> At the heart of this case was the enforcement of a new legal provision under the DSA: the right to access research data (Article 40(12) DSA). This provision requires large online platforms to provide researchers with immediate access to publicly available data on their platforms in order to assess systemic risks. The lawsuit has also helped clarify open legal questions regarding the judicial enforceability of this right in Germany. [0]
Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
Also, maybe this linked article would be a better one that the one from Reuters.
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
Because the language I'm reading here doesn't mean anything.
"Researcher" can mean anything. In the US we see DOGE people rifling through government finance records, pipelining the data to the executive, for targeting of specific political interests. "Research" means whatever the present democratically elected regime wants it to mean.
"Systemic risk" can mean anything. Last month in the US, millions of "undocumented" people were walking around relatively unconcerned. This month they're all a "systemic risk" and being actively hunted down for deportation or worse.
Maybe tomorrow you become a "systemic risk," and whomever is in elected office at that time designates and funds some academics to "research" all your X/Facebook/Mastodon/whatever activity. There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?
So it's not the least bit difficult to understand why members of a supposed democracy might think this isn't a power "researchers" should have. It's only a problem for the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.
The data is publicly available. Researchers could get it by scraping, this law says that companies must provide more convenient ways to access that public data.
This has fuck all to do with government overreach or access to private data.
We're talking about publicly available data. If Elon has access to this data, I'd argue that giving it access to German research, and even AfD which Musk supports, won't make it any worse.
As much as I would like to and as easy as it is to agree with you, it's about the public data, not the researcher or research.
And systemic risk doesn't mean anything. It means what you continue to describe: context.
> a power "researchers" should have.
Again. It's about public data. Nobody can or would prohibit counting cars or pedestrians and nobody would try to make it harder than it already is. This applies to platforms like Twitter as well.
> It's only a problem for the the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.
The naïve suppose that exactly those people will govern who want the job, which, judging from their experience, are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education.
> There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?
I think if they'll ever be in a position to do that, they won't give two figs about prior norms and reticence and all this pearl clutching.
Observe the means through which a 49.8% mandate is doing just that in the US.
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
The limit to "researchers" and "systemic risk" opens the door to cherry-picking the results - use a microscope to find issues when elections don't go your way, turn a blind eye when they do. The law is good (far better than not having it), but should be expanded, making the data available to everyone.
Good to see the EU recognizing there are innocuous things that when scaled to X- or Facebook- size produce systemic risks.
And if you want to be a platform that large, well, you owe additional societal responsibilities that your smaller competitors don't have to worry about (yet).
If that is the case, having researchers perform analysis makes it possible to identify that risk and that is yet another reason to make sure that public data is not obscured.
In a way, this research would either prove or disprove your theory.
Researchers have exactly the same right to this data as X has to accessing the German market. If they want to make money, they play by the rules chosen by the people of that country. They are free to not sell their services if they don't like the deal offered.
Because that is what is democratically voted for? If the people (or the representatives they voted for) say that society having access to that data is what society wants, then the company can either provide that data, or have it taken from them.
There should not be a scenario where a company "beats" society.
This law is not about arbitrary companies, but about large social networks affecting millions of people. Requiring a certain transparency from these seems justified.
There are vanishingly few private companies of significant size. For example in the US most businesses with more than a few owners are government chartered corporations, LLCs, and the like. This gets them government granted liability shields, and so it makes sense for them to be proactively regulated to prevent causing foreseeable harm that they might otherwise escape responsibility for.
The text actually says "very large online platform" which is defined in 33(1):
> This Section shall apply to online platforms and online search engines which have a number of average monthly active recipients of the service in the Union equal to or higher than 45 million, and which are designated as very large online platforms or very large online search engines pursuant to paragraph 4.
Paragraph 4 just reiterates that. Paragraph 3 gives scope for adjustment:
> In such a case, it shall adjust the number so that it corresponds to 10 % of the Union’s population in the year in which it adopts the delegated act, rounded up or down to allow the number to be expressed in millions.
Basically "very large" -> 10% of the EU population. I'm not a lawyer, though; there may well be specific legal shenanigans going on but at first blush, it doesn't look like it.
> Last, but probably the main thing that triggers me is that it "requires" somebody do some work for free. Why the fuck any company or person must do any work, that it doesn't deem necessary, to satisfy the curiosity of some "researchers"?
In democratic countries, there are many instances where you are required to do work for free to remain in business. You have to maintain accounts, records, licenses, authorisations, inspections, etc, depending on your business. This is a necessary part of engaging with the State in which you operate.
The Twitter API used to be extremely open way back in the day. This proved to be a boon for all kinds of social (and not so social) science research. In my mind, this was also one of the reasons for Twitter early growth as it made it trivial to build apps that interact with it. Over the years, the API got increasingly closed, making research in this area extremely difficult.
On the plus side, a decision like this can bring back the good old days of easy access for researchers. The down side, of course, is that it's almost impossible to define "researcher" in a way that prevents Cambridge Analytica like abuses from occurring again (not that the current owner is particularly interested in preventing them)
I was under the impression that the Cambridge Analytica situation was largely about 1: private data, 2: exclusive access to that private data, and 3: the secrecy about that data-sharing even happening in the first place.
I think none of those things are happening here, do you agree with that?
Publicly known public access to public information and facebook secretly selling private information to private company are massively far from each other.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that the Mueller report was a thing and this type of research is fairly critical in ensuring there’s no foul play in elections from foreign interests.
Foreign interests are always interfering in US elections (and everyone else's too); that's the price of being a democracy. It's a tale as old as democracy itself. There are plenty of other notable examples in US history, but it's a constant, and efforts obviously only intensified in the post-war era as America became more important to everyone else.
The example in 2016 of one particular country's actions is more about what the establishment chose to report for political reasons, although obviously there is some novelty in the way influence efforts are changing over time to adapt to new technologies.
It is basically impossible to have anonymized social media data that cannot be deanonymized which is also useful for anything but a very narrow kind of research.
That's not at all true. This has nothing to do with the government. It's a court ruling on a law passed by parliament. In no way was the opinion/side of government at play here.
I think you're interpreting that that's the only outcome?
In Germany it's much harder to get money via lawsuit (vs the US), so that's kinda normal. If Twitter doesn't comply, the Staatsanwaltschaft will open a new lawsuit which will have a much bigger fine.
but yeah - 6k lawyers fee sounds like a joke, I guess it was a slam dunk case with very little time on the clock for the lawyers.
