Posted by saubeidl 12/24/2025
This was especially plain to see in the crypto side of twitter.
Platforms cannot make statements on the legitimacy of a user without incurring some level of responsibility, regardless if it's "obvious" that a verified badge simply means that you've spent a couple dollars.
The average internet user is closer to your grandmother than you or me, and that is who these laws are meant to protect.
So what's the right level of "responsibility"? Is letsencrypt issuing certificates to websites (which shows a lock icon in browsers) also fooling grandma into sending over her credit card details? What about EV certificates from a few years ago, where you paid ~$300/yr for a green lock? Should the EU get in the business of regulating what levels of verification are required to show lock/checkmark icons?
This is what they've been pushing for with app stores.
You might want to read Rundfunkstaatsvertrag (RStV), (§ 55 Abs. 1): "Anbieter von Telemedien, die nicht ausschließlich persönlichen oder familiären Zwecken dienen, haben folgende Informationen leicht erkennbar, unmittelbar erreichbar und ständig verfügbar zu halten: Namen und Anschrift, bei juristischen Personen auch Namen und Anschrift des Vertretungsberechtigten."
Google translate: " Providers of telemedia services that are not exclusively for personal or family purposes must keep the following information easily recognizable, directly accessible and permanently available: name and address, and in the case of legal entities, also the name and address of the authorized representative. "
Does advocating for one political position or another count as a personal or family matter?
Verification was “this account is who it says it is”. Not “this account has $10 to spare”.
People routinely had their checkmark removed when they said something controversial.
It was not indeed happening "routinely".
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/15/16658600/twitter-verific...
A verification badge should be something that says "this person indeed is who they claim to be" not "they can spend a couple of bucks a month" nor "we like him enough to give them a checkmark". Both are extremely unhelpful. The latter probably even more unhelpful since it is very subjective.
Probably should've been two different flags, but it wasn't.
The fine was to protected the users from that scam.
I like paying taxes to protected the users that don't have the ability to detect scams as we all here have (most of the time).
EU miss the point equally to the Congress in uuss when non tech people believe they can rule (or just lobbied).
But on this case, there will be no problem if Twitter had decided to use another checkmark for pro accounts.
The three reasons for the fine are:
* Lack of transparency / misleading verified checkmarks
* Lack of open data access
* Lack of any ad transparency showing who paid to show which ads
None of those are censorship. All of those are basic good governance and transparency.
The censorship angle is nothing but FUD by an admin terrified of good governance and transparency.
Personally, I'd like to know who is trying to steer the conversation, in light of psyop campaigns and hybrid warfare against our democracy.
I'd also like researchers to be able to examine how a large public forum is run.
Again, transparency is the name of the game.
What use is that information to governments, if not to guide their censorship efforts? It's a setup for labelling your opposition as "hybrid warfare" combatants, not because they picked up a gun but rather because they're saying things you think shouldn't be said.
What X is scared of is showing that @AlabamaMAGALady and @DeutscherPatriot are based in St. Petersburg.
Again, there is no censorship. Just a transparency requirement.
So... what?
Visa restrictions can go both ways with US billionaires and politicians getting denied.
Who's gonna back down?
Prior checkmarks were for anyone who could pay 15K USD. X simply made it cheaper.
There is also a bizarre fine against Elon personally.
The EU makes more money from fining American tech companies than it makes from EU tech.
Don’t let unelected bureaucrats convince you that this is anything more than a revenue raising exercise for themselves.
You can sleep soundly again.
You make unsupported claims of censorship, but how exactly is a fine against misleading blue dot censorship since it contains no speech? The company could change how they describe the blue dot or attach disclaimers but they don't.
Why? Because the EU's actions serve Musk's and the Administrations political goals of vilifying anyone who has a different view, especially the EU, and using the levers of the state to retaliate and threaten.
> The EU makes more money from fining American tech companies than it makes from EU tech.
If it wasn't for ASML there would be no tech industry. The world depends on a single EU company for advanced chips and for its continued prosperity.
> Don’t let unelected bureaucrats convince you that this is anything more than a revenue raising exercise for themselves.
You're just another EU hater pushing mindless tropes. Why are you so full of hate?
No, they are voted on by elected representatives.
They must be proposed by the commission, which is not elected but appointed.
The commission is appointed by directly elected governments. It's the same as any ministerial post in any government.
It's also the same level of indirection as the US presidency, which is appointed by the Electoral College.
Yes technically the us 'electors' could vote for a different presidential ticket, but that's never happened in practice and even then their options are generally limited by who ran, electors can't pick just anyone.
