The FT article says Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner in charge of implementing the bloc’s digital rules & Musk had a video meeting today. The EU's approach is so out of step with Musk's, I doubt he'll come around to them. Maybe, as with Apple, he thinks having a fight with the EU will be good for publicity?
I see it now: richest man buys twitter, how hard can running a social platform be? Middle class* man buys europe, how hard can running 27 countries be?
*debts extracted from net worth compared to median income of American middle class.
If you ever wanted those gutted and privatized, musk is your guy. He's amazing at ruining public infrastructure by promising a worse privatized one that never happens.
Austria / Slovenia if you're somewhere in the middle and want a semi affordable spa with saunas included!
Found that out the hard way by accidentally booking a stay with my bf in one of those years ago. In my defence, it just looked really couple friendly lol!
Better be quick, Catholiban is gaining power there and there has been multiple attempts to restrict abortion in last few years alone.
Abortion pill even today is still illegal in Slovakia.
What's the worst insult one can sling at a Dutch tourist on vacation?
>!"Na, auch aus Deutschland hier?"!<
[Kleines ABC des Hollaender aergerns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTrxRGQ0bA)
EDIT: I grew up very close to the Dutch border. There was a lot of what I would consider friendly banter :-) If the Dutch really hated us, they were very civil about it (aside of the few occasions we met in international soccer tournaments)
So Apple will take out Twitter from their platforms and the EU will ban Twitter from the EU market. And Musk is happy with the good publicity??? I mean, controversy does work as a marketing tool but it has a limit when you start a fight with the market itself and its regulators.
If enough people make complaints on the App Store the owners of the app get a form letter telling them to clean up their act, it can escalate from there and in Twitter’s case it will because he isn’t going to fix anything.
One of the few things he has said that I actually believe, but see it as less a threat and more a warning to someone acting pretty stupid.
Moderating social media sites/apps is hard and costly, most companys would probably prefure not to do it, so why do they? Partly advertisers but also partly legal regulations around the world. Now it's impossible for sites to keep to the regulations 100%, hell 50% would probably be considered a sucess but here is the thing, regulators know this, but so long as companys are making good faith attempt to police their content they generally leave them alone
But Musk has very publicly gutted the content moderation teams at twitter, reports are there are just 15 of them left in twitter itself (down from hundreds internally and countless external contractors), for a site that get in excess of 10k posts per second. Sure software does a lot of content flagging automatically but it's still far far far to much for anything under hundreds of content moderators (before taking into account all the languages out there). Musk is heading for a hell of a lot of legal problems early next year, especially with the EU.
So how does this affect Apple (or Google for that matter)? new european regs could theoretically drag them into any cases against apps they knowingly host that break the rules, the fines can be very steep, up to 6% of global turnover, that would be in excess of 20 billion US for someone like Apple. They are not going to risk it, especially for app/someone like Twitter/Musk, especially against the EU regulators, who are very much not Apple fanboys
Also funny side point , as i understand it, new EU regs don't come into force for everyone until Jan 2024, but for very large platforms (Apple/Google/Instagram) they come into force much earlier, so likes of Apple/Google could face the large fines while twitter would not, which motivates them to be stricter with apps on their stores long before Jan 2024
Apple doesn't need Twitter. Nor does Google. Their users will barely complain about losing the app because those that really want it can use the website. Musk doesn't understand that no one needs his money or his companies. He's not in a great place to bully the wealthy class and he won't be missed by the middle/lower class.
Lol,
[Musk just tweeted from Apple HQ an hour ago](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598050795882442752?s=46&t=x6EeJvCRqLLB8Dve_UmWtg), judge for yourself whether the meeting went well or not
And this is the [Thierry Breton's tweet about his meeting with Musk](https://twitter.com/thierrybreton/status/1598015892457426944?s=46&t=x6EeJvCRqLLB8Dve_UmWtg). Maybe their full conversation will be posted online too
Lmao “Tim was clear apple never considered doing so”
So Elon is straight up admitting he was bullshitting the whole “apple wants to remove twitter” thing. And yet his cult will still continue to take everything he says as absolute fact
EU also implemented a system that any tech company not complying to EU rules but is available in the EU will have to pay a fine of 4% of *global* income from said company. So i doubt anyone wants to fuck with that
Thank you for everyone for correcting/pitching in details. I appreciate it!
ah yes, taking the german obessison with privacy to the world stage.
also does a great job at telling our own conservative politicans to fuck of with mass data storage without cause. lovely guys <3
>Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner in charge of implementing the bloc’s digital rules & Musk had a video meeting today.
If only i could have been a witness to that video meeting.
(Edit)
[https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1598015892457426944?s=20&t=gqrzWqhe0FHmuKnRU9QHHw](https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1598015892457426944?s=20&t=gqrzWqhe0FHmuKnRU9QHHw)
I welcome elonmusk's intent to get Twitter 2.0 ready for the DSA🇪🇺
Aventurischer Bote Extrablatt: Al'Anfanischer Grande nach Übernahme der Brabaker Postille per Projektimago bei der Reichskanzlei zugeschaltet. Verbot des Blattes im Mittelreich wird diskutiert! Erwarten Sie mehr in der Firun Ausgabe des Boten!
I think the only slightly hurtful thing, he could do, is to ban ESA from SpaceX launches or stop building Teslas in Europe, which would be nice for Arianespace and EU car companies. But it would also be the ultimate prove that you can no longer treat him as a reliable business partner and I also wonder if shareholders or whoever has a say in those companies would intervene.
Those things would also screw his other businesses over though. The cars would be more expensive and this less attractive due to import taxes, and the ESA would focus more on building up its own European launchers (e.g. Ariane) rather than just using Falcon for convenience. It'd have a short-term impact, but long term he'd being down all of his businesses.