Not really.
6k euros are only for taking court's time and flat-rate lawyers salary.
(Imagine, in Europe average person may sue tech giants!)
If x will not comply it will be forced, maybe even by some sort of receivership.
The big thing is that x may be sued in German court.
> The big thing is that x may be sued in German court.
Let's say German court rules that X cannot operate in Germany. X decides to shut down any brick&mortar locations in Germany including any data centers located in Germany, but they do not stop Germans from accessing a public web service located outside Germany. What's the point? Will they then go after Germans continuing to use X?
In other words, a German court ruling against a non-German company can only go so far. However, IANAL, so willing to learn how a German court ruling would be anything other than a nuisance to a non-German company
"Other platforms have granted us access to systematically track public debates on their platforms, but X has refused to do so," said DRI's Michael Meyer-Resende in a statement on Wednesday, announcing the lawsuit.
Thinking about the probable next steps made me remember that time Germany temporarily prohibited wikipedia.de from pointing to the actual Wikipedia when an article there said that the German politician Lutz Heilmann had been a full-time Stasi (the infamous and insanely brutal secret police) employee in the former DDR.
Interesting that a single cranky ex-Stasi employee can block Wikipedia for all of Germany because he's mad that Wikipedia states the proven fact that he is a former Stasi employee.
Do German courts not review the facts before granting injunctions?
As a rule short term injunctions (in this case 2 days) have minimal fact checking.
That’s kind of the inherent tradeoff for courts being able to make really rapid decisions. It’s useful if say someone’s house was going to be destroyed tomorrow you can’t exactly do a lot of fact checking or the damage will have been done, but it means a lot of seemingly silly things happen.
The goal is prevent harm while doing basic fact checking in preparation for some longer review, and again 2 days later the court didn’t extend the injunction after review.
Many of the largest US companies has local branches in Europe, and twitter is no exception here. In this case they have a branch office in Berlin. Im not a lawyer so Im not sure about the exact details, but if there is local presence then they are subject to the laws of that country like any other company, and enforcement should be similar.
He's not subject to any law that I can see. Hence my question, what will EU courts do here? Elon does not care what any courts or governments have told him so far. In the end I think he will threaten something with his German factories and everyone will back down. He's not going to get arrested or anything.
I mean, it's great to get some stuff on the record (and as a German myself I see our courts as one of the stronger checks on power in general, they've been imperfect but overall pretty reliable).
But I'm not sure what the researchers are trying to find that's not already in plain sight. By now it's pretty clear that the network is actively driving discourse in one specific direction. And with Musk's involvement in the US admin, it's even more officially a non-friendly foreign actor than tiktok is.
> By now it's pretty clear that the network is actively driving discourse in one specific direction.
Research is exactly about not just taking a look and declaring something "pretty clear". Also what "a direction" is not clear, or the dynamics of what affects the direction etc.
2. Musk, despite being the wealthiest person on earth and running companies that are genuinely fascinating, has nonetheless—against overwhelming odds—been considered a loser.
3. Because of (2) and his fragile ego (part of the reason he was widely considered a loser in the pre-Musk dominant circles) he went hard to the right. Petty grievances, anti-free speech, “burn it down”, etc.
4. Twitter made changes under Musk that compensated large accounts based on the number of views or engagements.
Effectively a rev share for ad spend
5. Because Musk can massively amplify content and has a fragile ego, aligning yourself with Musk’s pet issues directly affects income for influencers. Accounts in the other direction can be demonetized and deprioritized on feeds.
This has led to large accounts, in the run up to the election, being very vocally trump even when they’ve had publicly leftist leanings in the past. It wasn’t a shift in policy positions. It was a shift to ragebait and memes that were more likely to get Elon’s attention and retweets.
So it is both pretty clear and a result of active decisions in one specific direction. We don’t need a multi-year quintuple blind study by esteemed Ivy League research fellows to do the basic observation and deduction of the situation.
Non-friendly meaning not single sided in favor of your preferred political orientation. As a US citizen I find the discourse on X to be nowhere near as directed compared to platforms such as reddit or bsky- I am sure you are deeply concerned about that issue as well, even though you left it unsaid
Elon's proclamation of far-right ideas is pretty obvious, but Twitter as a platform isn't Elon.
It shouldn't be too hard to find evidence of a more direct link from Twitter itself given the general vibe there, but until there's concrete proof there's nothing much people and countries can do.
Before foreign influence laws can be applied, you need proof. Without proof, Twitter could sue governments and make a hefty additional profit. Lack of quality research has previously gotten Intel off the hook for their illegal dealings, costing the EU half a billion in interest once the dust settled.
We need either cold, hard facts or more vague laws to pull off something like a TikTok ban in the EU.
While there is right wing angle into this, I feel it might be just because Twitter does not want spend extra resources on handling government requests. Twitter is making losses, so let's not increase cost.
Into the 1920s and early 1930s, Germany seems to have been a/the center of research, culture, etc. The rise of the Nazis shut down research that conflicted with their political goals and researchers left for free countries, especially the US. The US, perhaps the only wealthy place on earth after WWII - it devastated Europe - has been the center of research and culture since then.
Now in the US, right-wing powers have campaigned to shut down disinformation research, often via lawfare and apparently via influence on major universities. Also, the Trump administration has made clear it is against much scientific research, especially when results conflict with political goals, and has already interfered in significant ways with research (and also culture). I think the Trump administration would agree with that description.
There's no war yet that will devastate the US economically, but the Trump administration is willing to risk that. Even without a war, it's not hard to imagine disinformation researchers moving to Europe now, and also scientists and also artists generally. Again, I think the Trump administration would endorse that.
I still remember the time before the Internet, I can assure you the world was full of disinformation and misinformation, I believe way more than today.
Everywhere, in schools, in cafes, the bus stop people would tell you crazy things and people would argue about whether it is true or not.
If you really wanted to settle it you would need to find an encyclopedia, but most of the time you would need to go to a public library and find a book or go through microfilms for hours, make a copy and show it to everybody to fight disinformation.
Depending on the country, the government had a tight or tighter control on what was in that library.
Some country would also tightly control what was said in a bar or cafe like in East Germany.
So thinking we are in a life threatening misinformation epidemic is just false if you compare to just a few decades ago.
