One of this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) panels brought together publishers, a French minister, and a UK think tank previously involved in US State Department-funded censorship of Americans, who praised the EU’s controversial Digital Services Act (DSA) while railing against “misinformation.”
French Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technology Clara Chappaz spoke about the DSA as a solution to the “problem” presented by free speech on the internet.
Chappaz and another speaker, the CEO of the UK think tank – the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) – defended the law as not being a censorship tool but “merely” making what is illegal offline also illegal online.
Yet the French official remarked that it requires platforms to introduce measures reducing “the systemic risks” tied to “misinformation.” And this ends up providing a mechanism for censorship of whatever the authorities decide to consider “misinformation.”
Chappaz also spoke about an age verification law that was introduced in France last week, the pretext being preventing minors from accessing adult sites.
ISD CEO Sasha Havlicek went as far as to claim that instead of being a censorship law, EU’s DSA is in fact there to “serve fundamental rights” – and that includes free speech.
Havlicek – whose organization advises Spotify’s Safety Advisory Council on how to deal with “online abuse, hate speech, disinformation, and extremism” and is also a member of YouTube’s Priority Flagger Program – repeated Chappaz’s assertion that the DSA cannot be a censorship tool because it mandates the removal of illegal content only.
Another panelist, Dow Jones & Company publishing group CEO Almar Latour, complained about “disinformation” playing a big role “in the past year” and dismissed those who claim otherwise as spreading “misinformation.”
Latour spoke about the ever-eroding trust in institutions (i.e., entrenched elites), and while acknowledging that this has “deeper roots,” he also repeated the claim heard many time over the last years that “disinformation” and “misinformation” are now present on such a scale that they “exacerbate that trend.”
To Latour’s mind, the fact that legacy (“news”) media and others rapidly losing trust of the public is “a very malignant trend.”
