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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?
Kind of funny coming from a government elected by 33% of the populace.
I've seen conservatives, liberals, leftists, and rightists all make this argument about some form of election where they've lost as some form of pushback, and here's the thing. If you don't vote, and you have a free and open ballot, you're saying you're fine with any option that wins. Not voting is an endorsement of the current order, whomever ends up the winner.
I have far more respect for somebody who shows up, and even just spoils their ballot or writes in something off the wall than somebody who isn't part of the process at all, then tries to act like it's not legitimate. Those who show up are the ones who create the government. You can be upset if your preference loses and be upset with the choices made of course.
But non-voters, especially ones who act as if they're above it all are silly, especially when the reality most of the 67% who didn't vote aren't doing it for some noble reason, but because they don't care, and no, they wouldn't care even if the perfect politician who you think should be in charge showed up either (I've said the same thing to my fellow lefties about Bernie).
The UK does not have a free and open ballot if what you want to vote for runs into restrictions on speech. It makes it very difficult for candidates to legally advertise their political position, or for you to campaign for it. In the past, it was possible to get elected from prison, but the Representation of the People Act 1981 put a stop to that. Liberal Democracy depends on a tightly interlocking system of rights to enable free elections. You don't get to pick and choose what parts you have. Removing one element can break a whole lot more.
Spoiling your secret ballot is an option. That's what I did back when de facto suppression of anti-lockdown dissidents meant I had no anti-lockdown candidates to vote for. But those weren't free and open elections, since public assembly by those expressing my favoured political views was criminalized.
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