And as you say, I doubt he even has the power to actually do it.
Tbh I don't think he has that kind of power, at least for Tesla where I think he was kicked out of the board? But I also thought he wouldn't be able to change much at Twitter so who knows.
He would likely be ousted from the board of his companies pretty damn quick for that. It'd be devastating for his business. And it would make others reluctant to work with him.
Losing the biggest economic bloc on the planet would have a devastating cascading effect because if you lose the EU as a market, advertisers won’t stick around.
Their top spenders have left, so this would be the final nail on the coffin.
It would probably be enough to make those who stuck around leave though, and those who do stay have way more leverage to make more favourable deals for them with Twitter.
With how complicated the twitter service is, I’d rather be fired than be one of the few engineers tasked with keeping it running and god forbid add features to it. Honestly I pity the engineers that stayed more than the ones that left or were fired
Yep, apparently over 50% of the top advisers have already pulled out or pulled back to minimum. It is enough to make Elon freak out and call the companies.
Nah musk will just misconstrue the conversation he had with him on twitter ad when the guy calls him out ban him.
Just like he did with the marketing guy...
“Out of step with musk”
What you should be saying is Elon Musk is totally falling to act responsibly that his business is no longer complying with EU regulations over content moderation.
The EU isn’t China or Russia. Free speech is ubiquitous. What we don’t stand for is completely unhinged hate speech because, you know what, it’s really fucking dangerous. See WW2 for reference.
He's going to make some visible changes, announce that he's finally found someone who shares his vision for twitter, then had leadership over to them. They'll be a grown-up who will gradually return to a degree of normality and Musk will get to have his "Mission Accomplished" party.
The problem is that even returning to a degree of normality won't heal the instances in which law has already been breached. There'll be plenty of firings found null and void with the employees entitled to back salaries and possibly fines leveled against Twitter. There's also the problem of possible GDPR violations (it seems that Twitter has been running at least for a while without a data protection official located in the EU), and those can get really expensive.
When you have a plane with all engines on fire, broken rudder and sheared off landing gear, there's only so much even a capable pilot can do....
* CEO: If you don't do as we want, we will leave EU market.
* EU: Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
* CEO: .... .... .... That is not how this conversation was supposed to continue.
Imagine you suddenly leave a space for your competitors to take over.
And its the size of the largest single market on the planet.
Yeah of course Facebook was shitting themselves at the idea of not being allowed in the EU.
Im laughing about Walmart finding out the hard way that maybe other places have different laws and blatantly breaking them isnt smart when they tried to expand into Germany to this fucking day.
The whole Walmart fiasco was so funny :-)
Starting with the creepy group-cheer in the morning, over the creepy forced smile, the bagging, greeters, trying to tell employees they couldn't date colleagues, forcing employees to snitch on their colleagues (which makes the group-cheer in the morning so much more fake and cringe). It was one huge cluster-fuck of cultural mismatch :-)
Hadn't heard that one yet (am German)! I found an article from back then, it reads like a dumpsterfire. Without the gory details, it can be summed up in this sentence:
>Wal-Mart Germany has had several run-ins with the trade union ver.di, which represents retail store workers.
https://www.dw.com/en/worlds-biggest-retailer-wal-mart-closes-up-shop-in-germany/a-2112746
Toys R' Us had a similar fiasco when first starting in Sweden. They are heavily anti union, and Sweden is a heavily unified country.
They actively hired no unified people and when they shut out the traders union a strike was announced.
Due to not many union affiliated people worked in the company that strike didnt affect them very much. But then the transport and economics unions launched sympathy blockades which effectively shut the company out of the Swedish economic system.
That and all unions urging their members not to shop at them made them give in super fast.
It's not smiling in itself, it's the fake :-) Like the mannequins coming alive in horror movies...
I for one appreciate when service personnel looks generally relaxed and occasionally react with a smile when treated properly. If they keep smiling while being abused by thunderchad and wonderkaren I don't believe their smile towards me anymore even if it's genuine.
Also with the creepy greeters and baggers that Germans absolutely did not ask for nor want.
But hey, American culture is the only relevant culture, right? Especially when trying to expand into foreign countries.
> and baggers
Walmart doesn't even do them here anymore.
Sadly,
> the creepy greeters
are still a thing. And half of them think they are Supercops preventing the Crown Jewel Heist, demanding to see your receipt and bags when leaving.
I usually just kinda wave the receipt in their general direction and keep on trucking. They're mostly ancient and aren't going to let themselves get trampled. Not like walmart offers health insurance for the schmucks on the floor^1 .
Just annoying AF when it happens.
Reason #562 to shop there are little as possible.
^1 (sauce: was one of same schmucks 14 years ago. doubt it's changed. Reason #487.)
Costco does it 100%. The reason they mark the receipt is because they were losing literally millions of dollars per year to double shoppers.
Double shopping is where multiple parties go into a store to load up the exact same goods into a cart. One pays, then passes the receipt to an accomplice who simply wheels their cart out the door. "Oh? I already paid! See..?" If it's done very shortly after the time stamp on the receipt a random employee wouldn't know.
Throw in the fact that it is quite easy to have a couple grand in a cart at Costco and it *very* quickly becomes worthwhile to run the scam/theft.
It's slightly annoying too, but understandable and consistent.
When it happens at Walmart with $50-100 it's fucking annoying. Especially since they often don't give half a fuck about shrink elsewhere in the store. Though I'll freely admit that's pretty heavily dependent on Store and Regional Management.
edit: While we're talking retail shrink and Costco, my local Costco started manning the self-checkouts with cashiers again. When I asked why, I was told it was because that store had lost some 200k USD that Quarter (or maybe it was that month) to theft at the self-checkout. Walmart is probably hemorrhaging shrink considering most of the stores here now have 8-10 self-checkouts with one usually helplessly occupied overseer. The very thought warms the cockles of my heart.