Yes, it was harder to prove or disprove a claim when information was not as readily accessible as it is today. For the same reason, the likelihood of even becoming aware of any "fringe theories" without digital communication was much lower. So, overall I would say they are more pervasive today.
Yeah I agree. Its much easier to disseminate false information in the digital age, because if you have the means, you can drown out the true information in a way that's much harder to detect. I don't think this is an oranges to oranges comparison.
It would be interesting to measure it, but look at things like vaccination rates, which have gone down, and the willingness to support political candidates and news sources who embrace disinformation, which has gone way up - whatever you think of Trump and the modern GOP, they are much different than their predecessors. Maybe now people are more convinced of disnformation or otherwise willing to act on it.
"not as easily accessible information" and "disinformation" are two different things
> Everywhere, in schools, in cafes, the bus stop people would tell you crazy things
Where and when is this supposed to be?
Even taking that at face value, at MOST every living person could be talking about one crazy thing at the same time, and then there would be nobody to listen. Or half of them could talk, the other half would listen. With the internet and bots, there is no upper limit. For every person, there can be 50 trillion bots chirping at them.
> So thinking we are in a life threatening misinformation epidemic is just false if you compare to just a few decades ago.
Is this supposed to be an argument against researching it over taking your word for a world where everybody was telling everybody else crazy things all the time? If there is no problem, then all the less reason to be coy with the data, right?
Seems good that people would discuss and make value judgements on said policy. Europeans seem to have no trouble loudly voicing their opinion on American law, and I don't see Americans getting thin skin about it.
Why should we operate under the assumption any policy implemented by any politician (German or otherwise) is inherently good by default? Specifically in the case of Germany, we have many recent and historical examples of not great ideas being implemented...
Might be good to be willing to question these things instead of retorting "THE LAW IS THE LAW" and bowing to the overlords with the rubber stamps, no?
People here aren't criticizing the policy, but the very idea that Germany is allowed to make said policy. Americans in this thread are absolutely getting thin skin about the idea that a US company has to follow German laws.
> Why should we operate under the assumption any policy implemented by any politician (German or otherwise) is inherently good by default?
That's not loudly voicing an opinion. Nobody said you should "operate under the assumption". If you have a criticism to make, make it.
> Specifically in the case of Germany, we have many recent and historical examples of not great ideas being implemented...
And we have many recent and historical examples of Germany taking human rights more seriously after WW2 than people who haven't had their whole continent ravaged by war in living memory can even fathom. That you talk of "overlords with rubber stamps" to project the ambition for private corporations to have ZERO accountability just shows me that that you live on a wholly other planet than Germans do, and that you're playing to an American audience. These laws aren't there to please non-German companies, they are here to protect Germans.
> Europeans seem to have no trouble loudly voicing their opinion on American law, and I don't see Americans getting thin skin about it.
That's not my experience. Try arguing in favor of European hate speech laws, healthcare, consumer protection regulations, rent control, social democracy or anything else at odds with libertarianism and you'll get heavily downvoted both here and on US-centric subreddits.
If there is one thing very common among Americans, it is the belief of "American exceptionalism" despite more than enough evidence that whatever Americans are doing is just outright Not Working At F...ing All.
In the past the US government stepped in multiple times to protect the interests of big tech against European legislation.
I guess people became used to assuming non American laws would not matter and I cannot blame them, it really looked like that.
The interesting point about trump is, that he is burning lots of “threat potential”: If I announce tariffs and withdrawal of military cooperation anyways I run out of threats at some point.
I have yet to see anyone argue that twitter has a right to operate in Germany in defiance of German laws. I have seen people in other threads argue that, rather than comply with Chinese laws, american companies should cease to to business in China.
Righteously, the German government has the right to enforce the law and Elon will certainly now not like this government even more. That gives him more reasons to team up with the right wing to have his way in the world's third largest economy so he can run the world the way he likes it.
This ruling doesn't have the government as a party. It has nothing to do with the German government. The German judiciary, yes. German plaintiff, yes. But not the government. The law in question is an EU law: https://algorithmic-transparency.ec.europa.eu/news/faqs-dsa-...
TBH, while I would like Twitter to be obligated to provide access to any data to anyone, I don't really understand on what grounds the decision was made. I mean, I wouldn't ask, if it was an USA court, where it's considered normal that any stupid judge can make any stupid decision, and it is called a precedent and must be respected. But in Germany there are laws, right? At least, theoretically. I mean, I personally don't believe in that, but any court decision is supposed be almost a natural consequence of the existing laws. So what is the law that makes a company obligated to do some work for free and send your data to some "researchers"? Honestly, I just don't like how it sounds, I kinda prefer libertarian anarchy, unrestrained mayhem and total impunity of various Musks to that kind of stuff.
Germany (and the entire EU) are complete hypocrites about data privacy.
“Privacy for me, but not for thee” appears to be the operative principle.
And it’s completely random. Transnational businesses have to expend enormous time and effort complying with privacy, right to be forgotten, data sovereignty, GDPR, etc. and then random courts and bureaucratic agency rulings carve out exceptions wherever they feel like.
I’m not excusing X for failing to respond to a court order, I’m just pointing out that the order itself was ad hoc and inconsistent like many others.
I also don't like this ruling from a moral point of view. I know others may disagree with me, because we obviously all value scientific research here and a lot of us don't really like social media in general, but the fact that you want to research something and that the results of that research will have value to others doesn't entitle you to someone else's services.
I might encourage X to volunteer this data, to the extent that things like privacy can be safe-guarded etc. But force them to with the strong arm of the law? No thanks. There's no rights basis here. We could benefit from the results of the research, for sure, but I don't think anyone has a right to the data other than those who produced it (individual users with respects to their personal data + X itself).
Leaving aside the specifics of this situation and the implementation difficulties, a corporate FOIA where legitimate researchers (and others like journalists) could get reasonable, vetted access to data sounds fantastic. It'd be great to know what criteria your insurance used to determine appropriate rate increases, or the history of food safety failures at the slaughterhouse that produced the meat at the grocery store.
Why would you take a moral stance against that (as opposed to the obvious practical stance against it)?
On the other hand, a business's mere existence doesn't entitle them to somebody else's market. If the people of Germany want to require social media businesses to make this data available to researchers, then that is simply the law of the land. It's really not up for X/Meta/etc to decide the rules of the market, nor do they have a "right" to do business without following said rules.
