How far should content moderation go? |
With Brussels’ bans on Russian state media and new rules to police online content, the European Union has shown it wants to fight disinformation. But that question gets more difficult when the information is spread by actual news organizations.
Over the weekend, the EU agreed on its new online content rules, the Digital Services Act. The new rules will give European governments more powers to take down illegal content like terrorist propaganda or hate speech. But a lot of problematic content isn't illegal, and some fake news is published by real media outlets.
Among EU negotiators, one of the most contentious debates was whether news articles should be exempt from the DSA. Some politicians argued that news should be exempt from take-downs, otherwise tech companies like Facebook will have too much power to choose what users do and don’t see. Others countered that much of the misinformation and disinformation people read online is spread via articles.
In the end, news articles weren’t given any special treatment in the DSA. They will be taken down if they’re illegal in Europe, just like content from any other website. But there’s still plenty of gray area about how enforcement will work, and whether the law will work as intended.
The issue of blocking stories from news outlets has stirred controversy plenty of times before. In the U.S., Twitter Inc. suspended the account of the New York Post over a story on Hunter Biden. Then-Twitter executive Jack Dorsey called the move a “mistake,” and soon-to-be Twitter owner Elon Musk recently said the decision was “incredibly inappropriate.” Musk, a free speech absolutist, was recently warned by Thierry Breton, EU internal market commissioner, that “any company operating in Europe needs to comply with our rules,” which will eventually include the Digital Services Act. “Mr Musk knows this well,” Breton said in a tweet.
More recently, Europe dealt with fake news from real news sites when Russia invaded Ukraine, and Russian state media published articles falsely claiming there were U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine making bioweapons. The outlets also refused to even acknowledge that the invasion of Ukraine was a war. And later, they published false claims that horrific events like the Mariupol hospital attack and Bucha massacre were staged events.
The EU took unprecedented action at the start of the war by banning state-sponsored media sites RT and Sputnik from broadcasting, publishing or promoting their content anywhere in the EU. But this only opened a can of worms for Brussels. If you’re banning RT and Sputnik, why not the Russian state news website TASS?
Some in the EU did go further. Latvia, for example, banned 71 Russian-state linked websites and—with its Baltic neighbors and Poland—pushed to ban Russian government accounts on social media. But other EU countries were wary of these moves, warning that it set a dangerous precedent. Would the EU start banning other state sponsored media, and if so, how would it determine which ones? What does this mean for the future of a free press in the union?
Researchers have also warned that these bans are not foolproof. RT and Sputnik accounts were banned, but they have plenty of other related accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram still operating in the EU. People can also access their news sites with a VPN.
Under the DSA, Brussels won’t be banning this kind of disinformation from appearing in people’s feeds at all, but is hoping it will stop it from spreading. Companies will now have to submit reports to the EU about harmful content and could be told by Brussels to change their algorithms. Brussels can demand they do even more in an emergency such as a pandemic or a war.
But it’s still unclear how far Brussels will go in forcing companies to act against outlets as it tries to stop the spread of false stories—and whether it will work. —Jillian Deutsch