon as he is no longer VP. But then I suspect his days of international travel will end then more generally.)
But since diplomacy requires proportionality, maybe we start with Bannon, or Nick Fuentes, or Andrew Auernheimer. (They really should be banned from travel here like Matthew Heimbach, Richard Spencer, Don Black and Mark Weber already are.)
What purpose would a travel ban on those people serve? The UK is totally unable to police its own border nor remove violent predators. They've been reduced to paying perpetrators of sex offences to leave.
Overreach in some areas does not conflict with proportional and appropriate action in others.
In the last electoral cycle I've seen firsthand censorship applied to remote acquaintances because of the newly added EU DSA (this in and of itself would not be a huge disaster [by EU standards] if it wasn't accompanied by arrests), which was used as justification over some posts on TikTok and X; therefore I don't really care who hurts the pro-censorship faction within the EU. People have been arrested in WE for speech online for more than a decade now, but now it also happens in EE, where I live, bringing back communist-era "vibes". You would excuse me if the anti-Trump or anti-US (because of the current administration) rhetoric doesn't move me regarding this.
Or let me guess, "Trump bad and therefore we should accept DSA/Chat control 2.0/3.0/etc."? Sorry, I don't care. And people who think this is only about the recent X fine are also wrong (this started last year when Thierry Breton started influencing european elections while also boasting about how he can annul such elections without repercussions; you can deduce what I'm talking about by asking an LLM). This is in part US gov. protecting private companies (and thus itself) from fines, sure, but the broader point about censorship within the west applies. Everything that hurts the people making legislation regarding the Internet (or software in general) within the EU should be welcomed with open arms.
EU apologists would rather change the subject and talk about Trump and the polarizing social environment in the US rather than acknowledge that within the EU, there's not even a chance for discourse to be had about any policy(especially the nonexistent free speech) due to the aforementioned laws. The same people will act surprised when extreme positions regarding the EU are adopted by an ever-increasing number of people "until morale improves".
The EU does far too little to prevent election influencing. From Cambridge Analytica, proof of foreign bribery, algorithmic promotion of bot content by X and Meta specifically intended to undermine democracies, there's plenty of election fixing happening, and the EU should be much more aggressive about preventing it.
Individual free speech is not - of course - ethically or politically identical to "free speech" produced by weaponised industrial content farms funded by corporations and foreign actors.
See thats why one needs a sovereign financial and banking system. But tbh, Europeans deserve it, for they use and abuse of sanctions themselves, as some of Swiss citizens can attest.
> See thats why one needs a sovereign financial and banking system.
You mean a sovereign financial and banking system like the one currently freezing some $200B of Russian assets? Yeah I think the EU already has one of those.
Yes I am. See what's interesting? Just acknowledging Russia's security interests, and explaining that Russians are just not evil doers who attacked Ukraine for no reason is a Thought Crime in Europe. And now the Thought Police is being policed by the US Empire. Pretty funny if you ask me. It's the ultimate evidence free speech never existed in the West. It's a mirage.
If the people who attacked Ukraine without provocation - just as they attacked other neighbours in other regions - are attempting to bring down a democratically elected regimes across the region, so they can replace them with weak compliant puppets, the "thought crime" becomes straightforward self defence.
Jaques Baud is not a "mouthpiece". He has never appeared on Russian state TV and has taken great pains to avoid citing Russian sources in his analysis. The problem is that what he has been saying about the Ukraine war (that the war is not winnable and peace should be negotiated as soon as possible) is dangerous as to European leadership.
It's not remotely dangerous to the European leadership.
It is dangerous to EU citizens who are on the receiving end of a campaign to radicalise national governments with far-right Russian-funded puppet regimes which will - clearly, as we can see in the US - be absolutely hostile to existing freedoms.
Can you explain what sanctions impact swiss citizens?
Straight from the horse's mouth: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/foreign-affairs/former-swiss-in...
Sanctions on Jacques Baud for anti-war activism: https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/subjects/1802...
Sanctions on Nathalie Camp for of anti-colonialist speech: https://data.europa.eu/apps/eusanctionstracker/subjects/1764...
What Trump is doing to the EU is basically what the EU has been doing to us forever. Forced trade deals, forced tariffs, placing us on some lists. If we don't comply, they will impose sanctions. They are even trying to make gun ownership illegal in Switzerland...
I don't have love for Trump, but seeing the EU wining about being bullied by a bigger union is really funny to me.
>If we don't comply, they will impose sanctions. They are even trying to make gun ownership illegal in Switzerland...
UK is the proof that nobody is forced to be part of EU or have good relations with EU. EU also forces food not contain excrements, where is your freedom to buy food with exfements? As you can see I can also say ridiculous things.
Which "leftists" have monopolized the EU? What positions do they have to exert that kind of power, and what parties are they affiliated with?
Or is the EPP with the likes of Weber and von der Leyen "leftist" now? You have move quite far towards the extreme right for traditional conservative politicians to appear "leftist" to you.
Nationalism is on the rise in most EU countries and they get away with saying all kinds of things you apparently dream about, but feel censored to say. The tale of lacking free speech is a lie.
Free speech in the EU is different from the US. Insulting people is not considered free speech in the EU. Calling "fire" in a packed cinema wrongly is not covered by free speech in the EU.
You can say a lot of things, but you might feel social pressure, which is a feature, not a bug.
Can you give examples of the little freedom of speech?
By "conservative/nationalist", do you mean <MAGA-Aligned> , like PVV or AFD?
It's funny how the US administration thinks people like Breton acted ideologically. Brusselocrats are career politicians caring more about their CV than the spirit of their actions. They do populist flashy things, it's not like they'd lose an election or anything. Ban them all you want, you re just buttering their bread , it's another bullet in their CV, a badge of honor.
Then again, Trump has to win the election, and the Bell curve is symmetrical. Sanctioning EU politicians is less like sanctioning elected national politicians, and more like sanctioning artists. No nation was offended
Breton is 70 so he will probably do a soft retirement now.
He has had a fantastic career in business, academia, and (French) politics. Less than 5 years of that career was spent in Bruxelles.
EU has no dependency on other unless they want to remain as babies with a lavish lifestyle. Time to grow up and man up.
They should also stop pretence of global leadership, send billions here and there. Have a strong leadership that can just mind their own people.
From the thread, "If you want an explainer on why the EU’s DSA Fine Against X is Not About Speech or Censorship read this article:" https://www.techpolicy.press/the-eus-fine-against-x-is-not-a...