- cross-posted to:
- futurology@futurology.today
- cross-posted to:
- futurology@futurology.today
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Only small services with fewer than 50 employees and annual turnover of under €10 million (around $10.8 million) are exempt.
Soon: large platforms firing everyone but 49 employees, and outsourcing all their operations to hundreds of companies with fewer than 49 employees each… all owned by the same shareholders.
or they could just comply with the law:
sites will have to provide a reason to users when their content or account has been moderated, and offer them a way of complaining and challenging the decision. There are also rules around giving users the ability to flag illegal goods and services found on a platform.
Doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.
It is at the scale they are working on, there’s a reason you can’t get an actual person to contact you… It’s too expensive to have actual people working these cases
It’s mostly actual people. I know some of them at different platforms (for some reason this city has become a bit of a moderation hub). Most of these companies take moderation very seriously and if AI is involved it’s so far just in an advisory capacity. Twitter being the exception because… well, Elon.
But their work is strictly internally regulated based on a myriad of policies (most of which are not made public especially to prevent bad actors from working around them). There usually isn’t much to discuss with a user nor could it really go anywhere. Before a ban gets issued the case has already been reviewed by at least 2 people and their ‘accuracy’ is constantly monitored by QA people.
Most are also very strict to their employees. No remote work, no phones on the workfloor, strong oversight etc… To make sure cases are handled personally and employees don’t share screenshots of private data.
And most of them have a psychologist on site 24/7. It’s not much fun watching the stuff these people get to deal with on a daily basis. I don’t envy them.
Making sure their turnover also gets split into hundreds of companies seems like an administrative nightmare though. And I suspect the EU regulators are smart enough to see through such a ruse - eBay would still be one website, not hundreds, after all.
Yeah, exactly. 10MM is peanuts to huge tech companies. It’s not reasonable to split up services in a way that would still be profitable.
The Fediverse would likely be exempt, but any social media with advertising and any scale at all will hit 10MM revenue pretty quickly.
Yeah, I think the fact that the Fediverse is genuinely and legitmately multiple small websites, each of which can be proven to be run by different people with no connection to each other, would mean it’s exempt.
Well, most are run by 1 person or a small team. None have profits. Some have donation pages, and that’s it. So they are exempt by definition.
Just put the moderation business into a separate entity with no real revenue, which has no more than 49 regular employees and employ the rest as freelancers. Bam.
That would probably work in the US, but I’m not so sure it’d work in the EU. Even the UK is capable of cracking down on “freelancers” who are obviously just regular employees with bosses trying to dodge regulation.
2004: The Internet is going to lead us into a utopian future of free communication and access to information! No government will ever be able to censor information anymore because they will lack legal reach to censor everything!
2024:
Big shout-out and thanks to the EU for being the only major political entity trying to actually make an effort.
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The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a tough new piece of regulation that imposes new rules around content moderation and online advertising, is about to expand to cover huge swathes of the internet.
The Associated Press notes that this will include household names like eBay and OnlyFans, which didn’t hit the 45 million monthly active user threshold in the EU for VLOP status.
“From tomorrow, the Digital Services Act rules apply to all online platforms accessed by users in the EU,” said the European Commission’s Margrethe Vestager.
Although the DSA is still a new piece of regulation, we’ve already seen the EU use it to open a formal investigation into X over, among other things, concerns it may have facilitated “the dissemination of illegal content in the context of Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel.” EU regulators have the ability to fine companies up to 6 percent of their worldwide annual turnover for breaking the DSA’s rules, and even block services as a last resort.
While this deadline has been a long time coming, there are concerns that EU member states aren’t ready to enforce the DSA’s rules more broadly.
Earlier this week, Politico reported that only a third of EU countries have nominated their local regulators (named Digital Services Coordinators), who will be expected to handle user complaints and generally enforce the DSA in each member state.
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I like how AP considers onlyfans to be a household name.
Does not everyone have fans at home?
Only small services with fewer than 50 employees and annual turnover of under €10 million (around $10.8 million) are exempt.
Wow. Great that this exception is there otherwise it would have killed all hobby forums and things like Mastodon and Lemmy.
