Petition calls to ban Elon Musk's X in Europe
Petition calls to ban Elon Musk's X in Europe
This petition introduces the campaign for the ban of Elon Musk's social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) in the European Union.
cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4853256
To whom it may concern.
I can see it being banned for government communications on varying national levels, but I don't think it should be banned entirely, despite being an awful platform.
One one hand fuck Twitter. On the other k worry the EU might go wild with banning stuff Banning hellsite is good but it'd lead to less good stuff. And help chat control bs in some form
I'll rather choose myself which social media platforms I use rather than let the authorities decide for me. Banning things you don't like is not a solution because soon the things you do like are getting banned too because someone else doesn't like them. This is so incredibly narrow sighted.
I think it's important for groups of people to be able to choose to ban propaganda and misinformation, because propaganda is not simply information being imparted, it's an entire ecosystem of deceptive methods to disseminate information and to alter your perception without you realizing.
If it were calling for the EU banning X solely because they don't like Musk's shitty personal opinions, I'd agree with you, but they cite the disinformation, misinformation, and outright propaganda that the platform is being used to spread, and I think that's perfectly valid.
Take 2 scenarios:
5 million actual people telling you that 'x' political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.
500 thousand actual people, plus 4.5 million bot accounts telling you that 'x' political view is common and popular, causing you to doubt, or at least temper your own personal beliefs.
In reality, you don't even need the bot accounts to outnumber the real users if you control the algorithms that determine what people see, which is exactly the situation that X is in right now.
tl;dr This isn't about banning the viewpoints themselves, it's about banning a platform that deceptively alters visibility of viewpoints to manipulate people.
Banning things you don’t like is not a solution
Tell that to Musk; X bans TONS of people over their viewpoints.
good; it should be banned; it's not a social media outlet it's a propaganda wing for a fascist regime.
What are the chances of this actually happening, Europeans? GDPR did, so it doesn't seem impossible, but this is a lot more targeted at one specific company.
There's also the fact he's now close the the new American strongman, and they don't want to piss off America.
I don't like Twitter, but I am also not for banning a service or application nationwide. This should be the choice of the user. Do not take away freedom of choice, regardless of your feelings, believes or what you like. Do not be like China or Russia.
Instead fight against the actual problem, like disinformation or whatever it is. I'm absolutely against such a ban.
Should people also have the freedom of choice to buy snake oil that claims to cure cancer, etc? The opposite of freedom is not regulation. That's a bunch of propaganda used by people when they want to change an inconvenient topic. It's used, for example, when talking about the ACA and claiming that nationalized health insurance would rob the people of choosing their blood sucking middle man for health insurance.
How is that even remotely equivalent comparison?
Are you defending snake oil? The pseudoscience con so uniquituously used to deprive the desperate from their money that it became the term used to describe "harmful bullshit sold for profit?"
Freedom of choice or not, I suppose you should be able to spend your money however you want.
But if someone is selling people lies under the promise of medical miracles, we need to throw the book at them.
Isn't blocking a disinfo place a way of fighting disinformation? I don't get it
Blocking an entire community, service or application blocks access to non disinformation and normal communication too. Instead fight against the specific issues. Or with your logic we need to ban every platform such as Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, Discord and even Wikipedia. Because misinformation is everywhere.
I don't want anyone decide for myself what to use. If I want to use Twitter, that should be MY decision, not yours, not the one with the campaign here and certainly not any government.
There needs to be due process. We can't ban a website because 10k people said it has disinformation. The DSA is the process for combatting disinformation on major platforms, and we should follow it. Twitter is already being sued under the DSA, and they will be banned in the next few months if they do not fulfill their obligations to fight disinformation.
except it's literally state sponsored propaganda.
It had long since hit critical mass in Europe before it was bait and switched to serve as a US fascist tool of propaganda. Banning it is the correct response.
change.org isn't going to do much, and the EU already has an ongoing lawsuit with Twitter regarding its disinformation promotion.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_6709
It could be argued that the EU prosecutors should speed things up, though.
I am afraid they already did:
Commission concludes that online social networking service of X should not be designated under the Digital Markets Act -- (October 2024)Please see the comment by @HK65@sopuli.xyz, I am mistaken here.I would have loved to see the initiators to go the official way for the petition as I agree that change.org won't change much. Here we go: https://commission.europa.eu/get-involved/engage-eu-policymaking/petition-eu_en
The DMA has no bearing on disinfo, it's about access, like mandating a public API to federate with or banning self-preferencing with other products.
The disinfo thing is regulated by the DSA - Digital Services Act, and it very much applies to Twitter.
Can non Europeans sign ?
I hope not.
Well I just did, it's on charge.org and I'm Australian