Social media censorship: a global operation built by the EU
Nazis are alive and well
Nov 4
At the Brownstone Institute, Robert Kogon has written a devastating article on the European Union’s control of social media censorship.
The EU has created a global system of crippling fines it will levy against social media platforms that fail to censor what the EU doesn’t want the public to see.
One MAJOR subject the EU wants to squash is criticism of COVID policy and science, including the destructive effects of the vaccines.
Here is an excerpt from Kogon’s article: “How the EU is Forcing Twitter to Censor (and Musk Can’t Stop It)” (October 7, 2022)
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“Unbeknownst to most Americans…their 1st Amendment rights are being vitiated, namely, by the European Union. There is a financial gun pointed at Twitter. But it is not the Biden administration, but rather the European Commission, under the leadership of Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, that has its finger on the trigger.
The law in question is the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which was passed by the European Parliament last July 5 amidst almost total indifference — in Europe as much as in the United States — despite its momentous and disastrous implications for freedom of speech worldwide.
The DSA gives the European Commission the power to impose fines of up to 6% of global turnover [total worldwide gross revenue] on “very large online platforms or very large online search engines” that it finds to be non-compliant with its censorship requirements. “Very large” is defined as any platform or search engine that has over 45 million users in the EU. Note that while the size criterion is limited to users in the EU, the sanction is based precisely on the company’s global turnover.
[…]
…the “strengthened” [EU] Code of Practice and the passage of the DSA served as a kind of one-two punch, putting “very large online platforms and search engines” — Twitter, Meta/Facebook and Google/YouTube, in particular — on notice about what would be in store for them if they failed to fulfill the EU’s censorship requirements.
[…]
Think about this for a moment. For the last several months, American commentators have been up in arms about occasional, informal contacts between social media companies and the Biden administration, whereas those same companies have been systematically reporting back to the European Commission on their censorship efforts for the last two years now and they will henceforth be part of a permanent task force on “combatting disinformation” — aka censoring — chaired by the European Commission…
It’s no surprise that COVID information is one of the key subjects on which the EU is demanding total control.