> At the heart of this case was the enforcement of a new legal provision under the DSA: the right to access research data (Article 40(12) DSA). This provision requires large online platforms to provide researchers with immediate access to publicly available data on their platforms in order to assess systemic risks. The lawsuit has also helped clarify open legal questions regarding the judicial enforceability of this right in Germany. [0]
Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
Also, maybe this linked article would be a better one that the one from Reuters.
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
Because the language I'm reading here doesn't mean anything.
"Researcher" can mean anything. In the US we see DOGE people rifling through government finance records, pipelining the data to the executive, for targeting of specific political interests. "Research" means whatever the present democratically elected regime wants it to mean.
"Systemic risk" can mean anything. Last month in the US, millions of "undocumented" people were walking around relatively unconcerned. This month they're all a "systemic risk" and being actively hunted down for deportation or worse.
Maybe tomorrow you become a "systemic risk," and whomever is in elected office at that time designates and funds some academics to "research" all your X/Facebook/Mastodon/whatever activity. There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?
So it's not the least bit difficult to understand why members of a supposed democracy might think this isn't a power "researchers" should have. It's only a problem for the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.
The data is publicly available. Researchers could get it by scraping, this law says that companies must provide more convenient ways to access that public data.
This has fuck all to do with government overreach or access to private data.
I dunno. There's an argument to be made that information which one could obtain piecemeal being made easily accessible at mass scale can create a qualitatively different situation to one in which significant labor is required to acquire it.
It's not a perfect analogy, but we can consider the case of recording in public being legal and the majority of people feeling this is reasonable, versus people's gradient of unease with uniquitous CCTV surveillance, versus how people would feel if the government made sure a law that all CCTV cameras are made remotely accessible at all times.
The OP mentioned: "This provision requires large online platforms to provide researchers with immediate access to publicly available data on their platforms in order to assess systemic risks"
> So if I run a large online shop I need to provide an API so anyone can download all of my product descriptions and prices?
> If I publish an online magazine, I need to provide an API so anyone can download all the content I produce?
How is your online shop a "systemic risk" ? Moreover "large online platforms" is a clearly defined term... not your usual website
So please: keep cool... We, Europeans, are not always stupid bureaucracy lovers. Sometimes we also have good ideas to try to preserve our shared freedom and rights and democracy :-)
At first pass this comment sounds like a critique a “cynical and lazy” internet commentator wrote under willful ignorance of facts like the underlying law only applying to platforms with 45 million monthly active users in the EU.
When you come across something that makes it seem like everyone else has lost their mind, a 30 second Google search might help.
We're talking about publicly available data. If Elon has access to this data, I'd argue that giving it access to German research, and even AfD which Musk supports, won't make it any worse.
As much as I would like to and as easy as it is to agree with you, it's about the public data, not the researcher or research.
And systemic risk doesn't mean anything. It means what you continue to describe: context.
> a power "researchers" should have.
Again. It's about public data. Nobody can or would prohibit counting cars or pedestrians and nobody would try to make it harder than it already is. This applies to platforms like Twitter as well.
> It's only a problem for the the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.
The naïve suppose that exactly those people will govern who want the job, which, judging from their experience, are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education.
> are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education
I agree chucklingly that the statistical overrepresentation of lawyers in parliaments fits this assessment pretty well
> There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?
I think if they'll ever be in a position to do that, they won't give two figs about prior norms and reticence and all this pearl clutching.
Observe the means through which a 49.8% mandate is doing just that in the US.
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
The limit to "researchers" and "systemic risk" opens the door to cherry-picking the results - use a microscope to find issues when elections don't go your way, turn a blind eye when they do. The law is good (far better than not having it), but should be expanded, making the data available to everyone.
Good to see the EU recognizing there are innocuous things that when scaled to X- or Facebook- size produce systemic risks.
And if you want to be a platform that large, well, you owe additional societal responsibilities that your smaller competitors don't have to worry about (yet).
Not exactly: in the security space, we have better tools available than obscurity. But in the spam/abuse prevention space, obscurity is the best you can do.
If that is the case, having researchers perform analysis makes it possible to identify that risk and that is yet another reason to make sure that public data is not obscured.
In a way, this research would either prove or disprove your theory.
Researchers have exactly the same right to this data as X has to accessing the German market. If they want to make money, they play by the rules chosen by the people of that country. They are free to not sell their services if they don't like the deal offered.
Because that is what is democratically voted for? If the people (or the representatives they voted for) say that society having access to that data is what society wants, then the company can either provide that data, or have it taken from them.
There should not be a scenario where a company "beats" society.
Almost all of the countries we label as "democracies" have constitutions, and many of those constitutions limit what can be "democratically voted for". In the United States, the constitution has strict limits on ceaseing private property. That does not mean the US is not "democratic" by common usage of the term. Those living in democracies that thus protect private property rights may find laws that encroach on those private property rights odd, and be against them. Even in a country that has no such protections, one may be against such laws.
We are aware of the problems the US has. But the question "Why would anyone in a democracy accept" is easily answered, and as such I did.
As for the statements on encroachment or protections: this is about public data, not about private data or secrets.
The argument made in court is about research facilities due to the outsized impact X can make. You want to play in someone else's country, you'll have to follow their rules. This works the other way around as well, if a German company were to host their data in the US, they would have to accept that the government can snoop on that data whenever they want since the US does not protect German citizens. (and as such, privacy laws in Germany and in the EU since around 1995 do not allow private data to be transferred by default)
Something more countries might want to do is protect citizens from large corporations. They are not your friends.
Okay, I can see your point. I thought this was under the question "Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?" but I see now it was a response to the other question that was response to that question.
It seems like that phrase "democracy" means different things to different people, depending on where they are from.
DSA and DMA is widely known, but perhaps not by their acronyms or every individual rule.
I don't know in what country you live, but this was not exactly some hidden issue, in almost all member states this was a local issue and had local news coverage as well.