It would be one thing if the rules themselves were immoral or unreasonable, but I don't think this has anything to do with the rights of social media companies.
It's about being able to factually analyses and judge how various entities try to __publicly__ infer with elections through various means like propaganda posts and or ads.
Giving that there are a lot of indices that X did infer with US elections due to how it tuned itself to maximize the reach and effectiveness of right wing propaganda this is quite an important analysis.
And in difference to the US systematically spreading misinformation and hate speech to rile up people, or enabling/not preventing it as a platform, is illegal. Even highly so (on a constitutional level). Because you know last times it did end with WW2. Also as a fun fact: This and various other aspects of our constitution have been pretty much put in place by the US as a condition to give west Germany independence again after WW2. In general a lot of the German constitution is "lets start with the ideas behind the US constitution but then consider what didn't work out well and make it more prone against hostile somewhat elected governments undermining democracy".
Anyway if X insist in not helping to prevent or even detect/analyze people trying to infer with German elections it's probably time to kick them out of German. Like imagine some German company being suspected to be involved in election inference in the US and refuses to work with the US government to resolve any suspicions and doesn't even bother to pretend to cooperate, especially with the current government they would be banned in a matter of days. So it would be very dump to not do the same when the situation is the other way around.
> Giving that there are a lot of indices that X did infer with US elections due to how it tuned itself to maximize the reach and effectiveness of right wing propaganda this is quite an important analysis.
This superficially reads like the left wing equivalent of the "facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop" conspiracy theory. Are you able to link to any evidence of this?
> The GFF and Democracy Reporting International had argued that X had a duty under European law to provide easily researchable, collated access to information such as post reach, shares and likes - information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts but in practice impossible to access.
What law requires this? That data seems interesting, but it also seems odd to require a private platform to provide it. Is this directly legislated in the EU, or is this some kind of technicality?
It's clearly in the spirit of the law, namely Article 40 section 12 of the EU Digital Services Act:
> Providers of very large online platforms or of very large online search engines shall give access without undue delay to data, including, where technically possible, to real-time data, provided that the data is publicly accessible in their online interface by researchers, including those affiliated to not for profit bodies, organisations and associations, who comply with the conditions set out in paragraph 8, points (b), (c), (d) and (e), and who use the data solely for performing research that contributes to the detection, identification and understanding of systemic risks in the Union pursuant to Article 34(1).
It is called following local laws if you want to operate in the market under the jurisdiction of these local laws. You are free to not comply and then they are free to prevent you from operating. It is the same like individuals visiting/moving to this place. Being private/public company does not grant you immunity.
Why would a nation allow a private US company to run roughshod over their laws to the detriment of their society? Just because some other nations are so abused by corporations that do allow it? What’s the logic behind this?
It’s refreshing to have a president that won’t standby while American companies are routinely harassed by Europeon bureaucrats.
They’re going to find that Europe is much more dependent on access to US markets than vice versa. I would imagine top folks at LVMH and VW have to recognize the perilous course their governments have taken.
> At the heart of this case was the enforcement of a new legal provision under the DSA: the right to access research data (Article 40(12) DSA). This provision requires large online platforms to provide researchers with immediate access to publicly available data on their platforms in order to assess systemic risks. The lawsuit has also helped clarify open legal questions regarding the judicial enforceability of this right in Germany. [0]
Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
Also, maybe this linked article would be a better one that the one from Reuters.
[0] https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU/news/court-orde...
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
Because the language I'm reading here doesn't mean anything.
"Researcher" can mean anything. In the US we see DOGE people rifling through government finance records, pipelining the data to the executive, for targeting of specific political interests. "Research" means whatever the present democratically elected regime wants it to mean.
"Systemic risk" can mean anything. Last month in the US, millions of "undocumented" people were walking around relatively unconcerned. This month they're all a "systemic risk" and being actively hunted down for deportation or worse.
Maybe tomorrow you become a "systemic risk," and whomever is in elected office at that time designates and funds some academics to "research" all your X/Facebook/Mastodon/whatever activity. There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?
So it's not the least bit difficult to understand why members of a supposed democracy might think this isn't a power "researchers" should have. It's only a problem for the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.
The data is publicly available. Researchers could get it by scraping, this law says that companies must provide more convenient ways to access that public data.
This has fuck all to do with government overreach or access to private data.
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We're talking about publicly available data. If Elon has access to this data, I'd argue that giving it access to German research, and even AfD which Musk supports, won't make it any worse.
As much as I would like to and as easy as it is to agree with you, it's about the public data, not the researcher or research.
And systemic risk doesn't mean anything. It means what you continue to describe: context.
> a power "researchers" should have.
Again. It's about public data. Nobody can or would prohibit counting cars or pedestrians and nobody would try to make it harder than it already is. This applies to platforms like Twitter as well.
> It's only a problem for the the naïve, who suppose the future is governed by only the right people.
The naïve suppose that exactly those people will govern who want the job, which, judging from their experience, are neither engineers, nor hackers, coders, scientists or scientifically literate people and definitely nobody who was ever concerned with their own education.
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All the words you deemed imprecise are explicitly defined at length in the relevant act.
Including a multistep application precess to be recognized as a vetted researcher.
> There is a non-zero possibility in Germany that AfD will one day get to designate what "research" means and what the "systemic risks" are. How does that sound?
I think if they'll ever be in a position to do that, they won't give two figs about prior norms and reticence and all this pearl clutching.
Observe the means through which a 49.8% mandate is doing just that in the US.
Could they use this to get at X data to train LLMs?
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
The limit to "researchers" and "systemic risk" opens the door to cherry-picking the results - use a microscope to find issues when elections don't go your way, turn a blind eye when they do. The law is good (far better than not having it), but should be expanded, making the data available to everyone.
> systemic risks
Is the key phrase here.
Good to see the EU recognizing there are innocuous things that when scaled to X- or Facebook- size produce systemic risks.
And if you want to be a platform that large, well, you owe additional societal responsibilities that your smaller competitors don't have to worry about (yet).
One possible counterargument is that bad actors could use the data to improve their spamming or astroturfing methods.
Security by obscurity?
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It's public data already.
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They bought the place already.
If that is the case, having researchers perform analysis makes it possible to identify that risk and that is yet another reason to make sure that public data is not obscured.