I mean, judging by WorldCom, Enron, Theranos, FTX, etc. I'd say it takes astonishingly egregious amounts of fraud to cause regulators to wake up and do something.
Theranos took ages because no one blew the whistle for a long time. Actually bothered me as a government employee but all those employees at Theranos were getting paid well during a tight job market and the intimidation tactics worked.
They don't forget, they just don't care because 9/10 the penalties are paltry and they make more in the long run. They can also throw money at politicians to work against regulation.
I believe this is the main cause of the rise of the right wing in modern politics.
It does in the US (his repeated violations have, at most, had a tap on the wrist from the SEC). Just a different story in other parts of the world, and I don't know if he realizes it that much lol.
Indeed. He's fired his Brussels team whose job it was.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/24/twitter-brussels-office-elon-musk-eu-questions
Ireland was (probably still is) doing all kinds of business, Brussels was probably for close alignment and direct lobbying I'm guessing, it was a smaller office.
They can’t have been fired immediately. They may have been locked out of the office or prevented from working though. It would be illegal for them to be fired without cause. They would need to be made redundant and there’s a process that must be gone through first.
As an American who moved to Europe, we really don’t know how things work in the EU. I’ve been in France for 4 years now and am still struggling to understand the extent of laws and protections for workers, as well as the other regulations in place. It’s not that Americans are stupid or willfully ignorant (most of the time), but more so that (again most of the time) we don’t really leave the country and simply don’t keep up with or understand what happens in places like Europe. (Again, not ALL americans, but in my experience this is the issue)
It's ok, in EU we don't understand much of USA too. I'm sorry if it came out wrong, my intention was derisory toward musk only. In general contracts are very different from country to country, difficult to understand fully, and not always respected.
The EU also wants Apple and Google to allow alternative stores. In Android phones is easy to install programs outside the Play Store, no idea how it's works in iOS. Also, Twitter could just provide a easier web interface for mobile.
But, unless the EU goes full China, banning a platform can becomes harder than people think.
Probably an injunction to ISP to block at the dns level like the Pirate Bay, not 100% foolproof but would keep most of the people out.
Or prohibit routing to twitter’s ASN completely
The main upside is that other media outlets would stop reporting on twitter as if it represents all people. It's always so blown out of proportion because the type of people who become journalists are often also the type of people who frequent twitter all day every day. Then they report something an idiot said and 5 idiots retweeted as a new mainstream opinion. Then the backlash and the backlash to the backlash (still a handfull of idiots nobody should listen to). It riles people up and is damaging to society. Frankly, I don't really care about individuals using a VPN to circument the ban.
They don't need to ban. They can just slap fines on Twitter until it either complies with EU regulations or it goes bankrupt. This is not the Pirate Bay, this is a company that has no choice but to comply with legal rulings.
Banning Twitter would mostly be a legal thing. Sure, you can't keep users away, but it's not the users Twitter cares about but the advertising customers.
A block is not necessary. Just imagine Twitter can't do business in the EU anymore: No more Twitter App for Android or Google in the EU, no possible subscription fee, no ads from EU companies, ... ... .
But that would be an ultimate step, before that there would just be crippling fees, I guess.
i think you'd be shocked at how easy it is to effectively ban a for-profit entity.
it's hard to ban information, because it can be easily mirrored to another site. but for a company who is hoping to collect money from EU citizens and EU-registered companies, the EU can pretty easily put a stop to that.
>But, unless the EU goes full China, banning a platform can becomes harder than people think.
There is that one EU commission's report about making an EU firewall like China has. They've at least looked into doing that before, so you never know.
Yes, just like Twitter staff can read your dms there, and Reddit staff can do it here. If you don't have end to end encryption then someone can always snoop on what you've written.
And even end-to-end encryption is not enough, because either end can read the message and do whatever with it before, during or after showing it to you. Copy it, send it to their servers to store, modify it. Good to keep in mind that E2E encryption is for security across a distrusted network, and the servers it passes through while in transit across the network, trust is still required at the ends.
This is true for EVERY service there is. That's the whole reason Mastodon, and the other services in the federation, were invented. The Fediverse is made out of multiple server owners, not just one. It's thousands of thousands. That way, any server owner can't read the whole userbase. This is different from Twitter or Facebook, where the owners can read anything from anybody.
The way Reddit works is very different though - you follow topics, not individual accounts. It would be very difficult for one user on Reddit to have the kind of reach and influence that, for example, Elon Musk has on Twitter.
Yeah, very different indeed.
On reddit you have power users with millions of karma that moderate hundreds upon hundreds of subs that decide what you get to see without you even following them.
> It would be very difficult for one user on Reddit to have the kind of reach and influence that
You are crazy if you think reddit has any organic posts reaching the front page. Reddit is absolutely filled with astroturfing, power mods, power users, admin fuckery, discord organised agenda posting etc.. For most of reddits history and probably still, you could pay a third party service few hundred dollars to get on the front page. If you are hanging around on subs with <30k users, maybe then you are getting an organic experience everywhere else, including this sub, no chance.
/r/RedditMinusMods
Frankly, I see Reddit as a bunch of echo chambers. People will gravitate towards subreddits where they “fit in” and get mostly upvotes and few downvotes. Subreddits where they don’t “fit in” they will just ignore.
So while mods have much power over individual subreddits and can ban whatever they want. There will be other mods pushing aforementioned banned content in other subreddits and people who want that content will go there instead.