The only way someone would not have been aware is if they spent none of their time on any local or global reports. But in those cases, everything is going to be something they are unaware of and we'd be talking about people who are essentially disconnecting themselves from society. Everyone else would have heard about it multiple times since even local elections made a point of mentioning it, and election turnout is high, even if you don't participate yourself for some reason, it would be really hard to not have talked to anyone who did.
You're mixing a whole lot of things in a big ball of mud here, with a lot of half-truths and assumptions. Are you doing that on purpose?
This is not about data that is private, it's not a 'copy of your private data against your wishes', it's research access to public data that has impact on civil society due to the outsized impact on daily life some multinationals have.
As for 'liberty': corporations are not people, if anything, society should be free to not have commercial meddling involved in their life. As with everything else there is a gradient here, it's not some extreme choice there either everything is allowed or nothing is allowed. But messing with society is something that is worth preventing, intentional or not. It takes data and research to do that. In most cases, public data, and that is what this is about.
Which researchers will have access? Who decides upon them and what is their specific objective? Can I have access to it for my research?
> commercial meddling
What do you mean by this? Who is meddling and with what?
The user of social media has a personal engagement with that company. I don't think a government should be involved in that relationship. Why do you think it should?
Don't do that, try and redirect the discussion using some dumb definition/semantics argument. This data is public data on posts that X locks behind a wall in order to force sign-ups and ad views. You and I both know the colloquial definition for "the people", it's literally the electorate of the state in question, in this case all the German citizens who are able to vote for the polticians who passed this public access law. This isn't the government trying to pry private company secrets from poor, downtrodden corporations, it's the government passing a law that public data from social media needs to be easy to access for researchers.
It's data the user has agreed to share with the company at agreement with their terms. The data is not public if it is not made public. If it was, they wouldn't need to compel them to hand it over.
Who are the researchers and what thesis are they exploring?
Moreover. Companies operate by Charter, via the will of the people (and the people is you or us). And regardless of any agreements companies have with shareholders, first and foremost, you have a responsibility to the people you live and operate with, to act for the peoples interests, otherwise you don't have a right to exist, contrary to the lack of action in law on this.
A Charter is a grant, from the people, for any for-profit organization to exist, it comes with certain restrictions and it can be revoked at any time.
Charter
a written grant by a country's legislative or sovereign power [The People], by which a body such as a company, college, or city is founded and its rights and privileges defined.
> The GFF and Democracy Reporting International had argued that X had a duty under European law to provide easily researchable, collated access to information such as post reach, shares and likes - information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts but in practice impossible to access.
Read the last half of that. The court agrees.
> information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts
Great, so we all agree that according to the German law, researchers have access to this data, so there is no need to argue about it! I would personally go so far as to say "the people" at large should also have access to the data, so that no one can weaponize the definition of "researcher" or "the people" (which is prone to happen, as evidenced here), but luckily that's not the conversation we're having today, in this case the law is very clear and the German courts agreed so. Also, the GP post by that individual had no point, it was ostensibly a question, but in the article they covered that in this case, according to the law and German courts, "the people" means "researchers", so they either didn't read the article or were redirecting for other reasons. I just wasn't going to play around with their "definitionalism" where definitions of simple things are the most important talking point in order to off-track a discussion.
> but in the article they covered that in this case, according to the law and German courts, "the people" means "researchers",
From my review [1] [2], it appears that "researchers" is undefined.
Ultimately, can anyone apply for full access for free? I'm sure a lot of people across the political spectrum are curious about this.
If you have a clarification, great. If not, the point stands. X already has a firehose API solution [3]. While it's pay to access, it's unclear what compliance steps these researchers will have to jump through or whether anyone can just override this revenue stream for X and force it to turn over proprietary data that would otherwise be paywalled.
Researches get access, they then publish their studies. The press picks up on these studies and interprets them for "the people", unless "the people" want to read the studies by themselves.
To the extent we’re talking about user activity on the site, the people already have access to this data by dint of being the ones who did the things. Sent a tweet, viewed a tweet, clicked a link. They already have it. So what is being asked of X?
This is giving random researchers ("including those affiliated with non-profit bodies, organizations, and associations") "unrestricted access to all publicly available data on the platform immediately after elections" as long as they are doing something with some connection to the election? Doesn't sound very limited in scope... just timing. There's tons of nefarious uses for data like that which is why social media APIs usually have limitations on how broad you can go.
This law is not about arbitrary companies, but about large social networks affecting millions of people. Requiring a certain transparency from these seems justified.
There are vanishingly few private companies of significant size. For example in the US most businesses with more than a few owners are government chartered corporations, LLCs, and the like. This gets them government granted liability shields, and so it makes sense for them to be proactively regulated to prevent causing foreseeable harm that they might otherwise escape responsibility for.
The text actually says "very large online platform" which is defined in 33(1):
> This Section shall apply to online platforms and online search engines which have a number of average monthly active recipients of the service in the Union equal to or higher than 45 million, and which are designated as very large online platforms or very large online search engines pursuant to paragraph 4.
Paragraph 4 just reiterates that. Paragraph 3 gives scope for adjustment:
> In such a case, it shall adjust the number so that it corresponds to 10 % of the Union’s population in the year in which it adopts the delegated act, rounded up or down to allow the number to be expressed in millions.
Basically "very large" -> 10% of the EU population. I'm not a lawyer, though; there may well be specific legal shenanigans going on but at first blush, it doesn't look like it.
> Last, but probably the main thing that triggers me is that it "requires" somebody do some work for free. Why the fuck any company or person must do any work, that it doesn't deem necessary, to satisfy the curiosity of some "researchers"?
In democratic countries, there are many instances where you are required to do work for free to remain in business. You have to maintain accounts, records, licenses, authorisations, inspections, etc, depending on your business. This is a necessary part of engaging with the State in which you operate.
The Twitter API used to be extremely open way back in the day. This proved to be a boon for all kinds of social (and not so social) science research. In my mind, this was also one of the reasons for Twitter early growth as it made it trivial to build apps that interact with it. Over the years, the API got increasingly closed, making research in this area extremely difficult.