Virginia’s 23 Democratic electors (Southern) refused to vote for Democratic VP candidate Richard Mentor Johnson due to his open common-law relationship with Julia Chinn, an enslaved woman of mixed race (octoroon). Interracial marriage was illegal under anti-miscegenation laws. They voted for Van Buren (president) but switched VP votes to William Smith (another Democrat), denying Johnson a majority. The Senate elected Johnson anyway.
Nobody ever complains about ambassadors not being democratic though. Same thing goes for, idk, a Secretary of State or whatever, they all go through the same process.
Only when it comes to EU institutions people can't hide their hatred and can't help themselves but make the same old dishonest claim.
Yikes, I just did. Trivializing the holocaust in Germany of all places is not a good look.
Edit: This is exclusively based on the primary source - a book cover where the guy was using a swastika (!!!) to critise a policy he didn't like - i.e. made light of the holocaust. If you don't understand why that's completely unacceptable, I don't know what to tell you.
It's one thing to use something for documentary purposes or in art. It's another to use it to make light of the holocaust like this guy did. It's all clearly written in our law.
If that person didn't want to follow our law, why did he come here? Why do we have to bother with criminal immigrants that don't want to integrate into our way of life?
Oh no! Someone pointed out an inconvenient fact again!
> It's also the same level of indirection as the US presidency, which is appointed by the Electoral College.
But the US President doesn't have a monopoly on setting the agenda of Congress, the Commission does with respect to the EU Parliament. Anyone with any political awareness knows that if you set the agenda you control the outcome.
The US president can't propose laws, only Congress can, yet he can "set the agenda".
Only the EU Commission can propose laws, but the EU Council (composed of the heads of state or of government of the EU member states) sets the agenda.
"The European Council is a collegiate body and a symbolic collective head of state, that defines the overall political direction and general priorities of the European Union."
They are functionally equivalent.
Fantastic example of unintentional scare quotes.
> Only the EU Commission can propose laws, but the EU Council (composed of the heads of state or of government of the EU member states) sets the agenda.
Who has to nominate all the possible members of the EU Commission? Is it the EU Council?
Face it, the entire EU structure is designed to prevent little people from ever being able to get a law passed which would possibly benefit them except as populist measures inside the EU which stick it to the evil Americans again to promote internal support for the EU.
> Face it...
Beaten by the facts, you just move on to more vague and hateful nonsense. The EU is not the US. The EU is not a vassal state of the US, it will make its own determinations and punish whoever breaks laws within the EU.
US companies don't have to like it, they can leave. The US wouldn't EU companies breaking US laws so this is all just rank hypocrisy and bigotry.
Long windedly confirming exactly what I said while attempting to obfuscate the reality. You aren't appointing anyone to the European Commission that didn't get nominated via the European Council, which is the heads of states, and the resulting people then write the laws voted on by the European Parliament.
Unsurprisingly this leads to enormous bureaucratic inertia for the benefit of those that have already captured the system. It is as democratic as the internal functions of the CCP.
> US companies don't have to like it, they can leave.
Why doesn't the EU make them leave? Because you want to act all superior to, say, the CCP or Russia.
> Beaten by the facts
Not even close
> more vague and hateful nonsense.
Come off it - that's your whole m.o.
It's not a fact. It's just pedantry that is conveniently not applied anywhere else. Nobody would say the US president isn't elected or ministers aren't elected, but when it comes to the EU a double standard is applied by dishonest ideologues.
The rest of your post is classic moving of goal posts, but fwiw Congress has been absolutely irrelevant since the sitting president decided to rule by decree.
Absolute gold, thanks for that.
> The rest of your post is classic moving of goal posts.
At least you lot have a wicked sense of irony.
The EU systems balances national sovereignty with direct democracy but leans toward the former. It's a good system.
Anyway, EU states went to great lengths to join the EU and can leave at any time. Besides the self-destructive UK, none have.
> They must be proposed by the commission, which is not elected but appointed.
The commission is elected by elected representatives. Just like in many countries the leader isn't directly elected by voters but by their elected representatives.
Your comment is just ideological nonsense. You could argue in good faith about the pros and cons of various systems but you don't, it's just hate because you heard Trump or Musk or some right wing figure say it say it and you're garrotting it.
Prove me wrong by detailing whats wrong with it, and "muh democracy" doesn't count.
We're at the "make arbitrary demands" stage of blatant denialism then.
Citation needed. Everything I've been able to find says that they were free.