EU stops advertising on X over hate speech. Fines could follow next year::The European Union is pulling its advertisements from Elon Musk’s X for now, citing an “alarming increase” in hate speech and disinformation on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
This comment will make me sound like an idiot, but I’m just coming to believe that all of Musk’s decisions with X were targeted to this very outcome. To be the world’s centre of alt right propaganda. It just makes too much sense now.
He’s not that smart. He got stuck having to buy Twitter after his pump and dump backfired. His solution to having to buy Twitter was to cut costs by firing staff and use his celebrity to manufacturer engagement with troll posts.
The problem he missed was that staff was necessary to keep hate speech under control and his trolling meant to drive engagement would backfire from advertisers and regulators.
I wouldn’t say idiot, just very naive when it comes to your assessment of Musk’s ability to think ahead. He’s basically a South African Alex Jones who started out rich(er) 🤷
He didn’t come up with the plan, he was given the plan.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcna118490
There has been an increase in blatant racism and prejudice. I don’t know if those users eventually get banned. If the right takes any action against blatant hate speech, shitheads like Tim Pool will start crying and denounce the platform as not allowing free speech. If they allow “free speech,” then the shitheads eventually drive all the normal people off the platform. The only good thing is that Twitter already has a left wing population, so as long as they can maintain that, it should avoid turning to shit. It was also a mainstream platform so hopefully that should maintain the normie population.
Sites like Lemmy instances are better at allowing a wider range of “free speech” because as long as the instance population is large enough to keep the shitheads a minority, they can stick to their own subs and generally keep the bullshit quarantined.
Wasnt truth social already that?
I only know one person that uses truth social.
But he has like 70 million followers.
I’m not just the president, I’m also a member
Truth is USA only, so X has a much broader reach.
Taken out of context, “Truth is USA only” is one of the most jingoistic phrases ever 😂
Does Truth Social actually not allow users outside of the US?
That’s hilarious. Do they do it by IP? Because I’d imagine a lot of their users might be troops stationed over seas. Course the military probably has WANs with .mil addresses that everyone uses.
I think it’s not impossible that the goal was simply to discredit Twitter entirely
You’d be right. 10 days before he bought it, Musk got linked a plan to buy twitter and turn it into right-wing American WeChat.
I heard about it on Rachel Maddow’s October 2 show (has it really been 2 months since then?)
Not sure why you’d assume you sound like an idiot. You’re just coming to a hypothesis based on all available information. It seems like a sane train of reasoning based on all the empirical evidence we’ve seen thus far.
It’s likely that he didn’t mean for it to happen the way it did, or that he hoped there’s a bigger appetite or marketplace for X in this capacity. It’s also possible he didn’t think it all through as was made more likely by the way he was trying to come up with reasons to get out of the deal.
He’s just a stupid narcissist that came into money. They don’t think that far ahead, and it makes him look bad so he wouldn’t want this outcome
Misinformation has already spread in the continent. This will be downvoted but “too little, too late” is the only thing that comes to my mind reading that piece of news.
Better late than never, I say
Something to be said for doing the optimal thing with impeccable timing, I’d posit.
Elon was mulling pulling out of the EU and I really want this dumbass to follow through on that threat.
Please. Given that investors expect infinite growth and that EU is not an ignorable market for most businesses of this scale, it would destroy the company.
I wish he would
Well, he got forced to now
I feel like the EU is one of the few forces of good in the world these days.
It is not. But it has been doing some right things when it comes to privacy protection and so on.
Still, Trump’s border wall and caged children are merely cute compared to the shit going on at the borders of the EU.
I disagree. The EU is one of the best things that ever happened to us Europeans, who knows, we might be fighting another war if history went different.
Politically, the EU spins around between based decisions and crap like chat surveillance, but over all, it has been a major contributor to the high standard of life in Europe, I’m convinced of this.
Still, Trump’s border wall and caged children are merely cute compared to the shit going on at the borders of the EU.
What kind of things should I think of?
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Yeah, that’s not happening. Nice far right conspiracy theory though.
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I have. I have even lived in and right next to the widely decried “no-go zones” of Sweden, and can testify that the whole thing is a pile of racist bullshit.