On the plus side, a decision like this can bring back the good old days of easy access for researchers. The down side, of course, is that it's almost impossible to define "researcher" in a way that prevents Cambridge Analytica like abuses from occurring again (not that the current owner is particularly interested in preventing them)
I was under the impression that the Cambridge Analytica situation was largely about 1: private data, 2: exclusive access to that private data, and 3: the secrecy about that data-sharing even happening in the first place.
I think none of those things are happening here, do you agree with that?
Publicly known public access to public information and facebook secretly selling private information to private company are massively far from each other.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that the Mueller report was a thing and this type of research is fairly critical in ensuring there’s no foul play in elections from foreign interests.
Foreign interests are always interfering in US elections (and everyone else's too); that's the price of being a democracy. It's a tale as old as democracy itself. There are plenty of other notable examples in US history, but it's a constant, and efforts obviously only intensified in the post-war era as America became more important to everyone else.
The example in 2016 of one particular country's actions is more about what the establishment chose to report for political reasons, although obviously there is some novelty in the way influence efforts are changing over time to adapt to new technologies.
I don’t think they are easy. Russia spent tens of millions on the 2016 election and research found it had essentially no effect. The last three presidential elections were won by the candidate with the least money (and often by significant margins).
Elections are won by people voting for issues that affect them, not a rich boogeyman
I don't think the ease really matters when we're talking about nation-states who look at the outcome of US elections as having a major impact on their country's future. Ease matters for regular people. Nation-states are prepared to do whatever it takes, regardless of cost or manpower.
A good, obvious and well-documented example is that both British and German agents were spending millions to impact US elections in the WWII period. There are obviously today hundreds of lobbying groups dedicated to producing propaganda and swaying legislation in the US that benefits their country. Some of it is aboveboard, some of it is not.
It is basically impossible to have anonymized social media data that cannot be deanonymized which is also useful for anything but a very narrow kind of research.
That's not at all true. This has nothing to do with the government. It's a court ruling on a law passed by parliament. In no way was the opinion/side of government at play here.
I think you're interpreting that that's the only outcome?
In Germany it's much harder to get money via lawsuit (vs the US), so that's kinda normal. If Twitter doesn't comply, the Staatsanwaltschaft will open a new lawsuit which will have a much bigger fine.
but yeah - 6k lawyers fee sounds like a joke, I guess it was a slam dunk case with very little time on the clock for the lawyers.
Not really.
6k euros are only for taking court's time and flat-rate lawyers salary.
(Imagine, in Europe average person may sue tech giants!)
If x will not comply it will be forced, maybe even by some sort of receivership.
The big thing is that x may be sued in German court.
> The big thing is that x may be sued in German court.
Let's say German court rules that X cannot operate in Germany. X decides to shut down any brick&mortar locations in Germany including any data centers located in Germany, but they do not stop Germans from accessing a public web service located outside Germany. What's the point? Will they then go after Germans continuing to use X?
In other words, a German court ruling against a non-German company can only go so far. However, IANAL, so willing to learn how a German court ruling would be anything other than a nuisance to a non-German company
Why the hypothetical given that X failed to follow court orders in Brazil just a few months ago, and then shut down their local offices?
X's website was blocked, and then the courts looked at how Musk operates his business interests and decided that Starlink was a valid recipient of the penalty fines, and Musk gave in.
No, they will simply ask internet providers to stop providing access to X to their users, and local DNSes (usually associated to these ISPs) to stop providing IPs associated with Twitter. This is nothing new, there's decades of prior art on copyright grounds.
Some edgy kids may use a VPN or something to bypass the ban, but 95% of people will simply move on to the next usable thing.
Another route is to tell financial institutions that payments to X must not be processed. That will immediately shut down advertising revenue from German companies, which will mean Germans will become less profitable users for X.
So... Yeah, Twitter may flout the ban, some users too, but most users and, more importantly, German banks won't.
They could block access to X from Germany (via DNS and removing apps from stores). Not hard to bypass, but certainly enough to make most people move on to another platform.
The usual things governments will do is block payments to the company and order companies that are present in that country to stop doing business with the company in question. That means they'd lose their revenue from German users and disappear from the app stores in Germany.
Because of the nature of the DSA, Twitter would be failing to comply at a European level. Very worst case scenario (which probably will never happen) all European assets will be seized before they can be transfered back to the parent company to make sure fines will be paid. Some European employees might be caught for fraud and jailed. Obviously Twitter's domains would be blocked across the EU, though a cheap VPN is all you'd need to bypass that.
Musk may put himself in a rather awkward position, as the CEO of a company actively refusing court orders. He may be arrested and prosecuted for his actions, so it'd be unwise for him personally to visit his European offices. I'm sure he has committed some form of crime throughout the past couple of years they can jail him by.
In practice, we'd probably just see a short-lived domain block. Jailing Elon will probably set off Trump and his cronies so the EU will probably not bother to go after him.
The point is that Twitter makes money by advertising, and if they can't operate in Germany, they can't do business with German companies that want to use it to advertise. So it stops making money.
And if he doesn't comply, and continues doing so, contrary to court orders, they can also put injunctions against Starlink, start seizing Tesla assets, etc.
How would that work? Tesla is a different company with different ownership. It would be a pretty gross violation of those owners’ property rights to seize their assets simply because of a vendetta against the CEO for actions of a completely separate company he runs.
In the case of SpaceX, it would be even less feasible in that it’s a major DoD provider and there are defense treaties between the US and EU member states.
"Other platforms have granted us access to systematically track public debates on their platforms, but X has refused to do so," said DRI's Michael Meyer-Resende in a statement on Wednesday, announcing the lawsuit.
I assume it varies by platform. Meta has a service that makes data available to vetted academic researchers, for example, so keep in mind that "available to researchers" does not necessarily mean that one can just post a link to it on Hacker News.
If there's a specific platform you're thinking of, there's probably someone in here that can direct you to the right place. What platform are you thinking of?
