MICHAEL WALSH IS FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT FOR THE AMERICAN FREE PRESS: What lies behind the European Union’s increasing control of users’ content on social media? The issue is a radical shift that supersedes the tech giants’ own content moderating (and censorship) control. The new Digital Services Act (DSA) claims to ‘keep users safe online and stop the spread of harmful or illegal content that violates a platform’s terms of service.’

The novelist George Orwell had a few words explaining big tech’s ‘terms of service’ and the Digital Services Act: “An orthodoxy, a body of ideas which is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.”

Rather than face risks of billions in fines for non-compliance at least nineteen platforms have already made changes. The Digital Services Act list is number-based. Those platforms and online corporations – even online retailers like Amazon whose subscribers exceed 10% of the EU’s 450 million population, face the highest level of scrutiny.

A modern kind of witch-hunt: The Digital Services Act “will have a significant impact on the experiences Europeans have when they open their laptops,” says Nick Clegg, Meta’s president for global affairs. It is made clear to big-tech companies that violations could bring fines of up to 6 per cent of their global revenue and/or being barred from operating anywhere in the European Union. This does not as yet include the United Kingdom which is no longer a member of the European Union.

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Interestingly, the DSA is in open defiance of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes the right to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Experts concede that the crackdown will eventually have a global impact. North Americans will bear the brunt of the tightening up of information that is shared on the information highway, the points raised and political policies challenged by social media users.

The elephant in the room question is what lies behind the DSA’s so-called concern for the sensitivities of social media users. ‘Scratch the surface of the Digital Services Act machinations and it becomes apparent that the political elite, corporations and big tech themselves are more concerned with protecting themselves than they are of providing online users with a defensive suit of armor.

What we do know is that those in positions of political and commercial influence are more and more concerned with the control being applied by users of social media to the application of their policies and their consequences. The political elite are adept at controlling populations but intensely dislike being controlled by the freedom of the information highway’s mass surveillance of ‘the little people.’

Here is the crux of the matter: The influencer, the legislators themselves are constantly being surveilled and open to the enquiring users of big tech social media. Every policy from displays of Russophobia to migration and on to crime and mass surveillance control of populations is being scrutinized and responded to by billions of users of the big tech platforms. It was recently conceded that social media users combined to decisively defeat the multi-billion-dollar funded pro-COVID-19 vaccination corporate and media propagandists.

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Much the same can be said of equally pressing issues that affect billions. The masses are taking a critical view of the conflict in Ukraine, the covert operations of the Deep State, the issues relating to globalism and the draining away of American hegemony. In Europe and the United States – in fact, throughout the Western Alliance, entire populations use social media to vent their feelings, displaying sentiments which are invariably in sharp contrast to those of the pro-government mainstream media.

A recent case in point is the flare-up in violence in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Whereas the controlled mainstream media is blatantly taking a pro-Israeli stance, social media users are equally supportive of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and an end to what they claim is the genocide of the Palestinian population. It is these conflicts of interest that motivate the DSA. 

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Dissident journalist Julian Assange was referring to social media when he wrote: “This generation is burning the mass media to the ground. We are reclaiming our rights to world history.” Dimitry Vyatkin, a prominent Russian legislator: “Internet sites have an audience that significantly exceeds the coverage of mainstream media.”

The former President of Costa Rica nailed it: “The Internet is the hope of an integrated world without frontiers, a common world without controlling owners, a world of opportunities and equality. This is a utopia that we have been dreaming about and is a world in which each and every one of us are heroes of a destiny that we have in our hands.” Not so fast, Laura Chinchilla, The European Union will see that they are more powerful than social media.