If further evidence was needed of how a toxic stew of disinformation, propaganda and hate speech can spread with apparent impunity on social media platforms, it was provided in the days following Hamas’s attack on Israel two weeks ago. One consequence may be the hastening of a long-delayed day of reckoning for the way in which these powerful companies are held to account for the material they host.
This year’s implementation of the EU’s new Digital Services Act (DSA) represents a significant modification of the legal framework which for more than two decades gave excessive leeway to platforms while paying insufficient attention to the public interest. Now, of the 19 “very large online platforms” (VLOPs) which since August have been required to comply with the full set of provisions introduced under the act, the focus of attention is firmly on X (formerly Twitter).
In the year since he completed his takeover of X, Elon Musk has degraded the platform’s ability to moderate content, dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, and ended its user verification system. Instead of verifying reputable sources, X now awards badges to paying subscribers, whose posts are then algorithmically boosted to make sure they are more visible. In the wake of the Hamas attack, boosted users were responsible for a stream of falsehoods, including fake videos and mocked-up news stories, in posts that were shared and viewed tens of millions of times. Under Musk’s new terms of service for X, those views bring financial rewards for the people who post them.
Last week the European Commission formally requested a detailed response from X on its spreading of disinformation, violent content and hate speech. The company is required to provide evidence before the end of this month that it is in full compliance with the DSA. If it fails to do so, it may be subject to substantial fines.
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This is the first time the commission’s new powers will be deployed against a VLOP. The act’s complex processes are as yet untested and any attempt at enforcement will almost certainly be contested, leading to lengthy litigation. It is no surprise, though, that X looks set to be the first test case. While not the biggest of the social media platforms, it continues to wield a disproportionately large influence in the political and news spheres. And the contrast between Musk’s self-avowed commitment to an extreme form of libertarianism and the stated objectives of the new regulations could hardly be starker.
For a quarter of a century, platforms in the US and EU have been protected by laws which limited their liability for illegal content. Those laws have not been fit for purpose for some time. In the EU, the era of light touch regulation is drawing to a close, a process accelerated by a bloody war and the actions of a hubristic billionaire.