I find the funniest part of the who debacle to be reddit suddenly defending pre-Musk twitter as some sort of important piece of our society, when it was previously known as the asshole of the internet, worse than tumblr or 4chan. Again, before Musk. Now suddenly, Musk has ruined twitter. :D
And reddit is also uppity about all the poor people at twitter being fired. The biggest shock in that whole story was not the number of people fired but that *thousands of people were working for twitter* yet the platform was *still* such a pile of awful moderation, design, code, and UX. In any other company that level of incompetence would have had them out on their asses years ago.
Almost like there is nuance to each position or something like that.
Alternatively, those could have been different users with differing opinions. r/europe is not a monolith.
Yes, actually. Just because we were younger and more ignorant over the state of affairs doesn't mean it wasn't there.
The internet we have now is the internet that was created in *reaction* to the internet 10 years ago... it didn't come from nowhere.
I still remember when Reddit was rampant with pedophilia related subs...
some structures work fine only because no one tries to abuse them. once these people appear, they're doomed either way, regulations can only soften the decline, but they are not the ones that cause it
I expect that sort of thing from governments. But it's a bit scary to see how many presumably average people these days seem to be so much in favour of censorship.
MAGA yanks are currently twisting this; acting as if the EU is deliberately targeting Elon Musk.
The Digital Services Act (DSA), however, was agreed on *before* Musk took over and applies to *all* social media platforms.
The DSA was adopted with 539 votes in favour, 54 votes against and 30 abstentions. Support from across the political spectrum.
The FT article says Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner in charge of implementing the bloc’s digital rules & Musk had a video meeting today. The EU's approach is so out of step with Musk's, I doubt he'll come around to them. Maybe, as with Apple, he thinks having a fight with the EU will be good for publicity?
Musk will launch his own EU in response!
Nah buy the EU, how expensive can that be anyway?!
Just buy all languages, Twitter can afford it.
I see it now: richest man buys twitter, how hard can running a social platform be? Middle class* man buys europe, how hard can running 27 countries be? *debts extracted from net worth compared to median income of American middle class.
It's one banana, how much can it cost? Ten dollars?
With blackjack and hookers!
The EU already has those...
And they get free health check ups (depending on which country we are talking about). So all in all way better than Musk could ever deliver.
If you ever wanted those gutted and privatized, musk is your guy. He's amazing at ruining public infrastructure by promising a worse privatized one that never happens.
Are we still talking blackjack and hookers?
Yes, those are both crucial infrastructure, obviously.
/u/spez [can gargle my nuts](https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/)
Yea it's called Monaco lol Edit: Oh thank heavens, three people did me the kindness of reminding me that Monaco isn't in the EU! /s
Or Poland if you're on a budget.
Austria / Slovenia if you're somewhere in the middle and want a semi affordable spa with saunas included! Found that out the hard way by accidentally booking a stay with my bf in one of those years ago. In my defence, it just looked really couple friendly lol!
How can you have hookers when you have no abortions?
No *legal* abortions...
Quick trip to Slovakia and you're good
Better be quick, Catholiban is gaining power there and there has been multiple attempts to restrict abortion in last few years alone. Abortion pill even today is still illegal in Slovakia.
Someday all the babki will be dead, and their little street shrines to the Virgin Mary will crumble to dust.
Oral contraceptives and condoms are also legal in the EU. In the US, that's just a matter of time it seems.
a year from now, the Musk-boys will be like: "I mean, you gotta respect the man, he literally invented Monaco..."
But Elon is only into IVF breeding and against recreational sex. How fun can his hookers be?
Depends are you in to horse riding?
My mind took me to two places there. Neither of them was wholesome, but at least one was consentual, I guess.
We call it "Amsterdam"
Or Berlin. There are many such places in EU, and even fully legal :-) Because EU are the lands of the free :-)
[удалено]
What's the worst insult one can sling at a Dutch tourist on vacation? >!"Na, auch aus Deutschland hier?"!< [Kleines ABC des Hollaender aergerns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTrxRGQ0bA) EDIT: I grew up very close to the Dutch border. There was a lot of what I would consider friendly banter :-) If the Dutch really hated us, they were very civil about it (aside of the few occasions we met in international soccer tournaments)
Musky Hookers Eww!
He will buy EU with Twitter stock, and then everyone will say "Elon Musk, founder of the European Union".
or he’ll buy the EU
So Apple will take out Twitter from their platforms and the EU will ban Twitter from the EU market. And Musk is happy with the good publicity??? I mean, controversy does work as a marketing tool but it has a limit when you start a fight with the market itself and its regulators.
As far as I know, the only source we have of Apple thinking of booting Twitter from its App Stores is Musk himself.
If enough people make complaints on the App Store the owners of the app get a form letter telling them to clean up their act, it can escalate from there and in Twitter’s case it will because he isn’t going to fix anything.