Thinking about the probable next steps made me remember that time Germany temporarily prohibited wikipedia.de from pointing to the actual Wikipedia when an article there said that the German politician Lutz Heilmann had been a full-time Stasi (the infamous and insanely brutal secret police) employee in the former DDR.
Interesting that a single cranky ex-Stasi employee can block Wikipedia for all of Germany because he's mad that Wikipedia states the proven fact that he is a former Stasi employee.
Do German courts not review the facts before granting injunctions?
As a rule short term injunctions (in this case 2 days) have minimal fact checking.
That’s kind of the inherent tradeoff for courts being able to make really rapid decisions. It’s useful if say someone’s house was going to be destroyed tomorrow you can’t exactly do a lot of fact checking or the damage will have been done, but it means a lot of seemingly silly things happen.
The goal is prevent harm while doing basic fact checking in preparation for some longer review, and again 2 days later the court didn’t extend the injunction after review.
IANAL. In Germany, something being true makes it non-defamatory [1].
> Wer in Beziehung auf einen anderen eine Tatsache behauptet oder verbreitet, welche denselben verächtlich zu machen oder in der öffentlichen Meinung herabzuwürdigen geeignet ist, wird, wenn nicht diese Tatsache erweislich wahr ist, mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu einem Jahr oder mit Geldstrafe und, wenn die Tat öffentlich, in einer Versammlung oder durch Verbreiten eines Inhalts (§ 11 Absatz 3) begangen ist, mit Freiheitsstrafe bis zu zwei Jahren oder mit Geldstrafe bestraft.
I'll just translate the important condition for being punished for defamation ("Üble Nachrede"):
> [...] if not this fact is demonstrably true [...]
I've intentionally kept the somewhat weird word order while translating. It's just as weird to read for a German. It's an old law.
indeed as a german i have a hard time to read this in any way other than "if the fact is not demonstrably true", which means if it was true it would be allowed. but intuitively it does make sense that true statements can be used to defame someone and that should be limited. among other things the right to be forgotten is relevant here, and also the problem of taking things out of context and beyond the audience it was intended for. a statement that i make among my friends should not allow anyone to defame or embarrass me by making it public to a wider audience.
Many of the largest US companies has local branches in Europe, and twitter is no exception here. In this case they have a branch office in Berlin. Im not a lawyer so Im not sure about the exact details, but if there is local presence then they are subject to the laws of that country like any other company, and enforcement should be similar.
He's not subject to any law that I can see. Hence my question, what will EU courts do here? Elon does not care what any courts or governments have told him so far. In the end I think he will threaten something with his German factories and everyone will back down. He's not going to get arrested or anything.
I mean, it's great to get some stuff on the record (and as a German myself I see our courts as one of the stronger checks on power in general, they've been imperfect but overall pretty reliable).
But I'm not sure what the researchers are trying to find that's not already in plain sight. By now it's pretty clear that the network is actively driving discourse in one specific direction. And with Musk's involvement in the US admin, it's even more officially a non-friendly foreign actor than tiktok is.
> By now it's pretty clear that the network is actively driving discourse in one specific direction.
Research is exactly about not just taking a look and declaring something "pretty clear". Also what "a direction" is not clear, or the dynamics of what affects the direction etc.
2. Musk, despite being the wealthiest person on earth and running companies that are genuinely fascinating, has nonetheless—against overwhelming odds—been considered a loser.
3. Because of (2) and his fragile ego (part of the reason he was widely considered a loser in the pre-Musk dominant circles) he went hard to the right. Petty grievances, anti-free speech, “burn it down”, etc.
4. Twitter made changes under Musk that compensated large accounts based on the number of views or engagements.
Effectively a rev share for ad spend
5. Because Musk can massively amplify content and has a fragile ego, aligning yourself with Musk’s pet issues directly affects income for influencers. Accounts in the other direction can be demonetized and deprioritized on feeds.
This has led to large accounts, in the run up to the election, being very vocally trump even when they’ve had publicly leftist leanings in the past. It wasn’t a shift in policy positions. It was a shift to ragebait and memes that were more likely to get Elon’s attention and retweets.
So it is both pretty clear and a result of active decisions in one specific direction. We don’t need a multi-year quintuple blind study by esteemed Ivy League research fellows to do the basic observation and deduction of the situation.
> We don’t need a multi-year quintuple blind study by esteemed Ivy League research fellows to do the basic observation and deduction of the situation.
Of course not, they're going to provide more precise data and facts. Perhaps many don't need the data to arrive at conclusions the data will point to but that does not obviate the utility of the research. Really, if you think their data will point to these conclusions, one would think you'd be that much more interested to see that the research is being conducted.
> Because of (2) and his fragile ego (part of the reason he was widely considered a loser in the pre-Musk dominant circles) he went hard to the right.
This is such a weird take. While I don't disagree about Musk's ego, it should be quite obvious that there's something else at play here, considering an unhinged convicted criminal won the popular vote and became a president. I've personally seen multiple people go through the same shift to the right as Musk. Are they all losers? Or maybe, just maybe, some of the more insane policies of the current American left have pushed them there?
Sure, there's definitely a chance that some people reacted to the pendulum swing to the left; highlighted by (among many things?) Obama's election and marriage equality being passed.
But I think that more people were affected by these things:
The continued lack of funds allocated to education resulting in a terrible lack of critical thinking
The constant bombardment of social media
The influence of russia et al on social media
The gaming of recommendation algorithms by the far-right resulting in the pipeline to hatred
The crisis of masculinity where today's men don't feel they fill the same roles as their grandfathers, leading some to fall down the pipeline to hate
The gerrymandering of districts
Election rolls/registers being purged of historically left leaning people
USA supreme court rulings like Citizens United
Congress being so utterly out of touch with average Americans
And congress' age issue
Of course, there's many more points that people could argue about all day, and I don't think we're going to find out any real reasons here on HN. Maybe in 100 years time, if there's anyone left, the historians will be able to find the root issues.
> highlighted by (among many things?) Obama's election and marriage equality being passed
Genuinely I can't imagine two things less to do with more people associating with the right in America than these two. It looks as though the Democrat party has gone further and further to the hard left, and more and more people in the US have felt they have no option but to vote for change over the status quo. Mostly because of economics.