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Are these really the towns that are taken over by “sharia law”? Can you give examples of what you saw?
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Words have implications, and you are implying these immigrants want sharia law to be impemented. Do you have examples of this? Why did you mention these cities? What’s special about them?
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Can you mention some of all of these alleged “Sharia controlled” towns and, eh, countries?
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Your unchanged words:
Until you find out it [the EU] lets Muslim immigrants (80% of whom prefer sharia law over eu law) take over entire towns & countries.
Provide examples then. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the burden of providing such evidence is on the claimant and no one else.
And surely if you have a numeric figure like 80% for the proportion of Muslim immigrants in the EU who supposedly prefer sharia law, you can cite the source in which the statistic came from, and the source will list their data collection and analysis methodology which will also surely be logically and mathematically sound, right? Riiiiight?
Can we get an example of a town that’s been “taken over” in this manner? Your words.
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Yeah I read all your weird, totalitarian ranting, but you didn’t prove anything to anybody.
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If you’ve ever been to Marseille, Paris or Rotterdam, you’d know that is categorically incorrect.
I personally live in an area with a higher Muslim population, but nobody here wants Sharia Law. Nor to take over any towns.
You should be less gullible about places you’ve never been to, and things you know little about.
Which country has Muslim immigrants taken over? Name it please.
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Just like the Jews were taking over Germany, right?
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Mans still salty the Ottomans conquered Al Andalus 500 years later
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By 2050, Muslims could account for roughly 11.2% of the total European population.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/15-european-countries-with-most-muslims.html
You are needlessly fearmongering.
I don’t want to get in the middle of a flame war, but as someone who’s seen the culture of his small town shift over the last couple decades, I can’t help but have some sympathy for those who worry about this happening in their local (Admittedly, in my case, it’s watching a town where the suburban drops off to rural slowly be subsumed by city sprawl, so this might be a false equivalance).
But I think the real issue is that that’s not an evenly distributed 11%. People will naturally bunch up in groups along cultural lines. I could see a city developing a single Arab/Muslim neighborhood over the course of a decade being of no note, but it sounds like some are developing multiple over just a couple years.
I have no real data to back that notion up, but from what I hear from Europeans, that’s the general feel. I think that’s the real issue: things are changing and they feel like they’re changing fast, and that’s freaking people out. Telling people who feel that way they’re crazy only “others” them and I feel that’s really how the situation gets worse.
But also, the towns the guy above mentioned feel like bigger cities (I’m American and haven’t been to Europe, so I also might lack perspective), and so I do feel like they’re overstating the point.
I have no real data to back that notion up, but from what I hear from Europeans, that’s the general feel.
Yeah, and Americans in general once felt that the Irish or the Italians would take over the country because they were emigrating in large numbers. Guess what never happened?
Mamma mia!
I suppose, the point I mean to make is that belittling this guy does nothing to solve the problem.
There is a big difference though. Their beliefs were compatible with Americans, everyone believed in Jesus, not killing people and such. And most importantly, the next generation mingled and married locals and they were almost fully assimilated by the third generation.
Where I live, and other places, most of the Muslim population (not all, mind you) keep their children from others as much as possible. The children are taught what they can and can’t do because they are Muslim. And they can only marry Muslims (conversions are allowed but the family must live Muslim lives under those rules. They are not allowing natural assimilation. Places like Denmark have laws forcing immigrant children to attend day care with locals, because otherwise they won’t.
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I think this is largely a consequence of the rate of change.
Going from 50 generations back to 40 generation back (call it 750 AD to 1000 AD) very little would have changed for people, especially those limited in their means of transportation. I think this is largely, if not exactly, true of any generational gap (the exceptions I feel can be found at those bridging the rise and fall of empires)
Meanwhile, 10 generations ago (call it like 1750) wouldn’t recognize the world today. Hell, 2-3 generations ago (thinking of those born ~1925-1950) barely recognize the world of today.
The way I see it, the rate of change we experience in the world today is simply beyond the rate of change we were bred for over the bulk of humanity’s history.
With that perspective in mind, it feels wrong to hold it against people to resist parts of that change.