In a way, this research would either prove or disprove your theory.
Counterargument it is, but its pretty weak considering benefits to free society
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I mean ... have you been on X recently? The bad actors don't need any help.
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> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
It seems a sizable number of people living in democracies would rather be living in non-democracies.
> Why would anyone living in a democracy be against this?
In normal democracies searching through records require a court order.
Through private/personal records. This is not the case here.
personally i think it is akin to slavery when compelling people to take certain behaviors.
corporations aren't people, but i could see some people applying that argument in this case.
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Researchers have exactly the same right to this data as X has to accessing the German market. If they want to make money, they play by the rules chosen by the people of that country. They are free to not sell their services if they don't like the deal offered.
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Because that is what is democratically voted for? If the people (or the representatives they voted for) say that society having access to that data is what society wants, then the company can either provide that data, or have it taken from them.
There should not be a scenario where a company "beats" society.
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> government has any right to data owned by a private company
Another way to look at it is that the people have a right to the data.
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The scope is limited to electoral debates. It's in the interest of the citizens.
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This law is not about arbitrary companies, but about large social networks affecting millions of people. Requiring a certain transparency from these seems justified.
Is such data owned by the platform in EU?
There are vanishingly few private companies of significant size. For example in the US most businesses with more than a few owners are government chartered corporations, LLCs, and the like. This gets them government granted liability shields, and so it makes sense for them to be proactively regulated to prevent causing foreseeable harm that they might otherwise escape responsibility for.
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> What is a large online platform?
The text actually says "very large online platform" which is defined in 33(1):
> This Section shall apply to online platforms and online search engines which have a number of average monthly active recipients of the service in the Union equal to or higher than 45 million, and which are designated as very large online platforms or very large online search engines pursuant to paragraph 4.
Paragraph 4 just reiterates that. Paragraph 3 gives scope for adjustment:
> In such a case, it shall adjust the number so that it corresponds to 10 % of the Union’s population in the year in which it adopts the delegated act, rounded up or down to allow the number to be expressed in millions.
Basically "very large" -> 10% of the EU population. I'm not a lawyer, though; there may well be specific legal shenanigans going on but at first blush, it doesn't look like it.
>If it's publicly available, you don't need to provide any access to it, it's available.
The data may be publicly available, but there may be anti-scraping measures.
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> Last, but probably the main thing that triggers me is that it "requires" somebody do some work for free. Why the fuck any company or person must do any work, that it doesn't deem necessary, to satisfy the curiosity of some "researchers"?
In democratic countries, there are many instances where you are required to do work for free to remain in business. You have to maintain accounts, records, licenses, authorisations, inspections, etc, depending on your business. This is a necessary part of engaging with the State in which you operate.
Let me chime in quickly, from the perspective of someone who worked for a few years on Twitter data (see https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rtKaL18AAAAJ&hl=en...).
The Twitter API used to be extremely open way back in the day. This proved to be a boon for all kinds of social (and not so social) science research. In my mind, this was also one of the reasons for Twitter early growth as it made it trivial to build apps that interact with it. Over the years, the API got increasingly closed, making research in this area extremely difficult.
On the plus side, a decision like this can bring back the good old days of easy access for researchers. The down side, of course, is that it's almost impossible to define "researcher" in a way that prevents Cambridge Analytica like abuses from occurring again (not that the current owner is particularly interested in preventing them)
I was under the impression that the Cambridge Analytica situation was largely about 1: private data, 2: exclusive access to that private data, and 3: the secrecy about that data-sharing even happening in the first place.
I think none of those things are happening here, do you agree with that?
Publicly known public access to public information and facebook secretly selling private information to private company are massively far from each other.
Everyone seems to be forgetting that the Mueller report was a thing and this type of research is fairly critical in ensuring there’s no foul play in elections from foreign interests.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
Foreign interests are always interfering in US elections (and everyone else's too); that's the price of being a democracy. It's a tale as old as democracy itself. There are plenty of other notable examples in US history, but it's a constant, and efforts obviously only intensified in the post-war era as America became more important to everyone else.
The example in 2016 of one particular country's actions is more about what the establishment chose to report for political reasons, although obviously there is some novelty in the way influence efforts are changing over time to adapt to new technologies.
I think you’re brushing under the rug just how easy these efforts have become through modern social media platforms.
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I thought we decided giving researchers access to social network data was a bad thing after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
There is always a conflict, but only with access to the data you can uncover CA-style usage of the data.
Cambridge analytica had all data associated with real names, and it included all your likes and even some people's private messaging.
Yes, anonymized research data is very different.
It is basically impossible to have anonymized social media data that cannot be deanonymized which is also useful for anything but a very narrow kind of research.
They weren't real researchers. More like data brokers.
So who is going to decide who is a "real" researcher?
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These researchers are on the side of the government.
That's not at all true. This has nothing to do with the government. It's a court ruling on a law passed by parliament. In no way was the opinion/side of government at play here.
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Even worse.
From TFA:
This looks like a Pyrrhic victory to me.
That's the cost of the lawyers. If they did cost only 6.000 euros, that's actually a victory for the little man.
I think you're interpreting that that's the only outcome?
In Germany it's much harder to get money via lawsuit (vs the US), so that's kinda normal. If Twitter doesn't comply, the Staatsanwaltschaft will open a new lawsuit which will have a much bigger fine.
but yeah - 6k lawyers fee sounds like a joke, I guess it was a slam dunk case with very little time on the clock for the lawyers.
They just need to delay until after the elections and then pay the fine.
No, not Staatsanwaltschaft (public prosecutor). This is a private suit. Plaintiff can get some sort of injunction next, I presume.
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Not really. 6k euros are only for taking court's time and flat-rate lawyers salary. (Imagine, in Europe average person may sue tech giants!) If x will not comply it will be forced, maybe even by some sort of receivership. The big thing is that x may be sued in German court.
> The big thing is that x may be sued in German court.
Let's say German court rules that X cannot operate in Germany. X decides to shut down any brick&mortar locations in Germany including any data centers located in Germany, but they do not stop Germans from accessing a public web service located outside Germany. What's the point? Will they then go after Germans continuing to use X?
In other words, a German court ruling against a non-German company can only go so far. However, IANAL, so willing to learn how a German court ruling would be anything other than a nuisance to a non-German company
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"Other platforms have granted us access to systematically track public debates on their platforms, but X has refused to do so," said DRI's Michael Meyer-Resende in a statement on Wednesday, announcing the lawsuit.