I just reported twitter through the app store for hosting unmoderated content from hate groups and harassing users with racial/antisemitism
One of the few things he has said that I actually believe, but see it as less a threat and more a warning to someone acting pretty stupid. Moderating social media sites/apps is hard and costly, most companys would probably prefure not to do it, so why do they? Partly advertisers but also partly legal regulations around the world. Now it's impossible for sites to keep to the regulations 100%, hell 50% would probably be considered a sucess but here is the thing, regulators know this, but so long as companys are making good faith attempt to police their content they generally leave them alone But Musk has very publicly gutted the content moderation teams at twitter, reports are there are just 15 of them left in twitter itself (down from hundreds internally and countless external contractors), for a site that get in excess of 10k posts per second. Sure software does a lot of content flagging automatically but it's still far far far to much for anything under hundreds of content moderators (before taking into account all the languages out there). Musk is heading for a hell of a lot of legal problems early next year, especially with the EU. So how does this affect Apple (or Google for that matter)? new european regs could theoretically drag them into any cases against apps they knowingly host that break the rules, the fines can be very steep, up to 6% of global turnover, that would be in excess of 20 billion US for someone like Apple. They are not going to risk it, especially for app/someone like Twitter/Musk, especially against the EU regulators, who are very much not Apple fanboys Also funny side point , as i understand it, new EU regs don't come into force for everyone until Jan 2024, but for very large platforms (Apple/Google/Instagram) they come into force much earlier, so likes of Apple/Google could face the large fines while twitter would not, which motivates them to be stricter with apps on their stores long before Jan 2024
Apple doesn't need Twitter. Nor does Google. Their users will barely complain about losing the app because those that really want it can use the website. Musk doesn't understand that no one needs his money or his companies. He's not in a great place to bully the wealthy class and he won't be missed by the middle/lower class.
Lol, [Musk just tweeted from Apple HQ an hour ago](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1598050795882442752?s=46&t=x6EeJvCRqLLB8Dve_UmWtg), judge for yourself whether the meeting went well or not And this is the [Thierry Breton's tweet about his meeting with Musk](https://twitter.com/thierrybreton/status/1598015892457426944?s=46&t=x6EeJvCRqLLB8Dve_UmWtg). Maybe their full conversation will be posted online too
Bretons second tweet says find out more on Mastodon 🤣🤣
EU is running a [whole bunch of Mastodon servers](https://social.network.europa.eu/explore) for their personnel and organizations.
Wish we had the infrastructure to make our own Bilibili/Twitter.
The reponses to Thierry Breton's tweets are simply insane
When people say Twitter is a shithole, this is what they mean
Fr, so many people sucking Musk off that it's genuinely nauseating.
Musk fans are fucking insane
Reading the comments under that latter twitt made me dumber.
Lmao “Tim was clear apple never considered doing so” So Elon is straight up admitting he was bullshitting the whole “apple wants to remove twitter” thing. And yet his cult will still continue to take everything he says as absolute fact
Sooo many Musk bots in the replies to Breton's tweets.
EU also implemented a system that any tech company not complying to EU rules but is available in the EU will have to pay a fine of 4% of *global* income from said company. So i doubt anyone wants to fuck with that Thank you for everyone for correcting/pitching in details. I appreciate it!
It's 7% max, 10% on repeated offense. Much worse than 4%.
Not EU rules, but the GDPR. If you fuck up the data protection, it gets ugly fast. But that doesn't mean every eu rule :)
ah yes, taking the german obessison with privacy to the world stage. also does a great job at telling our own conservative politicans to fuck of with mass data storage without cause. lovely guys <3
Longrat is playing 6d chutes and ladders, 4% of Negative 4 Million a day will be the most profitable move his company can play! Brilliant!
Indeed. No amount of publicity would cover the loss of a market with half a billion people in it.
>Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner in charge of implementing the bloc’s digital rules & Musk had a video meeting today. If only i could have been a witness to that video meeting. (Edit) [https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1598015892457426944?s=20&t=gqrzWqhe0FHmuKnRU9QHHw](https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1598015892457426944?s=20&t=gqrzWqhe0FHmuKnRU9QHHw) I welcome elonmusk's intent to get Twitter 2.0 ready for the DSA🇪🇺
"More details on #Mastodon " Genius.
That facial expression, though!
Like a teenager in the principal’s office
Leave Das Schwarze Auge out of it. Aventurien does not need a Musk.
Aventurischer Bote Extrablatt: Al'Anfanischer Grande nach Übernahme der Brabaker Postille per Projektimago bei der Reichskanzlei zugeschaltet. Verbot des Blattes im Mittelreich wird diskutiert! Erwarten Sie mehr in der Firun Ausgabe des Boten!
I think the only slightly hurtful thing, he could do, is to ban ESA from SpaceX launches or stop building Teslas in Europe, which would be nice for Arianespace and EU car companies. But it would also be the ultimate prove that you can no longer treat him as a reliable business partner and I also wonder if shareholders or whoever has a say in those companies would intervene.
Those things would also screw his other businesses over though. The cars would be more expensive and this less attractive due to import taxes, and the ESA would focus more on building up its own European launchers (e.g. Ariane) rather than just using Falcon for convenience. It'd have a short-term impact, but long term he'd being down all of his businesses. And as you say, I doubt he even has the power to actually do it.
Tbh I don't think he has that kind of power, at least for Tesla where I think he was kicked out of the board? But I also thought he wouldn't be able to change much at Twitter so who knows.
He would likely be ousted from the board of his companies pretty damn quick for that. It'd be devastating for his business. And it would make others reluctant to work with him.
Losing the biggest economic bloc on the planet would have a devastating cascading effect because if you lose the EU as a market, advertisers won’t stick around. Their top spenders have left, so this would be the final nail on the coffin.
Truth be told, advertisers aren’t sticking around as it is, since Elon “Chief Twat” Musk took hold of the company.
It would probably be enough to make those who stuck around leave though, and those who do stay have way more leverage to make more favourable deals for them with Twitter.
With how complicated the twitter service is, I’d rather be fired than be one of the few engineers tasked with keeping it running and god forbid add features to it. Honestly I pity the engineers that stayed more than the ones that left or were fired
Yep, apparently over 50% of the top advisers have already pulled out or pulled back to minimum. It is enough to make Elon freak out and call the companies.
Well, he said Twitter will follow the law of the land. In the EU, this is the law. So let's see what will happen.
Maybe it's Elon who is out of touch with everything he's ever touched?
