Google decides it won't comply with EU fact-checking law
Google decides it won't comply with EU fact-checking law
Google has told the EU that it will not comply with a forthcoming fact-checking law. The company says things are fine as they are.
Fuck Google
Unbelievable 2025 is turning out to be a stellar year
Time for EU to simply ban Google then for non compliance.
Google has told the EU that it will not comply with a forthcoming fact-checking law.
Perfect time to implement sky-high fines for non-compliance.
Google is basically saying the EU couldn't do its own subpar search and they're not brave enough to try.
I hate community notes, it's a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability.
I also hate these big international tech companies. Forget too big to fail, these are too big to change. We are all techno peasants and they are our tech lords
I hate community notes, it's a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability
And it lets certain communities brigade the notes with misinformation/disinformation to try and control the narrative.
Ironically, for authoritarian communist countries that recorded high rate of newly minted billionaires in the past five years, China and Vietnam are doing something right cracking down on billionaires.
Very fair, the persecution of Jack Ma was very interesting. Haven't heard of what happened in Vietnam though?
You shouldn't need to be authoritarian to crack down on these systems though. I really liked what I saw Lena Khan doing in the US, what Brazil did to twitter or what Julie Inman Grant did here in Australia
I hate community notes, it’s a cost free way of fact checking with no accountability.
I don't think it's necessarily bad, but it can be harmful if done on a platform that has a significant skew in its political leanings, because it can then lead to the assumption that posts must be true because they were "fact checked" even if the fact check was actually just one of the 9:1 ratio of users that already believes that one thing.
However, on platforms that have more general, less biased overall userbases, such as YouTube, a community notes system can be helpful, because it directly changes the platform incentives and design.
I like to come at this from the understanding that the way a platform is designed influences how it is used and perceived by users. When you add a like button but not a dislike button, you only incentivize positive fleeting interactions with posts, while relegating stronger negative opinions to the comments, for instance. (see: Twitter)
If a platform integrates community notes, that not only elevates content that had any effort at all made to fact check it (as opposed to none at all) but it also means that, to get a community note, somebody must at least attempt to verify the truth. And if someone does that, then statistically speaking, there's at least a slightly higher likelihood that the truth is made apparent in that community note than if none existed to incentivize someone to fact check in the first place.
Again, this doesn't work in all scenarios, nor is it always a good decision to add depending on a platform's current design and general demographic political leanings, but I do think it can be valuable in some cases. (This also heavily depends on who is allowed access to create the community notes, of course)
I get what you're trying to say, they can incentivise accuracy and they do at least prompt people to be more accurate lest the community holds them to account. But what i don't like is that there is no standard that the notes are held to and there is no accountability if either the original post or the community note are wrong.
I also don't like that the social media publishers are pushing the fact checkers onto the community to be done for free, but at the end of the day they own the community note and can delete it if they don't like it. We are doing their work for them and taking accountability away from them
France's tech sector: "Zis is mon' Chanz to shine!"
I get the sentiment, who doesn’t want to dunk on Google?
But the headline is needlessly inflammatory. There is no law yet; and google essentially is saying please please don’t implement it, it totally doesn’t make sense.
Don’t get me wrong, the EU should still implement it. And once it is law; Google will also comply.
Damn.
Wish the rest of us could just ignore all laws & not face any consequences.
What a fucking joke this entire system is.
They don't have a problem giving someone 100 years for a quarter bag of weed though. For a first time offense.
Oh that was long ago. it's for not having a baby if you're female now. Megacorps run usa and now the worst (which is best for some reason) ceo in the history of man will again be president and continue the clear path to government dismantling
God I hope this happens, it will be absolutely hilarious when the gcp services on which the EU infraestructure for telecommunications, research and development, industry, transportation, banking, agriculture, logistics and health is built up, crashes burning to the ground.
Fine the heck out of them then. If they don't pay the fine ban em. Plenty of alternatives out there. More competition in the search engine market would be better anyways.
