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Notes -
Thierry Breton, Commissioner for Internal Market of the European Union, has written a 'friendly' letter to the leadership and ownership of
XTwitter:((The commission has called this letter "neither co-ordinated or agreed", for whatever that means.))
Bruce Daisely, the pre-Musk Twitter VP for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, writes in the UK's Guardian that:
The London Met Chief Commissioner had an interview last week, where he said:
I'd like to summarize the rest of the video -- allegedly he or the interviewer highlighted Musk specifically -- but for some reason the underlying video has disappeared. I'm sure Sky News pulled the video without any government action being involved, yepyepyep.
apropos of nothing
A Washington Post journalist asks the White House: [edited for readability]
Given the urgency here, I'm sure that they have published urgent fact-checking on things like... *checks transcript* Trump's hilariously false claims about the harms caused by the Fukushima Nuclear Accident, right?... Right?
No, that's not what they mean by misinformation or disinformation, just like the people calling GOP investigations into the "Global Alliance for Responsible Media" 'conspiracy theories' didn't mean that like its clear and prominent existence or self-admitted tooling or target matters. The line between 'allegedly' and 'stated in public' is less a distinction and more just overlap.
There's a fun story here, where despite all this, free speech still works, and to some extent that's likely to keep being the case. Even if you end up having to exfiltrate employees from certain countries, there's VPNs for now and StarLink in the future, and one not-quite-stated explicitly side effect of StarLink is that Musk will probably end up with a mini-Cloudflare, too. (though, uh, there's another possible solution to that).
But there's a more morbid one where it's come to this point. There aren't any detailed reports behind Musk's claims that "The European Commission offered 𝕏 an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us". Musk has implied at length that GARM used 'Brand Safety' as a proxy for political positions, but there aren't specific claims in his lawsuit. There's no explanation how major industry metrics whoopsididdled the official number there for months on end. Barring a million Congressional subpeonas that aren't going to happen and wouldn't be answered fully even if they did, it's impossible to tell the difference between GARM's membership all acting independently in a specific way, and someone in power in some regulating state made a few phone calls?
Is this the one place all these forces were necessary? Or is it unusual only in its visibility, as a result of people not playing along?
It is ironic that a “law” enforcement officer is so clearly overstepping customary law. UK law doesn’t apply to non UK citizens outside of the UK as the UK is not sovereign in those areas. Would the UK be comfortable with China exercising that power? The US? The whole concept is absurd prima facie as you could have country A make it illegal to do X and country B make it illegal to do not X. I hope that LEO is stripped naked, paraded through the streets, and then is flogged for proposing this draconian and unworkable legal system.
I think that pales in comparison to the absurdity of a EU commissioner thinking he has the power to involve himself in a conversation between two American citizens about an American matter. All because some Europeans may be listening.
In saner times this would actually be a diplomatic incident, but now it's just the richest man in the world shitposting about people impotently demanding he stops shitposting.
I do get a distinct feeling the foxes are losing their grip and panicking a little bit.
There's been EU elections recently, so the Commission gets to appoint new people, and they are all jockeying. Thierry Breton wants to keep his post and is acting all tough. He wants to position himself as someone who isn't afraid of the Americans.
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