European Commission: social networks can no longer make key decisions alone

Parliamentarians are concerned about blocking Donald Trump's accounts.

The European Commission said that this is “no longer acceptable” for platform giants of social networks to make key decisions to delete the online content alone.

“In our opinion, this is more unacceptable for the platforms to make some key decisions on their own, without any supervision, accountability, dialogue or transparency,” said Prabhat Agaghat, head of the DG Connect of the European Commission.

According to him, freedom of expression of opinions is a key value in this matter. He also noted that the Law “On Digital Services” of the EU (Digital Services Act (DSA) is trying to build a balance between the effective removal of content and the preservation of freedom of expression on the Internet.

“... we are talking about the ban on blocking the accounts of some key persons, because freedom of speech is one of the basic freedoms of the European Union citizens,” said Grigory Bakunov, director of technology for the technology of Yandex. - One thing surprises me, and for a long time a division into key and non -key users has appeared on our Internet? What is this segregation? "

Previously, a number of largest Internet services blocked Donald Trump's accounts, and Appendix stores removed Parler social network, which was popular with his supporters. As a reason, they called Trump's incitement to violence on the eve of the cruel unrest that fell on the Capitol Hill of Washington last week.

The incident caused concern in the European Parliament: IT giants, according to deputies, demonstrated disproportionately greater power over freedom of speech on the Internet.

“The fact that such platforms as Twitter and Facebook decide who can speak is dangerous,” said the European Parliament deputy Kim Van Sparrent. “We must transfer power over the freedom of expression from private companies back into the hands of democratic institutions.”

Nevertheless, the European commission did not introduce more harsh measures in the DSA to crush the advertising business models of giants of social networks. Agarval noted that the introduction of more stringent rules for advertising income would not limit their ability to dissolve malicious information. “An advertising business model can strengthen and accelerate the viral distribution of content. But, in our opinion, this is the insufficient reason for her completely, ”he said.

Recall, DSA assumes that IT giants will have to prevent abuse of their systems, potentially used online advertising and algorithms of content recommendations to users. Corporations that cannot limit the spread of illegal content will receive large fines. With regard to platforms covering more than 10% of the EU or 25 million users (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube), the European Commission will have direct authority to supervision, since such platforms are “considered systemic by nature”. In the most serious cases, EC will be able to impose fines of up to 6% of the company's global turnover.