What others share just info for free?
> What others share just info for free?
Given it's a legal obligation? The ones whose boss isn't personally interfering with a foreign election.
Where can we download that data you're referring to?
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Facebook has its Researcher Platform for vetted academics: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/researcher-platform/
Perhaps there are fees involved, perhaps not, but yes, they do election monitoring on other services:
https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/global/collection?...
Here's the press release TFA is based on:
https://democracy-reporting.org/en/office/EU/news/court-orde...
There is also the Meta Content Library and API (https://transparency.meta.com/en-gb/researchtools/meta-conte...) although that seems to contain only a subset of the data.
Here are FAQs on the EU law that was applied here: https://algorithmic-transparency.ec.europa.eu/news/faqs-dsa-...
Thinking about the probable next steps made me remember that time Germany temporarily prohibited wikipedia.de from pointing to the actual Wikipedia when an article there said that the German politician Lutz Heilmann had been a full-time Stasi (the infamous and insanely brutal secret police) employee in the former DDR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia#German...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutz_Heilmann
Interesting that a single cranky ex-Stasi employee can block Wikipedia for all of Germany because he's mad that Wikipedia states the proven fact that he is a former Stasi employee.
Do German courts not review the facts before granting injunctions?
As a rule short term injunctions (in this case 2 days) have minimal fact checking.
That’s kind of the inherent tradeoff for courts being able to make really rapid decisions. It’s useful if say someone’s house was going to be destroyed tomorrow you can’t exactly do a lot of fact checking or the damage will have been done, but it means a lot of seemingly silly things happen.
The goal is prevent harm while doing basic fact checking in preparation for some longer review, and again 2 days later the court didn’t extend the injunction after review.
In many legal jurisdictions, something being true does not necessarily make it non-defamatory. Don't know if that's the case in Germany.
I don't agree, but it's a legal reality.
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That was in 2008. The block lasted 2 days (https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/lawmaker-apologize...).
That’s still an eternity for such a valuable resource.
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How is Germany going to enforce this? President Musk doesn't seem to be subject to any laws to me.
Many of the largest US companies has local branches in Europe, and twitter is no exception here. In this case they have a branch office in Berlin. Im not a lawyer so Im not sure about the exact details, but if there is local presence then they are subject to the laws of that country like any other company, and enforcement should be similar.
Should be similar but I argue Elon is a special case of someone who never faces consequences after court decisions.
how about "in no way"?
sigh- I wish we could go back to the heady days of the Biden presidency when everyone knew who had their hands on the wheel
It was the person inside the Easter Bunny costume, right?
Sadly the wheel was not attached to the car. But we knew who was holding it!
He's not subject to your laws, the EU isn't a state of your union.
He's not subject to any law that I can see. Hence my question, what will EU courts do here? Elon does not care what any courts or governments have told him so far. In the end I think he will threaten something with his German factories and everyone will back down. He's not going to get arrested or anything.
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After feeding the bear now threatning us with nuclear annihilation, Germany does not have any legitimacy when it comes to policing critical voices
I mean, it's great to get some stuff on the record (and as a German myself I see our courts as one of the stronger checks on power in general, they've been imperfect but overall pretty reliable).
But I'm not sure what the researchers are trying to find that's not already in plain sight. By now it's pretty clear that the network is actively driving discourse in one specific direction. And with Musk's involvement in the US admin, it's even more officially a non-friendly foreign actor than tiktok is.
> By now it's pretty clear that the network is actively driving discourse in one specific direction.
Research is exactly about not just taking a look and declaring something "pretty clear". Also what "a direction" is not clear, or the dynamics of what affects the direction etc.
It’s pretty clear.
There were a few shifts that happened:
1. Musk bought twitter
2. Musk, despite being the wealthiest person on earth and running companies that are genuinely fascinating, has nonetheless—against overwhelming odds—been considered a loser.
3. Because of (2) and his fragile ego (part of the reason he was widely considered a loser in the pre-Musk dominant circles) he went hard to the right. Petty grievances, anti-free speech, “burn it down”, etc.
4. Twitter made changes under Musk that compensated large accounts based on the number of views or engagements.
Effectively a rev share for ad spend
5. Because Musk can massively amplify content and has a fragile ego, aligning yourself with Musk’s pet issues directly affects income for influencers. Accounts in the other direction can be demonetized and deprioritized on feeds.
This has led to large accounts, in the run up to the election, being very vocally trump even when they’ve had publicly leftist leanings in the past. It wasn’t a shift in policy positions. It was a shift to ragebait and memes that were more likely to get Elon’s attention and retweets.
So it is both pretty clear and a result of active decisions in one specific direction. We don’t need a multi-year quintuple blind study by esteemed Ivy League research fellows to do the basic observation and deduction of the situation.
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Non-friendly meaning not single sided in favor of your preferred political orientation. As a US citizen I find the discourse on X to be nowhere near as directed compared to platforms such as reddit or bsky- I am sure you are deeply concerned about that issue as well, even though you left it unsaid
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Elon's proclamation of far-right ideas is pretty obvious, but Twitter as a platform isn't Elon.
It shouldn't be too hard to find evidence of a more direct link from Twitter itself given the general vibe there, but until there's concrete proof there's nothing much people and countries can do.
Before foreign influence laws can be applied, you need proof. Without proof, Twitter could sue governments and make a hefty additional profit. Lack of quality research has previously gotten Intel off the hook for their illegal dealings, costing the EU half a billion in interest once the dust settled.
We need either cold, hard facts or more vague laws to pull off something like a TikTok ban in the EU.
"By now it's pretty clear that the network is actively driving discourse in one specific direction..."
I don't think this is clear at all.
While there is right wing angle into this, I feel it might be just because Twitter does not want spend extra resources on handling government requests. Twitter is making losses, so let's not increase cost.
Into the 1920s and early 1930s, Germany seems to have been a/the center of research, culture, etc. The rise of the Nazis shut down research that conflicted with their political goals and researchers left for free countries, especially the US. The US, perhaps the only wealthy place on earth after WWII - it devastated Europe - has been the center of research and culture since then.