Not too big of a fan of banning companies as the hurdles should be decently high... Especially if many people rely on their service but if they won't comply with our jurisdiction long term I see this as the only option as fees can not be order of business to pay
Start criminal proceedings to imprison the leadership responsible for non-compliance. Seize their assets to pay for any fine.
Why do we accept that all solutions to corporate crimes should be fines and kiddie gloves?
Given that we are going full authoritarian fascist now, perhaps the EU should ban Google, given the US tik tok precedent.
What a twist. In the 90s, the internet forced countries to wake up to the new modern era. It was a combination of American companies wanting both to expand and provide goodwill.
And now, this new era is going to tell American companies to fuck off.
Didn't a year ago or so, Some European lawmaker made a vague hint in support of something that involved regulations on social media, and Elon replied "go fuck yourself" verbatem?
Play hardball, or surrender and give them what they want. there's no compromise or middle ground with these techbro fascists
I wonder how it will work and how can be enforced. Weekly I can easily find non fact checked article on "respectable" newspaper.
If its the newspaper themselves that prioritize click baiting over fact checking, I don't know how can we ask Google or meta to fact check their userbase
Sovereign citizens are really getting out of hand. Oh wait it's google.
In other words, a company, acting on behalf of its own shareholders, tells a government, which represents 100% of the citizens in a given territory, to shove its legislation where the sun doesn’t shine. And not only is this not inherently absurd, but it also stands a significant chance of succeeding in getting the government to comply.
It felt miraculous for me that, for a while, tech companies appeared to comply to regulation (doing the bare minimum, as slowly as possible, but it kinda worked).
My hypothesis is that they now except political support from Trump administration and to pressure the EU?
Bingo. Trump already started playing with his corporate finger puppets, emboldening some, threatening others.
Same reason Zuckerberg, surely the expert on the matter, had this weird rambling about "masculine energy" very recently. What a Trumpian phrase.
This is definitely to avoid the ire of fuhrer trump. It's also coincidence that meta is abandoning fact checking right before the new administration
He will sic the dogs of regulation on them if they don't dance to his tune
wish the eu would just actually ban american companies there is really no need for them anyway
Good, hope they get banned in the EU so people will switch to competitors
I could see the EU backing down a few years ago, but these days they have watered down any actual advantage in search by filling their results with ads and low quality content. Not that I use Reddit any more, but a good Reddit search engine would probably be better for a lot of use cases.
Then you got people like Musk using their websites as foreign influence platforms to restore Nazis into power so I'd imagine there's an appetite for not being so reliant on the increasingly belligerent US media oligarchy, which itself is the victim of Fox News and Murdoch.
Plus everything is already enshittified anyway so easy to create better.
DuckDuckGo: Use us because Google is so evil they were banned in Europe
They use bing tho. I personally like Qwant as they fall under GDPR and are european. Also they are working on building an independent search index.
I would love that. I still use google products, because I was too lazy to switch, a ban would give me the incentive to move to another platform
Gigachad move on googles part. Who wins, the EU or google?
So, another “cookie banner” coming then, but this one says: “facts not checked”
I want to live in a world where the EU bans Google, but we all know the EU will just roll over and accept this.
Commence operation “find out”!
We need fact checkers more than community notes. Because disproving a claim takes a lot of time and skill, and notes will be abused for financial and personal gain in the long run. Perhaps it is also better to use the word content moderator instead of fact checker, as finding the ultimate truth isn't possible, unless you just present a mathematical proof.
And not a single bit of this would matter at all if YOU PEOPLE* would just know a damned thing!
*present company excepted, of course.
Who decides what the facts are?
Assuming you're asking in good faith, the code is here.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/code-practice-disinformation
Paid fact-checkers spread across all member states.
"The new Code will extend fact-checking coverage across all EU Member States and languages and ensure that platforms will make a more consistent use of fact-checking on their services. Moreover, the Code works towards ensuring fair financial contributions for fact-checkers' work and better access to fact-checkers to information facilitating their daily work."
Essentially, everything will have Snopes attached to it. Including political ads and other forms of advertising. As well as more blatant propaganda.