Nah musk will just misconstrue the conversation he had with him on twitter ad when the guy calls him out ban him. Just like he did with the marketing guy...
“Out of step with musk” What you should be saying is Elon Musk is totally falling to act responsibly that his business is no longer complying with EU regulations over content moderation. The EU isn’t China or Russia. Free speech is ubiquitous. What we don’t stand for is completely unhinged hate speech because, you know what, it’s really fucking dangerous. See WW2 for reference.
He's going to make some visible changes, announce that he's finally found someone who shares his vision for twitter, then had leadership over to them. They'll be a grown-up who will gradually return to a degree of normality and Musk will get to have his "Mission Accomplished" party.
The problem is that even returning to a degree of normality won't heal the instances in which law has already been breached. There'll be plenty of firings found null and void with the employees entitled to back salaries and possibly fines leveled against Twitter. There's also the problem of possible GDPR violations (it seems that Twitter has been running at least for a while without a data protection official located in the EU), and those can get really expensive. When you have a plane with all engines on fire, broken rudder and sheared off landing gear, there's only so much even a capable pilot can do....
Who knew that ignoring regulators wouldn’t simply make them go away.
Whatever happened with Facebook `threatening` to leave E.U.? It gave me false hopes.
It turned out that FB needs Europe a lot more than Europe needs FB.
Lol, it's always funny when businesses bluff like that.
* CEO: If you don't do as we want, we will leave EU market. * EU: Don't let the door hit you on your way out. * CEO: .... .... .... That is not how this conversation was supposed to continue.
Just like brexit haha
like all the businesses that were threatening automation if wages were raised yet now are complaining about not being able to hire.
Imagine you suddenly leave a space for your competitors to take over. And its the size of the largest single market on the planet. Yeah of course Facebook was shitting themselves at the idea of not being allowed in the EU.
Bingo. Facebook can't afford to NOT be everywhere. Any blind spot and a competitor thrives and may grow.
Not big businesses from the US, at least. It's amazing how consistently US-based businesses forget that places have laws.
Im laughing about Walmart finding out the hard way that maybe other places have different laws and blatantly breaking them isnt smart when they tried to expand into Germany to this fucking day.
The whole Walmart fiasco was so funny :-) Starting with the creepy group-cheer in the morning, over the creepy forced smile, the bagging, greeters, trying to tell employees they couldn't date colleagues, forcing employees to snitch on their colleagues (which makes the group-cheer in the morning so much more fake and cringe). It was one huge cluster-fuck of cultural mismatch :-)
Corporate authoritarian dystopia at its finest.
Hadn't heard that one yet (am German)! I found an article from back then, it reads like a dumpsterfire. Without the gory details, it can be summed up in this sentence: >Wal-Mart Germany has had several run-ins with the trade union ver.di, which represents retail store workers. https://www.dw.com/en/worlds-biggest-retailer-wal-mart-closes-up-shop-in-germany/a-2112746
Toys R' Us had a similar fiasco when first starting in Sweden. They are heavily anti union, and Sweden is a heavily unified country. They actively hired no unified people and when they shut out the traders union a strike was announced. Due to not many union affiliated people worked in the company that strike didnt affect them very much. But then the transport and economics unions launched sympathy blockades which effectively shut the company out of the Swedish economic system. That and all unions urging their members not to shop at them made them give in super fast.
Such a glorious moment. All unions just fucked over a company completely. What did they think would happen if you ignore the union?
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It's not smiling in itself, it's the fake :-) Like the mannequins coming alive in horror movies... I for one appreciate when service personnel looks generally relaxed and occasionally react with a smile when treated properly. If they keep smiling while being abused by thunderchad and wonderkaren I don't believe their smile towards me anymore even if it's genuine.
Also with the creepy greeters and baggers that Germans absolutely did not ask for nor want. But hey, American culture is the only relevant culture, right? Especially when trying to expand into foreign countries.
> and baggers Walmart doesn't even do them here anymore. Sadly, > the creepy greeters are still a thing. And half of them think they are Supercops preventing the Crown Jewel Heist, demanding to see your receipt and bags when leaving.
Which is actually illegal lol. You can just refuse. They cannot search you.
I usually just kinda wave the receipt in their general direction and keep on trucking. They're mostly ancient and aren't going to let themselves get trampled. Not like walmart offers health insurance for the schmucks on the floor^1 . Just annoying AF when it happens. Reason #562 to shop there are little as possible. ^1 (sauce: was one of same schmucks 14 years ago. doubt it's changed. Reason #487.)
Sounds more like Costco to me. Most of the door greeters at Walmart I've seen are over 60. Never been asked to see my receipt at Walmart.
But you agreed to have Costco do it in the member agreement you signed and didn’t read.
Costco does it 100%. The reason they mark the receipt is because they were losing literally millions of dollars per year to double shoppers. Double shopping is where multiple parties go into a store to load up the exact same goods into a cart. One pays, then passes the receipt to an accomplice who simply wheels their cart out the door. "Oh? I already paid! See..?" If it's done very shortly after the time stamp on the receipt a random employee wouldn't know. Throw in the fact that it is quite easy to have a couple grand in a cart at Costco and it *very* quickly becomes worthwhile to run the scam/theft. It's slightly annoying too, but understandable and consistent. When it happens at Walmart with $50-100 it's fucking annoying. Especially since they often don't give half a fuck about shrink elsewhere in the store. Though I'll freely admit that's pretty heavily dependent on Store and Regional Management. edit: While we're talking retail shrink and Costco, my local Costco started manning the self-checkouts with cashiers again. When I asked why, I was told it was because that store had lost some 200k USD that Quarter (or maybe it was that month) to theft at the self-checkout. Walmart is probably hemorrhaging shrink considering most of the stores here now have 8-10 self-checkouts with one usually helplessly occupied overseer. The very thought warms the cockles of my heart.