Sorry maybe that wasn’t clear: i think musk swung right because he wanted to be seen as Ironman and instead was mocked for being a loser.
Twitter can be mercilous. Musk wants so badly to be liked, didn’t get it (in part because it was so obvious), and went full Ben Shapiro aggrieved middle schooler.
Why is left always blamed for what hard right and right does? These people were right wing, fascist leaning and moderate right just did not liked when someone said that out loud. Moderate right would always go to their defense, frequently ignoring what those people do and say.
Left complains and comments about Musk, republicans and conservatives turned out to be entirely right. They were called paranoid and unfair.
Perhaps, left reacted to what right does, plans to do and was entirely correct. Perhaps, what happens now is the fault of moderate right and center who fed these people, celebrated these people, voted for these people and defended these people.
> Why is left always blamed for what hard right and right does?
Well, there is one thing the left should definitely be blamed for: alienating their own electorate. It's always "it's not our fault, it's their fault", without a shred of self-reflection. Why did previously left-leaning and left-voting people suddenly switch to vote right? And it's not because they're "hard-right", "fascists", "idiots", "racists" or "nazis" (if they were they wouldn't have voted left in the first place).
Unfortunately from what I've seen instead of taking a step back and reevaluating their approach the left is just doubling down on what they've been doing, sticking fingers in their ears and indiscriminately calling anyone who disagrees with them far right fascists. It's astonishing how far the Overton window has shifted. I just hope people come to their senses, or else we'll end up with another clown in the White House once the current one vacates it in four years.
I'm partial to believing Musk's control and personal beliefs have been a factor in changes in Xitter discourse. But what would be effective ways for convincing others? Also I like to think I verify my beliefs with systematic analysis.
Furthermore, these points don't give any analysis of how this change has evolved, exactly how the messaging has changed, what's been the timeline etc.
Not checking your assumptions with data, and furher rejecting attempts to do this, is what I think is a large part driving what's happening. But for sure I'd like a reality check for my thinking.
Imo, Musk bought twitter for political reasons and was hard right leaning long before. Just as quite a few people correctly guessed at the time. Musk was full of petty grievances long before buying twitter too, he had track record of being aggressive when meeting opposition long before and his companies had track record of treating certain groups more badly then others.
The way Musk acted before buying twitter, insulting and mocking people makes him someone who has no business to complain when they respond in kind after he fails. So, Musk buys twitter for political reasons, mocking employees, owners and those he considers to be on the left. He claims to make it more performant, fails, get mocked back.
It is getting tiresone. Musk had few minor left leaning opinions and tons of right wing ones. Notable, his got given right to control everything, be no subject to the law since he is rich and succesful in business. His few left opinions failed to made him admired on the left.
> 2. Musk, despite being the wealthiest person on earth and running companies that are genuinely fascinating, has nonetheless—against overwhelming odds—been considered a loser.
I've never heard or seen that. Musk is a public figure and subject to much criticism, but so are all public figures and Musk actively provokes it (that is, Musk trolls for it).
> 3. Because of (2) and his fragile ego (part of the reason he was widely considered a loser in the pre-Musk dominant circles) he went hard to the right. Petty grievances, anti-free speech, “burn it down”, etc.
Lots of wealthy SV people have gone hard right; they don't all have relatively fragile egos. Musk is following the herd.
It's pardoxical that people think Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. are geniuses when they both follow the herd and have chosen a herd that is running off a cliff. They did not invent this ideology (who did?).
Non-friendly meaning not single sided in favor of your preferred political orientation. As a US citizen I find the discourse on X to be nowhere near as directed compared to platforms such as reddit or bsky- I am sure you are deeply concerned about that issue as well, even though you left it unsaid
While that might be applicable in many cases it isn't in this particular one.
Both the main subreddits and blue sky's default moderation prohibit things in the middle of the right's Overton Window (e.g. on Trump or trans rights) while X does not prohibit things in the middle of the left's Overton Window.
(I dislike using the terms "left" and "right", but as vague as they are, this phenomena applies for almost all such categorizations)
> Both the main subreddits and blue sky's default moderation prohibit things in the middle of the right's Overton Window (e.g. on Trump or trans rights) while X does not prohibit things in the middle of the left's Overton Window.
I think that's what the previous poster's 'Yes "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."' is talking about, given Twitter fell into the same camp as Bluesky and said subreddits, pre-Musk.
Elon's proclamation of far-right ideas is pretty obvious, but Twitter as a platform isn't Elon.
It shouldn't be too hard to find evidence of a more direct link from Twitter itself given the general vibe there, but until there's concrete proof there's nothing much people and countries can do.
Before foreign influence laws can be applied, you need proof. Without proof, Twitter could sue governments and make a hefty additional profit. Lack of quality research has previously gotten Intel off the hook for their illegal dealings, costing the EU half a billion in interest once the dust settled.
We need either cold, hard facts or more vague laws to pull off something like a TikTok ban in the EU.
While there is right wing angle into this, I feel it might be just because Twitter does not want spend extra resources on handling government requests. Twitter is making losses, so let's not increase cost.
Into the 1920s and early 1930s, Germany seems to have been a/the center of research, culture, etc. The rise of the Nazis shut down research that conflicted with their political goals and researchers left for free countries, especially the US. The US, perhaps the only wealthy place on earth after WWII - it devastated Europe - has been the center of research and culture since then.
Now in the US, right-wing powers have campaigned to shut down disinformation research, often via lawfare and apparently via influence on major universities. Also, the Trump administration has made clear it is against much scientific research, especially when results conflict with political goals, and has already interfered in significant ways with research (and also culture). I think the Trump administration would agree with that description.
There's no war yet that will devastate the US economically, but the Trump administration is willing to risk that. Even without a war, it's not hard to imagine disinformation researchers moving to Europe now, and also scientists and also artists generally. Again, I think the Trump administration would endorse that.
