Europe's big tech bill is coming to fruition
&gt; The internet is about to get a lot safer<p>Uh-oh. When I hear that, I&#x27;m assuming that it will:<p>1. Going to be more tightly controlled<p>2. Going to be more strongly censored<p>3. Probably not going to be actually safer for people like me.<p>&gt; This article is from The Technocrat<p>Is it now?... that does not bode well.<p>&gt; If you use Google, Instagram, Wikipedia, or YouTube<p>Oh, you mean _that_ Internet. 4 sites which get a huge part of the traffic. Well, the first, second and fourth of these are quite unsafe: They surveil your activities for commercial manipulation purposes and also let the US (and maybe other) governments get some of that information.<p>As for Wikipedia, its editorial&#x2F;censorship&#x2F;moderation policies are variegated and complex, and while I&#x27;m not well-read about that, it does seem that they have at least some sort of a mainstream-politics bias.<p>&gt; The DSA will require these companies to assess risks on their platforms, like the likelihood of illegal content<p>Lots of things can be illegal, especially in world states with more restrictive laws. That doesn&#x27;t sound very safe.<p>&gt; The DSA will require these companies to assess risks on their platforms, like ... election manipulation,<p>Ah, now we&#x27;re getting somewhere. So this is formalizing the drumming-up-hysteria-about-Russia shenanigans we&#x27;ve seen in recent years. Once there were witches and gremlins and leprechauns who caused mischief, now it&#x27;s those evil Russian hackers, which were sent by evil Putin, since why not, right? Just recently we read in the Twitter files how the twitter people were pressured by the US government to come up with supposed Russian meddling, and they were panicking since there wasn&#x27;t any, so they had to cook something up.<p>&gt; Perhaps most important, the DSA requires that companies significantly increase transparency<p>That&#x27;s good, but about what?<p>&gt; ...  through reporting obligations for “terms of service”<p>Uh, that&#x27;s not so interesting. Plus, they still get to have outrageous &quot;terms of service&quot;. Those things shouldn&#x27;t be enforceable anyway, it&#x27;s not like you can seriously negotiate those terms.<p>&gt; hate speech, misinformation, and violence.<p>And who decides which information is valid and which isn&#x27;t? Also, what if  governments engages in misinformation or violence, as they often do? I&#x27;m pretty sure it&#x27;s going to be the &quot;information we don&#x27;t like&quot;, which is sometimes misinformation, and sometimes - not.<p>&gt; You will be able to participate in content moderation decisions that companies make and formally contest them<p>Such platforms should probably just be recognized as semi-public so that commercial companies can&#x27;t censor them without a court order.<p>, you&#x27;re going to start noticing changes to content moderation, transparency, and safety features on those sites over the next six months.