Meta says it's stepping up misinformation enforcement during Israel-Hamas war

Guardian Nigeria

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00:00 I would make almost the opposite statement.

00:03 This is a set of regulations that really are groundbreaking worldwide.

00:07 Nobody else has done this.

00:08 And it's done in a creative and I think pretty sensible way.

00:12 So no, I wouldn't say that we're late.

00:13 If anything, we're a little early.

00:15 In a time when you have the IRA out of the United States as well, and you're trying to

00:19 get more investment into tech in Europe, the UK also trying to make itself a hub for technological

00:25 advancements of any sort, does this bode in any way positively or negatively then for

00:32 Europe?

00:33 There are some risks in all of European regulation of digital tech platforms.

00:38 If you look at GDPR, a number of papers suggest that it's been negative for innovation.

00:44 The Artificial Intelligence Act also carries some risks, and this one could as well.

00:49 So there are trade-offs to be made.

00:51 There are always trade-offs to be made.

00:54 Here the trade-off was that in terms of protecting European consumers and also in terms of protecting

01:00 European society from risks to elections, risks to public health, risks from lots of

01:06 different kinds of misinformation and disinformation, that it was warranted to take action now.

01:11 Good to see you today.

01:13 The DSA has five basic tenets, illegal products, illegal content, protection of children, racial

01:18 and gender diversity, and ban on dark patterns as well.

01:21 Of the big US techs, who's most threatened by this?

01:25 I would say by a wide margin, the biggest threat is likely to be Twitter.

01:32 Some of the large platforms like Google and YouTube have generally very mature and nuanced

01:38 processes for monitoring content.

01:42 Twitter is likely to have problems not only because their standards are a bit looser,

01:48 but more importantly because they may not have the physical capacity to do the kind

01:52 of monitoring that's going to be called for.

01:54 At the point when Elon Musk bought the company, they had about 7,500 employees.

01:59 Today it's about 1,500.

02:01 One has partly that's due to people being canned and partly they quit.

02:07 But one has to assume when that many people walk out the door, a lot of institutional

02:11 knowledge walks out the door with them.

02:13 So I would say that they probably are at greater risk.

02:16 Some companies will be at greater risk than others and some with less risk just in the

02:20 nature of their business models.

02:22 Among those 19 companies are companies like Booking.com and Wikipedia, which have very

02:27 different business models and probably relative to content moderation, different aspects,

02:34 different issues.

02:35 I mean, there's a lot of headlines, wasn't there?

02:37 I think, Scott, it was what, November last year where they actually shut their Brussels

02:41 office over at Twitter.

02:43 I say formerly known as Twitter X now, isn't it?

02:45 But in terms of, as you point out, the notoriously libertarian Mr. Musk as well, this is going

02:51 to be a massive threat to him and his team actually growing their revenues if they're

02:55 in loggerheads almost immediately, I'd imagine, on DSA with the Europeans as well.

03:00 It's going to be a real struggle for them to be libertarian and conform with DSA, isn't

03:05 it?

03:06 Well, this is exactly my thought.

03:08 Now, Mr. Musk seems to have, as you say, a very libertarian view.

03:12 Some Americans look at freedom of expression really almost as if it were a religious principle,

03:17 but that represents a misunderstanding both of America's constitution and also the jurisprudence

03:23 out of the Supreme Court.

03:25 A very important decision years ago, Justice Kennedy explained that freedom of speech was

03:29 never absolute.

03:31 There were always limitations for defamation, for fraud, for imminent incitement to crime.

03:39 He liked to say, "Your freedom of speech doesn't extend to the right to yell fire in a crowded

03:45 theater."

03:46 So I think he's going to have problems.

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