I agree that there are some good ideas in the act and an amount of transparency that analogous American legislation usually misses. But that doesn't render the ugly parts of it less ugly! If nothing else, the required prioritization of "trusted flaggers" (which include both rather unserious-looking "anti-racism" watchdogs and anti-piracy lobbyist orgs) should make it a hard pass for anyone who wants an internet where users have equal rights.
Someone should try to register a center-right/libertarian org or an anti-copyright one as a "trusted flagger" to test the system for how non-partisan it actually is.
Yeah, I agree that their flagger program needs to have a spectrum of parties to be seen as remotely legitimate. I saw a bank was on there last time I looked. The question of what Europe’s speech laws and culture should be, vs how this regulation should delegate the enforcement they have indicated they are *going* to have, are also separate. I think the fact that the DSA requires the notices to be public, AND makes the stats about flaggers public, is ultimately an improvement over their old system.
Transparency alone isn't that great of a solace if there is no way to contest the decisions at scale. And scale is important here, as a single "trusted flagger" gone wild has jurisdiction over the entire EU. I can easily conjure up questions where, say, a German flagger on one side and a Hungarian or Estonian one on the other will together cover the entire spectrum of possible opinions as disinformation. Even Germany vs. Germany will be fun. Is calling Russian soldiers Orcs hate speech? Calling ISIS Daesh?
And then there is the most obvious consequence: Sorry, %user, that your abuse complaint is taking a while. We have to prioritize 100 000 trusted flagger reports about someone misquoting copyrighted song lyrics. It's the law!
Right. Though there is no real way to contest any decision in the US, which is one point I wanted to make in the post. The copyright takedown asks companies make, which are often simply automated here in the US, used to be voluntarily communicated to the public Lumen DB by the platforms - until that stopped. This means we can’t see what companies are trying to abuse copyright. I don’t like many things about the DSA but as for the argument that trusted flaggers will be flagging disinformation right and left — the flagging program is *supposed* to be narrowly tailored to flag “illegal content” like copyright or various European hate speech law issues and it would be a big stretch for most disinfo to fall under that.
There is plenty not to like from a US perspective. But from the filings around how platforms treat these reports, anyone should be able to see, for the first time, whether/how flagger behavior and platform response skews along ideological lines.
I agree that there are some good ideas in the act and an amount of transparency that analogous American legislation usually misses. But that doesn't render the ugly parts of it less ugly! If nothing else, the required prioritization of "trusted flaggers" (which include both rather unserious-looking "anti-racism" watchdogs and anti-piracy lobbyist orgs) should make it a hard pass for anyone who wants an internet where users have equal rights.
Eugyppius had some fun unpacking one of -- in fact the first -- German "trusted flaggers" https://www.eugyppius.com/p/creepy-government-funded-anti-hate , and even as his writings should often be viewed through a lens of "is there an alternative interpretation", he has been pretty flawless on the factual level, and the facts here speak for themselves. You can peruse the whole list at https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/trusted-flaggers-under-dsa .
Someone should try to register a center-right/libertarian org or an anti-copyright one as a "trusted flagger" to test the system for how non-partisan it actually is.
Yeah, I agree that their flagger program needs to have a spectrum of parties to be seen as remotely legitimate. I saw a bank was on there last time I looked. The question of what Europe’s speech laws and culture should be, vs how this regulation should delegate the enforcement they have indicated they are *going* to have, are also separate. I think the fact that the DSA requires the notices to be public, AND makes the stats about flaggers public, is ultimately an improvement over their old system.
Transparency alone isn't that great of a solace if there is no way to contest the decisions at scale. And scale is important here, as a single "trusted flagger" gone wild has jurisdiction over the entire EU. I can easily conjure up questions where, say, a German flagger on one side and a Hungarian or Estonian one on the other will together cover the entire spectrum of possible opinions as disinformation. Even Germany vs. Germany will be fun. Is calling Russian soldiers Orcs hate speech? Calling ISIS Daesh?
And then there is the most obvious consequence: Sorry, %user, that your abuse complaint is taking a while. We have to prioritize 100 000 trusted flagger reports about someone misquoting copyrighted song lyrics. It's the law!
Right. Though there is no real way to contest any decision in the US, which is one point I wanted to make in the post. The copyright takedown asks companies make, which are often simply automated here in the US, used to be voluntarily communicated to the public Lumen DB by the platforms - until that stopped. This means we can’t see what companies are trying to abuse copyright. I don’t like many things about the DSA but as for the argument that trusted flaggers will be flagging disinformation right and left — the flagging program is *supposed* to be narrowly tailored to flag “illegal content” like copyright or various European hate speech law issues and it would be a big stretch for most disinfo to fall under that.
There is plenty not to like from a US perspective. But from the filings around how platforms treat these reports, anyone should be able to see, for the first time, whether/how flagger behavior and platform response skews along ideological lines.