Touché. I should've said free and independent states, which is the along the lines of the typical verbiage used by US states. It was also in the context of who controls universities, which in the context of Nazi Germany, was likely Germany.
That is the Weimar Republic Era as Germany suffered through the brutality that was the Treaty of Versailles, and it was hell. Germany was suffering through hyperinflation, lack of availability/affordability of basic goods/necessities, massive unemployment, extreme civil unrest, and of course the rise of numerous extremist groups.
The Nazis' base was largely made up of disaffected people down on their luck. And in this era of Germany there were vast numbers of them.
Your assumption was just absurdly wrong. While the Nazis never gained majority support in a fair election, they did gain near 40% with a message that would scarcely resonate with anybody able to have a remotely pleasant, or even 'normal', life.
This is also why the Treaty of Versailles was so completely idiotic. Make life awful enough for a people and they'll start to feel they have nothing to lose. We effectively guaranteed WW2.
From my comment, you quoted and then responded to,
> 1920s-1930s Germany was "a/the center of research, culture, etc."?
To me, your immediate parent comment seems to be about a completely different topic, though in the same country at the same time. What does your comment say about Germany being "a/the center of research, culture, etc."?
I still remember the time before the Internet, I can assure you the world was full of disinformation and misinformation, I believe way more than today.
Everywhere, in schools, in cafes, the bus stop people would tell you crazy things and people would argue about whether it is true or not.
If you really wanted to settle it you would need to find an encyclopedia, but most of the time you would need to go to a public library and find a book or go through microfilms for hours, make a copy and show it to everybody to fight disinformation.
Depending on the country, the government had a tight or tighter control on what was in that library.
Some country would also tightly control what was said in a bar or cafe like in East Germany.
So thinking we are in a life threatening misinformation epidemic is just false if you compare to just a few decades ago.
Yes, it was harder to prove or disprove a claim when information was not as readily accessible as it is today. For the same reason, the likelihood of even becoming aware of any "fringe theories" without digital communication was much lower. So, overall I would say they are more pervasive today.
Yeah I agree. Its much easier to disseminate false information in the digital age, because if you have the means, you can drown out the true information in a way that's much harder to detect. I don't think this is an oranges to oranges comparison.
There were plenty of Dale Gribbles in the world before social media. Movies and books were full of conspiracy stuff (see "Enemy of the State" from 1998), and the public believed lots of them to varying degrees. Overreacting to that by using government to silence/control them would surely only generate legions more and give them easy legitimacy as victims.
The existence of a fictional movie says nothing about how popular conspiracies are. I have seen a lot of dystopian movies and read such books, including cyberpunk. A Scanner Darkly, The Illuminatus Trilogy, The Matrix, Snow Crash, Dune, eXistenz, just name some random ones. I'll mention four series, too: Twin Peaks, X-Files, Utopia, Nikita. That doesn't make me a conspiracy nut, because I am able to differentiate between fiction and non-fiction.
The trouble from 80's is different. We've shifted power vacuum, but whilst doing so the rich have become very much more rich, and [generally] they don't want to take responsibility; they want raw power. Things like bullshit (lies, conspiracies, manipulation), drama (such as creating friction between poor and middle class), obliteration of facts and science, cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions and law, and criminal behavior (including methods to avoid paying tax) are each tools for achieving more of such power.
UFOs are one of such, too. They're a tool to accelerate the distrust in government. For the acronym UFO itself is broad. A meteorite or Starlink satellite could be mistaken for an alien spaceship. Furthermore, drugs, hallucination, psychosis and the power of suggestion alone are strong tools to feed such fables.
I am well aware fans of conspiracies can very well be fans of X-Files but it is fiction first and foremost, plus don't forget Scully's role and background.
Thinking that Starlink satellites exist to make people think they're UFOs and create public distrust in the government seems like a terrible conspiracy theory, though.
> Thinking that Starlink satellites exist to make people think they're UFOs [...]
These are your words, your interpretation. Not mine.
Moreover, the meaning of UFO is Unidentified Flying Object. That could be anything, from Starlink to a swarm of drones to a SR-71 to a meteorite or some fireworks. Or just someone's vivid imagination, LSD or opioid trip, lying in a death bed, hypnosis, etc.
It would be interesting to measure it, but look at things like vaccination rates, which have gone down, and the willingness to support political candidates and news sources who embrace disinformation, which has gone way up - whatever you think of Trump and the modern GOP, they are much different than their predecessors. Maybe now people are more convinced of disnformation or otherwise willing to act on it.
"not as easily accessible information" and "disinformation" are two different things
> Everywhere, in schools, in cafes, the bus stop people would tell you crazy things
Where and when is this supposed to be?
Even taking that at face value, at MOST every living person could be talking about one crazy thing at the same time, and then there would be nobody to listen. Or half of them could talk, the other half would listen. With the internet and bots, there is no upper limit. For every person, there can be 50 trillion bots chirping at them.
> So thinking we are in a life threatening misinformation epidemic is just false if you compare to just a few decades ago.
Is this supposed to be an argument against researching it over taking your word for a world where everybody was telling everybody else crazy things all the time? If there is no problem, then all the less reason to be coy with the data, right?
Seems good that people would discuss and make value judgements on said policy. Europeans seem to have no trouble loudly voicing their opinion on American law, and I don't see Americans getting thin skin about it.
Why should we operate under the assumption any policy implemented by any politician (German or otherwise) is inherently good by default? Specifically in the case of Germany, we have many recent and historical examples of not great ideas being implemented...
Might be good to be willing to question these things instead of retorting "THE LAW IS THE LAW" and bowing to the overlords with the rubber stamps, no?
People here aren't criticizing the policy, but the very idea that Germany is allowed to make said policy. Americans in this thread are absolutely getting thin skin about the idea that a US company has to follow German laws.
This sentiment been around for seemingly forever. I can still remember Americans arguing against AirBnb and Uber being banned for not following laws around the country, and somehow being surprised that they got fines for it.
Thinking a law is dumb is not the same thing as “being surprised that there are laws.”