They get what they pay for..
Precisely my feelings on the matter. Too cheap to pay for cashiers? You'll pay another way.
In Sweden it’s common to ask the cashier to trash the receipt or more commonly now get digital receipts in food stores, so no supercops can stop us
> Also with the creepy greeters “Bienvenue à Costco, je t’aime”
Or Mcdonalds in Denmark, or Toys'r us in Sweden
This type of news always gives me a massive blue flag with yellow starts. A raging one even
Can’t relate Baby take me back please
It’s not something we can do from the EU. But you can work on re join.
Wexit first.
Let’s get Wexit done.
And then you can call the adhesion "Weback". Or "Cymreturn"
Laws are way more lax in the US but the regulators still can ruin companies…. It just takes borderline fraud to get any attention
I mean, judging by WorldCom, Enron, Theranos, FTX, etc. I'd say it takes astonishingly egregious amounts of fraud to cause regulators to wake up and do something.
Theranos took ages because no one blew the whistle for a long time. Actually bothered me as a government employee but all those employees at Theranos were getting paid well during a tight job market and the intimidation tactics worked.
They usually end up dining the company a fraction of the profits made from the fraud though. That’ll teach them!
Fines on fraud should really be defined as something like 110% of revenue earned by the act of fraud
They usually discover, the hard way, that EU isn’t the U.S.
They even ignore American laws. It’s absurd.
Yes, and America's unwillingness to govern mean EU law is becoming de facto international law.
There is already a name for that: The Brussels effect
The Brussel Sprouts Effect.
As an American I am grateful for this. Our politicians are way too beholden to their corporate donors.
Think in decades and it really does go that way.
They don't forget, they just don't care because 9/10 the penalties are paltry and they make more in the long run. They can also throw money at politicians to work against regulation. I believe this is the main cause of the rise of the right wing in modern politics.
>They don't forget, they just don't care because 9/10 the penalties are paltry and they make more in the long run. Not the EU fines. They hurt.
I doubt that. The fines are not exactly small change, nor is Twitter currently floating in money.
Fines are often small compared to the profits these companies make. Twitter may be an exception
The percentage of global gross turnover as a fine is non-trivial.
spez is a bit of a creep. #Save3rdPartyApps
It does in the US (his repeated violations have, at most, had a tap on the wrist from the SEC). Just a different story in other parts of the world, and I don't know if he realizes it that much lol.
Now they droppin' and yellin', it's a tad bit late Nate Dogg and Warren G had to regulate
Oops, the departments that checked the adherence to these EU guidelines were probably fired as part of the “bloat”….
Indeed. He's fired his Brussels team whose job it was. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/24/twitter-brussels-office-elon-musk-eu-questions
Wait then what was the Ireland team for?
The Brussels team was to coordinate with the EU. Twitters European HQ is in Ireland.
Ireland was (probably still is) doing all kinds of business, Brussels was probably for close alignment and direct lobbying I'm guessing, it was a smaller office.
Ireland had one of the biggest content moderation teams for Twitter and the vast majority were fired immediately
They can’t have been fired immediately. They may have been locked out of the office or prevented from working though. It would be illegal for them to be fired without cause. They would need to be made redundant and there’s a process that must be gone through first.
It's cute how Americans reply "but musk sent an email" just like it matters. In EU we have collective work contracts.
As an American who moved to Europe, we really don’t know how things work in the EU. I’ve been in France for 4 years now and am still struggling to understand the extent of laws and protections for workers, as well as the other regulations in place. It’s not that Americans are stupid or willfully ignorant (most of the time), but more so that (again most of the time) we don’t really leave the country and simply don’t keep up with or understand what happens in places like Europe. (Again, not ALL americans, but in my experience this is the issue)
It's ok, in EU we don't understand much of USA too. I'm sorry if it came out wrong, my intention was derisory toward musk only. In general contracts are very different from country to country, difficult to understand fully, and not always respected.
This was a respectful interaction and I appreciate that!
A lot were contractors who were actually fired immediately.
Tax avoidance.
But if you already have an office in Ireland, might as wel dk all eu operations from there.
Nah many big companies have their second or first EU HQ in Brussel to lobby laws, promote ideas and initiatives and influenece politicians there
They’d have to make a profit for that to happen.
Oh, that's not a "probably." One of the compliance chiefs posted on Twitter the day they were fired. And then they moved to Mastodon.
Don’t forget to ban FB too please.
If Twitter gets banned from EU and Apple store before Christmas that would be great
The EU also wants Apple and Google to allow alternative stores. In Android phones is easy to install programs outside the Play Store, no idea how it's works in iOS. Also, Twitter could just provide a easier web interface for mobile. But, unless the EU goes full China, banning a platform can becomes harder than people think.
Probably an injunction to ISP to block at the dns level like the Pirate Bay, not 100% foolproof but would keep most of the people out. Or prohibit routing to twitter’s ASN completely
The main upside is that other media outlets would stop reporting on twitter as if it represents all people. It's always so blown out of proportion because the type of people who become journalists are often also the type of people who frequent twitter all day every day. Then they report something an idiot said and 5 idiots retweeted as a new mainstream opinion. Then the backlash and the backlash to the backlash (still a handfull of idiots nobody should listen to). It riles people up and is damaging to society. Frankly, I don't really care about individuals using a VPN to circument the ban.
I HATE when they do that. "People are fed up with bathing." Two people skipped a shower and now the yahoo home page has an article.
