After years of relentless online censorship carried out by US tech giants (often, it now appears, via third parties and at the behest of governments, including their own) – things are starting to look up a little.
But over in Europe, the EU is involved in sometimes frenzied attempts to at least maintain the status-quo regarding suppression of free speech, and is now preparing to ramp up the use of legal tools it has prepared over the previous years, above all the Digital Services Act (DSA), rejected by critics as the bloc’s censorship law.
European Conservative reports, the EU bureaucracy is clearly rattled by Donald Trump’s return to power, and the fact that unlike during his first term in office, most of Big Tech now supports his (among other things, strongly anti-censorship) policies.
Just how rattled is clear from statements like that made by EU Commission VP Henna Virkkunen, who considers companies behind major social platforms “siding” with this US president (but not when they did that with the previous one) “a direct threat to European democracy.”
More free speech being a “threat” to democracy – there’s a concept difficult to wrap one’s mind around. Nevertheless, that’s the line the EU is currently taking, and the way to counter the “threat,” Virkkunen revealed as she addressed the European Parliament this week, is to bolster the use of fact-checkers and “hate speech laws.”
To achieve that, EU staff working to enforce the DSA will grow to 200 by the end of this year, and that will be complemented by involving what reports refer to as “local DSA coordinators” in member countries.
And while Virkkunen denied that the DSA is any kind of censorship law, she swiftly went on to outline how it can be used to censor content, stating that if speech is illegal (on the grounds of promoting hate) “offline,” the DSA now also makes it illegal and eligible for removal online.
This is true both regarding EU laws, and those in the 27-member countries, which provide for a wide variety of censorship-supporting legislation, given the tendency to criminalize speech that’s present across Europe.
EU’s hate speech rules will also be updated to force Big Tech platforms to make sure “hate speech is flagged and assessed 24 hours, and removed when necessary.”