The whole point of the Uber and Airbnb strategy was to force each market to re-evaluate whether long-standing laws (protecting special interests like the taxi lobby) were actually desirable by bringing legal challenges to them in each market after already winning the support of the people.
They were largely successful at this. Most markets democratically voted to change previous laws.
I know for people on the spectrum the idea of rules brings lots of comfort, but you do realize the whole point of a democracy is that rules can be debated and changed?
> Why should we operate under the assumption any policy implemented by any politician (German or otherwise) is inherently good by default?
That's not loudly voicing an opinion. Nobody said you should "operate under the assumption". If you have a criticism to make, make it.
> Specifically in the case of Germany, we have many recent and historical examples of not great ideas being implemented...
And we have many recent and historical examples of Germany taking human rights more seriously after WW2 than people who haven't had their whole continent ravaged by war in living memory can even fathom. That you talk of "overlords with rubber stamps" to project the ambition for private corporations to have ZERO accountability just shows me that that you live on a wholly other planet than Germans do, and that you're playing to an American audience. These laws aren't there to please non-German companies, they are here to protect Germans.
> Europeans seem to have no trouble loudly voicing their opinion on American law, and I don't see Americans getting thin skin about it.
That's not my experience. Try arguing in favor of European hate speech laws, healthcare, consumer protection regulations, rent control, social democracy or anything else at odds with libertarianism and you'll get heavily downvoted both here and on US-centric subreddits.
If there is one thing very common among Americans, it is the belief of "American exceptionalism" despite more than enough evidence that whatever Americans are doing is just outright Not Working At F...ing All.
Sure, plenty of Americans will downvote your bad ideas on HN, but you won’t generally find them discussing how bad they think xyz thing in Europe on a weekly basis. If they mention Europe at all, it will probably be in the context of a vacation someone took or is planning.
The thing is most Americans just don’t think much about Europe at all. Outside of the UK, I saw far more films from Hong Kong or Japan in normal movie theaters while growing up than all of Europe combined. It might be different for someone on the east coast but for most Americans, the EU just doesn’t have much impact culturally or in business either.
> The thing is most Americans just don’t think much about Europe at all.
Well they don't even know what's out there. 40% of Americans never left the US, 11% never even the state they were born in [1]. And even if you travel to another state, culturally it will be pretty similar to where you came from - same language, same TV/radio stations, same car dependence, same politics.
In contrast, in Europe... pretty much anywhere outside of Russia only needs about two to three hours worth of car drive and you're in a country where you don't know anything, in the Balkans you won't even be able to read because Serbs write in Cyrillic, and on the eastern border you can even play warzone tourist if you don't mind the risk of getting arrested or shot (or you can sign up for a combat tour with the Foreign Legion). Every one of our countries does stuff differently and you have so many opportunities of learning, it is mind blowing sometimes.
And yet, as a kid, I was able to go to Sakura Square in Denver on weekends and see several blocks where everything was Japanese, including a mini mall, a grocery store, book stores, music stores, etc. It's been there for generations and even has plaques written back when Japanese used katakana instead of hiragana to conjugate verbs. Another area in the suburbs was mostly Cantonese for a few blocks. Somewhere around 10-15% of my classmates spoke Spanish at home. And Denver is over a thousand miles from either border and only had a population of one and a half million at the time!
America is a huge country, but don't underestimate its cultural or linguistic diversity. It's had large immigrant populations from far flung places around the world for a very long time, whereas most of Europe has only become like this in the past generation or two.
In any case, your comment is missing the point. However little you believe Americans understand about the world, we get more media, cultural influence and business influence from places outside of Europe. Half the cartoons I grew up watching were from Japan, my family had Japanese cars and video games, popular business books talked about Japan and a lot of people saw it as almost a futuristic place. Hong Kong exported quite a bit of its culture through movies in the 90s and early 2000, and in recent years, Korea has become a major cultural force as well, while China has become the the key market to understand in terms of business opportunities.
In the past the US government stepped in multiple times to protect the interests of big tech against European legislation.
I guess people became used to assuming non American laws would not matter and I cannot blame them, it really looked like that.
The interesting point about trump is, that he is burning lots of “threat potential”: If I announce tariffs and withdrawal of military cooperation anyways I run out of threats at some point.
I have yet to see anyone argue that twitter has a right to operate in Germany in defiance of German laws. I have seen people in other threads argue that, rather than comply with Chinese laws, american companies should cease to to business in China.
Britannica
> sovereignty, in political theory, the ultimate overseer, or authority, in the decision-making process of the state and in the maintenance of order.
Merriam-Webster
> a: supreme power especially over a body politic
> b: freedom from external control : autonomy
> c: controlling influence
Wikipedia
> Sovereignty can generally be defined as supreme authority.[1][2][3] Sovereignty entails hierarchy within a state as well as external autonomy for states.[4] In any state, sovereignty is assigned to the person, body or institution that has the ultimate authority over other people and to change existing laws.
None of these match Germany. Maybe you have your own one that does, and I'm fine with that.
EU law isn't above national law. Yes as a member each country has to implement EU laws if they want to be a member, but they're also free to just leave.
That's like saying you're not free after you've entered a shopping mall and have to obey their house rules.
Righteously, the German government has the right to enforce the law and Elon will certainly now not like this government even more. That gives him more reasons to team up with the right wing to have his way in the world's third largest economy so he can run the world the way he likes it.
This ruling doesn't have the government as a party. It has nothing to do with the German government. The German judiciary, yes. German plaintiff, yes. But not the government. The law in question is an EU law: https://algorithmic-transparency.ec.europa.eu/news/faqs-dsa-...
TBH, while I would like Twitter to be obligated to provide access to any data to anyone, I don't really understand on what grounds the decision was made. I mean, I wouldn't ask, if it was an USA court, where it's considered normal that any stupid judge can make any stupid decision, and it is called a precedent and must be respected. But in Germany there are laws, right? At least, theoretically. I mean, I personally don't believe in that, but any court decision is supposed be almost a natural consequence of the existing laws. So what is the law that makes a company obligated to do some work for free and send your data to some "researchers"? Honestly, I just don't like how it sounds, I kinda prefer libertarian anarchy, unrestrained mayhem and total impunity of various Musks to that kind of stuff.
