Rumbling away throughout 2024 was EU threats to take action against Twitter/X for abandoning fact-checking. The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) is clear on its requirements - so that conflict will escalate. If X won’t change, presumably ultimately it will be banned from the EU.
Meta have decided they’d rather keep EU market access. Today they announced the removal of fact-checking, but only for Americans. Europeans can still benefit from the higher standards the Digital Services Act guarantees.
The next 10 years will see the power of mis/disinformation accelerate with AI. Meta itself seems to be embracing this trend by purposefully integrating fake AI profiles into its networks. From now on it looks like the main battle-ground to deal with this is going to be the EU.
Had coffee the other day with a Meta engineer. After Trump got elected, suddenly their manager was like “we have to ensure we have no false positive removals” of content that violates their various policies. When pressed, the manager was like “damn right this is about the election.” Previously they were more concerned about false negatives, apparently. Anyway, I suspect they’re trying to avoid Elon aiming his ion cannon at them or something. All social media in the US is probably going to swing further right as a result.
TikTok was a warning shot to the US companies to stay in line.
TikTok is prime example of political influence via social media. Unlike twitter where influence comes from a lax content policy, TikTok bans undesirable content.
Not to mention the security implication of having the location habits/sexual pref/interests of all your population in the hands of a foreign dictator (TikTok) or oligarchal megalomaniac (Elon,Zuck).