The EU apparently believes that Meta has insufficient moderation to curb ads that undermine the electoral process. Nice timing.
When US President, Joe Biden, signed into law the TikTok ban, it was under the air of moral panic pushed by the media that TikTok was somehow a threat to the American public. Specifically, it was some sort of Chinese spy machine for the communist leadership and that the platform was a propaganda machine designed to poison the minds of users and convince them to do the bidding of the Chinese government in a massive foreign interference campaign.
Obviously, none of that was ever proven as it was little more than conspiracy theories spread by the mainstream media. When US intelligence, supposedly the source of all of these “concerns”, was asked to produce evidence to back up these wild claims and conspiracy theories, the response from the intelligence community was a giant shrug as they admit that they got nothing. Instead, they got conjecture and hypotheticals which are kinds of evidence. Naturally, the lack of evidence never stopped the mainstream media from continuing to push these conspiracy theories anyway.
Now, tackling one of the two conspiracy theories about TikTok, one of the things I have long argued is that even if you subscribe to the notion that TikTok is a giant Chinese foreign interference operation pushing false narratives to the American public, and TikTok is banned in the US, what is stopping China from simply shifting operations to another platform like, say, Facebook for instance? After all, the platform gained notoriety thanks to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
I’ve had some responses to this argument, saying things along the lines of how Cambridge Analytica was different. What’s more, that was over 5 years ago that that has happened. Things are different now with Meta platforms. It’s an American company and the platform is moderated, so a Chinese foreign interference campaign wouldn’t be anywhere near as successful on that platform. Well, if you want something more recent, well, we just got something this month. What’s more, it kneecaps those arguments in the process. Apparently, the European Union is moving forward with a probe against Meta for failure to moderate for foreign interference. From ArsTechnica:
Brussels is set to open a probe into Meta’s Facebook and Instagram as soon as Monday over concerns the social media giant is failing to do enough to counter disinformation from Russia and other countries.
Regulators suspect that Meta’s moderation does not go far enough to stop the widespread dissemination of political advertising that risks undermining the electoral process, the European Commission is expected to say on Monday, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
EU officials are particularly worried about the way Meta’s platforms are handling Russia’s efforts to undermine upcoming European elections. The commission, however, is not expected to single out Russia in its statement and will only make reference to the manipulation of information by foreign actors.
EU officials also fear that the company’s mechanism to let users flag illegal content is not easily accessible or user-friendly enough to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act, the bloc’s landmark legislation designed to police content online.
Some of the reaction to the news was that this simply amounts to a strongly worded letter, but the article itself pours cold water on that notion:
The law, approved in April last year, includes measures to force platforms to disclose what steps they are taking to tackle misinformation or propaganda. If the EU finds Meta to be in breach of the Act, it could be fined up to 6 percent of its global annual turnover.
Oops.
It is clear that Europe found sufficient reason to launch this probe against Meta in the first place. What’s working against Meta is the history in dealing with foreign interference as I previously alluded to.
Things like this are why I argue for a more broad approach. More specifically, a broad set of rules that all platforms should abide by as opposed to targeting specifically one platform (which many consider to be legally questionable in the first place). If you want to tackle a broad problem such as foreign interference online, set broad rules tackling this problem. If you want to tackle a broad problem such as surveillance, set a broad set of rules federally targeting this specific issue. Banning one specific platform does nothing to tackle these issues. As the days go by, more and more evidence continues to surface that bolsters the arguments people like myself are making.