Germany (and the entire EU) are complete hypocrites about data privacy.
“Privacy for me, but not for thee” appears to be the operative principle.
And it’s completely random. Transnational businesses have to expend enormous time and effort complying with privacy, right to be forgotten, data sovereignty, GDPR, etc. and then random courts and bureaucratic agency rulings carve out exceptions wherever they feel like.
I’m not excusing X for failing to respond to a court order, I’m just pointing out that the order itself was ad hoc and inconsistent like many others.
I also don't like this ruling from a moral point of view. I know others may disagree with me, because we obviously all value scientific research here and a lot of us don't really like social media in general, but the fact that you want to research something and that the results of that research will have value to others doesn't entitle you to someone else's services.
I might encourage X to volunteer this data, to the extent that things like privacy can be safe-guarded etc. But force them to with the strong arm of the law? No thanks. There's no rights basis here. We could benefit from the results of the research, for sure, but I don't think anyone has a right to the data other than those who produced it (individual users with respects to their personal data + X itself).
Leaving aside the specifics of this situation and the implementation difficulties, a corporate FOIA where legitimate researchers (and others like journalists) could get reasonable, vetted access to data sounds fantastic. It'd be great to know what criteria your insurance used to determine appropriate rate increases, or the history of food safety failures at the slaughterhouse that produced the meat at the grocery store.
Why would you take a moral stance against that (as opposed to the obvious practical stance against it)?
That assumes all good ideas naturally translate into viable business models, but markets don’t always work that way. Consumers don’t always have the information, leverage, or incentive to push for things like transparency—especially in industries where companies benefit from opacity.
Not everything that’s good in a broader sense aligns with what businesses are incentivized to do. The absence of a transparency-first company doesn’t prove there’s no demand—it just shows that the market structure doesn’t naturally reward it.
On the other hand, a business's mere existence doesn't entitle them to somebody else's market. If the people of Germany want to require social media businesses to make this data available to researchers, then that is simply the law of the land. It's really not up for X/Meta/etc to decide the rules of the market, nor do they have a "right" to do business without following said rules.
It would be one thing if the rules themselves were immoral or unreasonable, but I don't think this has anything to do with the rights of social media companies.
For me this all comes down to people have rights and organizations have privileges to operate granted by the society you are wanting to operate in. If you operated a company on an island where nobody was effected, I could see the argument of the parent. But as soon as you say hay I am going to offer x to these people, then you are operating under a set of rules that are determined by the society you operate in.
It's about being able to factually analyses and judge how various entities try to __publicly__ infer with elections through various means like propaganda posts and or ads.
Giving that there are a lot of indices that X did infer with US elections due to how it tuned itself to maximize the reach and effectiveness of right wing propaganda this is quite an important analysis.
And in difference to the US systematically spreading misinformation and hate speech to rile up people, or enabling/not preventing it as a platform, is illegal. Even highly so (on a constitutional level). Because you know last times it did end with WW2. Also as a fun fact: This and various other aspects of our constitution have been pretty much put in place by the US as a condition to give west Germany independence again after WW2. In general a lot of the German constitution is "lets start with the ideas behind the US constitution but then consider what didn't work out well and make it more prone against hostile somewhat elected governments undermining democracy".
Anyway if X insist in not helping to prevent or even detect/analyze people trying to infer with German elections it's probably time to kick them out of German. Like imagine some German company being suspected to be involved in election inference in the US and refuses to work with the US government to resolve any suspicions and doesn't even bother to pretend to cooperate, especially with the current government they would be banned in a matter of days. So it would be very dump to not do the same when the situation is the other way around.
> Giving that there are a lot of indices that X did infer with US elections due to how it tuned itself to maximize the reach and effectiveness of right wing propaganda this is quite an important analysis.
This superficially reads like the left wing equivalent of the "facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop" conspiracy theory. Are you able to link to any evidence of this?
> The GFF and Democracy Reporting International had argued that X had a duty under European law to provide easily researchable, collated access to information such as post reach, shares and likes - information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts but in practice impossible to access.
What law requires this? That data seems interesting, but it also seems odd to require a private platform to provide it. Is this directly legislated in the EU, or is this some kind of technicality?
It's clearly in the spirit of the law, namely Article 40 section 12 of the EU Digital Services Act:
> Providers of very large online platforms or of very large online search engines shall give access without undue delay to data, including, where technically possible, to real-time data, provided that the data is publicly accessible in their online interface by researchers, including those affiliated to not for profit bodies, organisations and associations, who comply with the conditions set out in paragraph 8, points (b), (c), (d) and (e), and who use the data solely for performing research that contributes to the detection, identification and understanding of systemic risks in the Union pursuant to Article 34(1).
It is called following local laws if you want to operate in the market under the jurisdiction of these local laws. You are free to not comply and then they are free to prevent you from operating. It is the same like individuals visiting/moving to this place. Being private/public company does not grant you immunity.
If that happens, it won't be a law, but a court-ordered punishment intended to force compliance. It seems that courts are allowed to do a lot of things to force people to comply with their orders. Up to and including imprisonment. Punishments given for this purpose apparently go away as soon as compliance happens. And this is a general principle, not just in Germany.
Germany probably already has a system for the government to order ISPs to block certain domains. It would be surprising if any overbearing surveillance state didn't.
Why would a nation allow a private US company to run roughshod over their laws to the detriment of their society? Just because some other nations are so abused by corporations that do allow it? What’s the logic behind this?
It’s refreshing to have a president that won’t standby while American companies are routinely harassed by Europeon bureaucrats.
They’re going to find that Europe is much more dependent on access to US markets than vice versa. I would imagine top folks at LVMH and VW have to recognize the perilous course their governments have taken.
Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
Also, maybe this linked article would be a better one that the one from Reuters.
[0] https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU/news/court-orde...
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