Children's Health Defense
By Robert Kogon
Note that X, rebranded as a “free speech platform,” provides information on platform users to the governments of the European Union (EU) member states in connection with not just illegal speech — and, yes, national legislation in EU countries includes many “speech crimes” — but also legal speech that is deemed “harmful.”
This is the real innovation involved in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA): It creates an obligation for platforms to take action in the form of “content moderation” against not just illegal content, but also ostensibly harmful content such as “disinformation.”
Note that in the period covered in X’s latest “DSA Transparency Report” to the EU on its “content moderation” efforts, nearly 90% of such requests for information on the purveyors of ostensibly “illegal or harmful speech” came from just one country: Germany.
See the chart below.
Note that X also takes action against posts or accounts for “illegal or harmful speech” that is reported to it by EU member states or the European Commission.
Such action may involve deletion or geo-blocking (“withholding”) of content. But, as the “enforcement options” linked in the report make clear, it can also involve various forms of “visibility filtering” or restricting engagement — “by our Freedom of Speech, Not Reach enforcement philosophy,” as the report puts it.
Here again, Germany is top of the table, having submitted 42% of all the reports to X on “illegal or harmful speech” and nearly 50% of the reports from member states.
See the chart below. Germany submitted nearly twice as many reports as any other member state — France finished a distant second — and over 10 times more reports than comparably-sized Italy. The European Commission submitted around 15% of the reports…
READ FULL ARTICLE HERE… (childrenshealthdefense.org)
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