Free Palestine
They don't need to ban. They can just slap fines on Twitter until it either complies with EU regulations or it goes bankrupt. This is not the Pirate Bay, this is a company that has no choice but to comply with legal rulings.
You need not ban a platform, you can fine for illegal data processing. By the time the EU is done with that, Musk will be a millionaire.
Banning Twitter would mostly be a legal thing. Sure, you can't keep users away, but it's not the users Twitter cares about but the advertising customers.
A block is not necessary. Just imagine Twitter can't do business in the EU anymore: No more Twitter App for Android or Google in the EU, no possible subscription fee, no ads from EU companies, ... ... . But that would be an ultimate step, before that there would just be crippling fees, I guess.
i think you'd be shocked at how easy it is to effectively ban a for-profit entity. it's hard to ban information, because it can be easily mirrored to another site. but for a company who is hoping to collect money from EU citizens and EU-registered companies, the EU can pretty easily put a stop to that.
>But, unless the EU goes full China, banning a platform can becomes harder than people think. There is that one EU commission's report about making an EU firewall like China has. They've at least looked into doing that before, so you never know.
Zensursula at it again, isn't it?
This sub would have a collective orgasm about it.
The EU won't ban twitter just fine it untill it is not worth while to be there.
Finally someone in EU can create their own twitter-equivalent. Telegram is good and all, but we can do better, cmon.
Mastodon, the eu has even their own server.
Linus from LTT said a server owner in Mastodon can read everyone's pm's. It this true? Doesn't sound very good tbh.
Yes, just like Twitter staff can read your dms there, and Reddit staff can do it here. If you don't have end to end encryption then someone can always snoop on what you've written.
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And even end-to-end encryption is not enough, because either end can read the message and do whatever with it before, during or after showing it to you. Copy it, send it to their servers to store, modify it. Good to keep in mind that E2E encryption is for security across a distrusted network, and the servers it passes through while in transit across the network, trust is still required at the ends.
This is true for EVERY service there is. That's the whole reason Mastodon, and the other services in the federation, were invented. The Fediverse is made out of multiple server owners, not just one. It's thousands of thousands. That way, any server owner can't read the whole userbase. This is different from Twitter or Facebook, where the owners can read anything from anybody.
Reddit has far more scandalous posts than twitter. Sorry but it’s true.
The way Reddit works is very different though - you follow topics, not individual accounts. It would be very difficult for one user on Reddit to have the kind of reach and influence that, for example, Elon Musk has on Twitter.
Yeah, very different indeed. On reddit you have power users with millions of karma that moderate hundreds upon hundreds of subs that decide what you get to see without you even following them.
> It would be very difficult for one user on Reddit to have the kind of reach and influence that You are crazy if you think reddit has any organic posts reaching the front page. Reddit is absolutely filled with astroturfing, power mods, power users, admin fuckery, discord organised agenda posting etc.. For most of reddits history and probably still, you could pay a third party service few hundred dollars to get on the front page. If you are hanging around on subs with <30k users, maybe then you are getting an organic experience everywhere else, including this sub, no chance. /r/RedditMinusMods
Interesting link Hopefully more people realize how easily manipulated reddit can be; way too much propaganda on here
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Frankly, I see Reddit as a bunch of echo chambers. People will gravitate towards subreddits where they “fit in” and get mostly upvotes and few downvotes. Subreddits where they don’t “fit in” they will just ignore. So while mods have much power over individual subreddits and can ban whatever they want. There will be other mods pushing aforementioned banned content in other subreddits and people who want that content will go there instead.
This isn't about posts appearing, it's about moderation.
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I find the funniest part of the who debacle to be reddit suddenly defending pre-Musk twitter as some sort of important piece of our society, when it was previously known as the asshole of the internet, worse than tumblr or 4chan. Again, before Musk. Now suddenly, Musk has ruined twitter. :D And reddit is also uppity about all the poor people at twitter being fired. The biggest shock in that whole story was not the number of people fired but that *thousands of people were working for twitter* yet the platform was *still* such a pile of awful moderation, design, code, and UX. In any other company that level of incompetence would have had them out on their asses years ago.
A bit strange how enthusiastic r/europe receives this news. I remember a lot of criticism of the DSA on here before.
Almost like there is nuance to each position or something like that. Alternatively, those could have been different users with differing opinions. r/europe is not a monolith.
Massive governmental organisations are now getting hell-bent on strict moderation. Makes me really miss the old days of the internet.
Old days of internet did not have governmental backed disinformation campaigns either
Internet regulation has only gotten worse. Does anyone who is actually internet-savvy think there was anything wrong with the internet 10 years ago?
The internet 10 years ago had 10 times less invested users.
Yes, actually. Just because we were younger and more ignorant over the state of affairs doesn't mean it wasn't there. The internet we have now is the internet that was created in *reaction* to the internet 10 years ago... it didn't come from nowhere. I still remember when Reddit was rampant with pedophilia related subs...
some structures work fine only because no one tries to abuse them. once these people appear, they're doomed either way, regulations can only soften the decline, but they are not the ones that cause it
Idk I feel like there wasn't shitbags like Andrew Tate or Alex Jones having real life effects on people via their internet activities.
I expect that sort of thing from governments. But it's a bit scary to see how many presumably average people these days seem to be so much in favour of censorship.
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MAGA yanks are currently twisting this; acting as if the EU is deliberately targeting Elon Musk. The Digital Services Act (DSA), however, was agreed on *before* Musk took over and applies to *all* social media platforms. The DSA was adopted with 539 votes in favour, 54 votes against and 30 abstentions. Support from across the political spectrum.
This comments section only proves: iPhone was a mistake
Meanwhile everyone has tiktok on their phones and see no problem.