Now in the US, right-wing powers have campaigned to shut down disinformation research, often via lawfare and apparently via influence on major universities. Also, the Trump administration has made clear it is against much scientific research, especially when results conflict with political goals, and has already interfered in significant ways with research (and also culture). I think the Trump administration would agree with that description.
There's no war yet that will devastate the US economically, but the Trump administration is willing to risk that. Even without a war, it's not hard to imagine disinformation researchers moving to Europe now, and also scientists and also artists generally. Again, I think the Trump administration would endorse that.
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Germany is a federation of states, too.
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Vietnam invigorated the US economy? The twenty year Afghanistan War too?
1920s-1930s Germany was "a/the center of research, culture, etc."?
This is especially rich in the context of a post pedestaling against disinformation.
Could you provide the reasoning for what you are saying? I think it's pretty well-known and non-controversial.
To be more specific, I mean Germany and environs, for what it's worth.
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I still remember the time before the Internet, I can assure you the world was full of disinformation and misinformation, I believe way more than today.
Everywhere, in schools, in cafes, the bus stop people would tell you crazy things and people would argue about whether it is true or not. If you really wanted to settle it you would need to find an encyclopedia, but most of the time you would need to go to a public library and find a book or go through microfilms for hours, make a copy and show it to everybody to fight disinformation.
Depending on the country, the government had a tight or tighter control on what was in that library.
Some country would also tightly control what was said in a bar or cafe like in East Germany.
So thinking we are in a life threatening misinformation epidemic is just false if you compare to just a few decades ago.
Yes, it was harder to prove or disprove a claim when information was not as readily accessible as it is today. For the same reason, the likelihood of even becoming aware of any "fringe theories" without digital communication was much lower. So, overall I would say they are more pervasive today.
Yeah I agree. Its much easier to disseminate false information in the digital age, because if you have the means, you can drown out the true information in a way that's much harder to detect. I don't think this is an oranges to oranges comparison.
Yeah, and remember when some adults (otherwise normal people) argued that they had seen UFO's?
They argued that they had seen a flying object that they were unable to identify? Is there a counter argument to this?
Kind of harmless conspiracy compared to many of the current ones.
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It would be interesting to measure it, but look at things like vaccination rates, which have gone down, and the willingness to support political candidates and news sources who embrace disinformation, which has gone way up - whatever you think of Trump and the modern GOP, they are much different than their predecessors. Maybe now people are more convinced of disnformation or otherwise willing to act on it.
"not as easily accessible information" and "disinformation" are two different things
> Everywhere, in schools, in cafes, the bus stop people would tell you crazy things
Where and when is this supposed to be?
Even taking that at face value, at MOST every living person could be talking about one crazy thing at the same time, and then there would be nobody to listen. Or half of them could talk, the other half would listen. With the internet and bots, there is no upper limit. For every person, there can be 50 trillion bots chirping at them.
> So thinking we are in a life threatening misinformation epidemic is just false if you compare to just a few decades ago.
Is this supposed to be an argument against researching it over taking your word for a world where everybody was telling everybody else crazy things all the time? If there is no problem, then all the less reason to be coy with the data, right?
In this thread: An alarming number of people somehow perplexed by the concept of sovereign nations and local laws.
Seems good that people would discuss and make value judgements on said policy. Europeans seem to have no trouble loudly voicing their opinion on American law, and I don't see Americans getting thin skin about it.
Why should we operate under the assumption any policy implemented by any politician (German or otherwise) is inherently good by default? Specifically in the case of Germany, we have many recent and historical examples of not great ideas being implemented...
Might be good to be willing to question these things instead of retorting "THE LAW IS THE LAW" and bowing to the overlords with the rubber stamps, no?
People here aren't criticizing the policy, but the very idea that Germany is allowed to make said policy. Americans in this thread are absolutely getting thin skin about the idea that a US company has to follow German laws.
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> Why should we operate under the assumption any policy implemented by any politician (German or otherwise) is inherently good by default?
That's not loudly voicing an opinion. Nobody said you should "operate under the assumption". If you have a criticism to make, make it.
> Specifically in the case of Germany, we have many recent and historical examples of not great ideas being implemented...
And we have many recent and historical examples of Germany taking human rights more seriously after WW2 than people who haven't had their whole continent ravaged by war in living memory can even fathom. That you talk of "overlords with rubber stamps" to project the ambition for private corporations to have ZERO accountability just shows me that that you live on a wholly other planet than Germans do, and that you're playing to an American audience. These laws aren't there to please non-German companies, they are here to protect Germans.
I have no objections, but I don't see how it relates to my comment.
> Europeans seem to have no trouble loudly voicing their opinion on American law, and I don't see Americans getting thin skin about it.
That's not my experience. Try arguing in favor of European hate speech laws, healthcare, consumer protection regulations, rent control, social democracy or anything else at odds with libertarianism and you'll get heavily downvoted both here and on US-centric subreddits.
If there is one thing very common among Americans, it is the belief of "American exceptionalism" despite more than enough evidence that whatever Americans are doing is just outright Not Working At F...ing All.
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In the past the US government stepped in multiple times to protect the interests of big tech against European legislation.
I guess people became used to assuming non American laws would not matter and I cannot blame them, it really looked like that.
The interesting point about trump is, that he is burning lots of “threat potential”: If I announce tariffs and withdrawal of military cooperation anyways I run out of threats at some point.
I have yet to see anyone argue that twitter has a right to operate in Germany in defiance of German laws. I have seen people in other threads argue that, rather than comply with Chinese laws, american companies should cease to to business in China.
Welcome to SV/HN. You must allow digital colonists to ruin your society.
Germany is not a sovereign nation.
By most accepted definitions you're wrong. Now go away troll.
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Righteously, the German government has the right to enforce the law and Elon will certainly now not like this government even more. That gives him more reasons to team up with the right wing to have his way in the world's third largest economy so he can run the world the way he likes it.
This ruling doesn't have the government as a party. It has nothing to do with the German government. The German judiciary, yes. German plaintiff, yes. But not the government. The law in question is an EU law: https://algorithmic-transparency.ec.europa.eu/news/faqs-dsa-...
„Genossen, wir müssen alles wissen“ (if you know, what I mean)
There is nothing to know. You want to claim this is "the actual oppression" without making the argument for it, likely because you have none.