Yeah, in my ideal world, we’d all get along and be able to deal with these things in a civilized manner, but that feels super dismissive of the Human Condition and the real lived experience of people in the real world.
Looping back to the point I want to make: coming at people hard for having a negative reaction to a changing world doesn’t make their acceptance of the changing world any better.
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Marseille’s Muslim population is 20%. i.e. a minority that can’t overrun anything.
Shall I look at the other cities you mentioned and continue to prove you factually incorrect?
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Thinking that any political opinions are fundamentally “Non-European” is a fundamentally totalitarian and racist mindset. I reject your attempts at gatekeeping my politics based on your arbitrary and chauvinistic ideas of “European” values. But hey, there is nothing more inherently European than racism, so I guess you’re living up to your own ideals there.
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Twitter is filled with idiots who’ll pronounce London/Paris/wherever is under Sharia law. Never seems to occur to them that this is very easy to fact check.
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You know, you can’t imply something and complain that we understood it
Nah you tried to imply something not born out by reality and got downvoted for it.
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Not for long we all get very right to fascist governments the next year’s and things will go south. Germany with a CDU/AFD coalition, Le pen in France, if those two happen I see a dark future ahead, but hey climate change will bite us in the ass anyway. Why not go under under fascist leadership…
We’re not very good at learning from the past, are we?
What exactly does the EU advertise?
I dunno. Like, cheese? EU cheese?
Maybe baklava?
It’s a big place. I think. I dunno.
Sorry if I misunderstood. I consider the EU to be a government body.
I assume cheese and baklava manufacturers are allowed to advertise wherever they like.
Does this mean the EU is not allowing these cheese and baklava companies to advertise where they want?
The EU is advertising itself and its initiatives, like DiscoverEU and other programs. They want their programs to be seen and used
It’s wherE yoU live!
I would imagine tourism and such
Finally they quit giving my tax money to a billionaire Nazi to promote laws against my citizen rights.
I had the exact same question.
Their militaries spend a ton on ads
Is Elon Musk finally in the ‘find out’ stage of this whole fiasco?
I imagine this will make musk’s “thermonuclear lawsuit” lose a few teeth
Thermonuclear lawsuit? Even the name sounds ridiculous
I love this, go get that refund! Should have happened a lot earlier though
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In October, a few days after Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a deadly attack on Israel, the European Commission asked X to provide details of the actions it was taking to combat the spread of “illegal content and disinformation” on its platform.
A tidal wave of antisemitism, Islamophobia and misinformation has engulfed social media platforms in recent weeks since the unprecedented October 7 attack by Hamas, followed by air strikes and a ground offensive by Israel against the Hamas-controlled enclave of Gaza.
“It is unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of antisemitism in American history at any time, let alone one month after the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement to CNN.
Germany’s Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency, which promotes equal treatment at work and in everyday life, announced on October 11 that it would stop using X entirely, citing an “enormous increase” in discriminatory and hateful speech on the platform.
“Ministries and state bodies should ask themselves whether it is still acceptable to remain on a platform that has become a disinformation network and whose owner spreads antisemitic, racist and populist content,” Ferda Ataman, Germany’s independent federal commissioner for anti-discrimination, said in a statement.
Sandra Wachter, a professor of technology and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, said they are required by the DSA to treat their boss like any other user by, for example, taking down his posts or flagging them as problematic if they break EU rules.
The original article contains 940 words, the summary contains 255 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
That’s not a good idea, if they don’t advertise I won’t know about the European Union.
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I mean all social media has hate speech of one kind of another and it’s almost all misinformation or part truths. Really depends on the agenda.
Why next year?
a fine is unlikely until next year as each of the EU’s 27 member states first needs to appoint national “digital services coordinators” — with the power to impose penalties — by February 17. So far, only two states, Italy and Hungary, have done so, a commission spokesperson told CNN.
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I think the person you replied to assumed that the legal action was related to the pulling of ads, when they’re actually two independent incidents.
It’s two separate things, from the article:
A more drastic move could come next year. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, could impose a fine of more than $100 million on X if the company is found to have breached tough new EU rules aimed at cleaning up digital media.