TBH, while I would like Twitter to be obligated to provide access to any data to anyone, I don't really understand on what grounds the decision was made. I mean, I wouldn't ask, if it was an USA court, where it's considered normal that any stupid judge can make any stupid decision, and it is called a precedent and must be respected. But in Germany there are laws, right? At least, theoretically. I mean, I personally don't believe in that, but any court decision is supposed be almost a natural consequence of the existing laws. So what is the law that makes a company obligated to do some work for free and send your data to some "researchers"? Honestly, I just don't like how it sounds, I kinda prefer libertarian anarchy, unrestrained mayhem and total impunity of various Musks to that kind of stuff.
> I don't really understand on what grounds the decision was made.
"The lawsuit is based on the Digital Services Act (DSA), which mandates platforms to provide researchers with access to relevant data."
See: https://algorithmic-transparency.ec.europa.eu/news/faqs-dsa-...
It's based on EU law.
Germany (and the entire EU) are complete hypocrites about data privacy.
“Privacy for me, but not for thee” appears to be the operative principle.
And it’s completely random. Transnational businesses have to expend enormous time and effort complying with privacy, right to be forgotten, data sovereignty, GDPR, etc. and then random courts and bureaucratic agency rulings carve out exceptions wherever they feel like.
I’m not excusing X for failing to respond to a court order, I’m just pointing out that the order itself was ad hoc and inconsistent like many others.
I also don't like this ruling from a moral point of view. I know others may disagree with me, because we obviously all value scientific research here and a lot of us don't really like social media in general, but the fact that you want to research something and that the results of that research will have value to others doesn't entitle you to someone else's services.
I might encourage X to volunteer this data, to the extent that things like privacy can be safe-guarded etc. But force them to with the strong arm of the law? No thanks. There's no rights basis here. We could benefit from the results of the research, for sure, but I don't think anyone has a right to the data other than those who produced it (individual users with respects to their personal data + X itself).
Leaving aside the specifics of this situation and the implementation difficulties, a corporate FOIA where legitimate researchers (and others like journalists) could get reasonable, vetted access to data sounds fantastic. It'd be great to know what criteria your insurance used to determine appropriate rate increases, or the history of food safety failures at the slaughterhouse that produced the meat at the grocery store.
Why would you take a moral stance against that (as opposed to the obvious practical stance against it)?
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On the other hand, a business's mere existence doesn't entitle them to somebody else's market. If the people of Germany want to require social media businesses to make this data available to researchers, then that is simply the law of the land. It's really not up for X/Meta/etc to decide the rules of the market, nor do they have a "right" to do business without following said rules.
It would be one thing if the rules themselves were immoral or unreasonable, but I don't think this has anything to do with the rights of social media companies.
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I suspect you’re comparing apples and oranges.
Personal data is not the same thing as anonymised aggregate data.
this has nothing to do with privacy
this isn't about private messages send on X
It's about being able to factually analyses and judge how various entities try to __publicly__ infer with elections through various means like propaganda posts and or ads.
Giving that there are a lot of indices that X did infer with US elections due to how it tuned itself to maximize the reach and effectiveness of right wing propaganda this is quite an important analysis.
And in difference to the US systematically spreading misinformation and hate speech to rile up people, or enabling/not preventing it as a platform, is illegal. Even highly so (on a constitutional level). Because you know last times it did end with WW2. Also as a fun fact: This and various other aspects of our constitution have been pretty much put in place by the US as a condition to give west Germany independence again after WW2. In general a lot of the German constitution is "lets start with the ideas behind the US constitution but then consider what didn't work out well and make it more prone against hostile somewhat elected governments undermining democracy".
Anyway if X insist in not helping to prevent or even detect/analyze people trying to infer with German elections it's probably time to kick them out of German. Like imagine some German company being suspected to be involved in election inference in the US and refuses to work with the US government to resolve any suspicions and doesn't even bother to pretend to cooperate, especially with the current government they would be banned in a matter of days. So it would be very dump to not do the same when the situation is the other way around.
> Giving that there are a lot of indices that X did infer with US elections due to how it tuned itself to maximize the reach and effectiveness of right wing propaganda this is quite an important analysis.
This superficially reads like the left wing equivalent of the "facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop" conspiracy theory. Are you able to link to any evidence of this?
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Article 40 section 12 DSA.
Fine could be up to 6% of the annual income of X and in addition up to 5% of the daily turnover for continued non compliance.
The fact that Mr. Musk already stated that he would like to influence the elections would probably count as aggravating circumstances.
The only question is how fast the bureaucracy can work.
> The GFF and Democracy Reporting International had argued that X had a duty under European law to provide easily researchable, collated access to information such as post reach, shares and likes - information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts but in practice impossible to access.
What law requires this? That data seems interesting, but it also seems odd to require a private platform to provide it. Is this directly legislated in the EU, or is this some kind of technicality?
It's clearly in the spirit of the law, namely Article 40 section 12 of the EU Digital Services Act:
> Providers of very large online platforms or of very large online search engines shall give access without undue delay to data, including, where technically possible, to real-time data, provided that the data is publicly accessible in their online interface by researchers, including those affiliated to not for profit bodies, organisations and associations, who comply with the conditions set out in paragraph 8, points (b), (c), (d) and (e), and who use the data solely for performing research that contributes to the detection, identification and understanding of systemic risks in the Union pursuant to Article 34(1).
See: https://algorithmic-transparency.ec.europa.eu/news/faqs-dsa-...
Why would a private US company be ordered to provide anything to researchers just because others do it? What's the logic behind this?
It is called following local laws if you want to operate in the market under the jurisdiction of these local laws. You are free to not comply and then they are free to prevent you from operating. It is the same like individuals visiting/moving to this place. Being private/public company does not grant you immunity.
So, if X does nothing, will Germany write and enforce laws to demand all ISPs block x.com?
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Doing business in a country means complying to its laws.
The US is/was asking a lot more from the private company TikTok iirc.
We can dislike these laws, but they’re not optional.
No no we only ask questions like this when it's a US company in the spotlight
Why would a nation allow a private US company to run roughshod over their laws to the detriment of their society? Just because some other nations are so abused by corporations that do allow it? What’s the logic behind this?
It’s refreshing to have a president that won’t standby while American companies are routinely harassed by Europeon bureaucrats.
They’re going to find that Europe is much more dependent on access to US markets than vice versa. I would imagine top folks at LVMH and VW have to recognize the perilous course their governments have taken.
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