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You assume that the EU acts in a coherent manner.

I think that premise is wrong - there are many interest groups, and by luck/lobbying/reaching critical mass/... they manage to put one of their interests into a law.

The problem is that the EU politicians do not want the think about the problem. They want to outsource it and make someone else to pay it.

But there is no solution. Any censorship is always subjective.

Also trusted flaggers bans cannot be disputed easily. Meta rather just takes whatever trusted flaggers have flagged, real or not, and it is not their problem. It is a problem between the EU citizen and anonymous trusted flagged with no accountability.

The next step is of course corrupted trusted flaggers who can take down business pages, whatever, for a payment.

The EU fines are not enough to get the US tech companies to change, or even leave completely. But they are enough to continually fund the EU regulatory bureaucracy itself. So this arm of the government really only exists to preserve itself.

I would be interested to see how many EU government jobs the US tech fines are supporting. Maybe Meta or Google is indirectly the largest employer in Brussels?

There are no fines at all in this story.

There are no fines, this is about having recourse when big tech randomly bans you. Which you will remember, is a very common outcry on this very page.

This is just an uninformed EU rant.

It's almost as though they want to be the government making the rules, rather than sitting back and letting the likes of META do whatever they want. The imperfect approach comes down to the reality of politics.

I think the censorship framing is quite manipulative. It is removal of unlawful content.

Is removing CSAM censorship? What about snuff?

If no, then where do you draw the line? Why can't our democratically elected governments decide what is and isn't lawful? Why should foreign Big Capital be allowed to decide instead?

As an EU citizen I am glad there's at least some overwatch and control over these companies. I don't trust them at all. In the US unregulated capitalism is fine: everything and his mother are for sale. Here, not so much.

Ironically if there is a single population that will immensely benefit from socialism, is the United States. Yet they are raised in fear of the very doctrine that would save them.

> Had a restaurant with a Facebook + Instagram page

But this here is already a prior problem - you depend on these US companies in the first place.

The EU could easily make it free to have a homepage associated for no cost. That would be something. Everyone gets a homepage for free, say, one business per EU citizen. Why is the system screwing us over to depend on US companies here?

except you dont' get a "human" when you buy "premium support", you get a chatbot with elevated access. source: ex-colleague who use to work at CSE team for IG and Whatsapp.

> It was then banned automatically for impersonation.

Sorry, but if it wouldn't have been banned then there would be 1000x legitimately looking fake BOT accounts impersonating every politician in Europe, which IMHO is a lot worse considering the disinformation campaigns of trolls and foreign adversaries, so of course Meta would err on the side of caution here and assume every account of a politician is 99,9999% gonna be a bot and just ban it instantly.

The only correct solution is META having human support staff on call for such situations which i thought they did in Dublin, at least last time I checked ~8 or so years ago.

When you have a business and you're trying to reach people, social media works surprisingly well, as long as you don't get banned for arbitrary reasons.

For better or worse, several economies would currently come to a screeching halt if WhatsApp were to be banned.

Everything is absolutely for sale, if we did things The American Way but luckily we aren't, so good luck buying it :)

hate speech in the EU is "incitement to violence or hatred based on race, colour, religion, descent or national or ethnic origin"[0].

You should be able to see criticism is fine, while calling people "stupid monkeys" is not.

But this isn't even about the EU's definition: Facebook & co have their own definition of hate speech, and they are not holding it up.

[0] https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/ju...

If you think calling black footballers monkeys isn't hate speech, there is no explaining anything to you about this topic.

Meanwhile if you're even slightly dickish to one of these people you will get immediately warned or shadowbanned. Meanwhile the post, get notified 9 months later that they reviewed it and found it doesn't violate their terms of service.

Stupid how? There's nothing regulation-worthy about banning users who aren't in some legally binding contract that'd make the action a breach of terms.

The US is moving rapidly away from EU towards Asia. EU acts like they are driving this.

That's about right. Instagram is the worst.

"We won't remove this because it doesn't violate our content policy - just block the user if you don't like it".

Yeah just seen someone's head cut off with a machete. Not even joking. That'll stay with me forever.

There's more and worse. A friend has been making a point of sending me Instagram Reels of OnlyFans performers showing their genitals briefly without getting banned or without the reels being removed. Some of those stay up for months.

Don't judge, the friend is interested in the way they find interesting solutions to bypass censorship, more than the content. Or so he says. And LOL, no, I'm not "the friend".

This to say, that they are absolutely not in control of their platforms, except for heavily political content, and speech-related content. Flash a vulva quickly enough by using smart lighting, and they won't catch it. I guess we'll still have that in our dystopian future.

Zuckerberg social medias are but a cancer to society. That has become fundamentally clear. They need to be so heavily regulated that they become unrecognizable, or they should be destroyed with all means possible (legally, of course).

This is actually true? Facebook bans users who talk about contraception and HIV?

I don't use Facebook so no idea if this is true or not personally, but ChatGPT seems to think this isn't true and that if it does happen it's probably a mistake?

They are not breaking EU law.

>Under EU law, online platforms should "engage in good faith" with the body, but its decision is not legally binding.

It's fine if you just want to see Facebook suffer but let's not pretend they are breaking the law.

This might feel like a reasonable take in isolation, but if you take it in context of today's society, and how everything actually works, it's not reasonable or realistic. Nor is it empathetic in any way.

These social media companies have created an environment where they are the dominant, near-exclusive, medium for communication in our digital age. If you are running a consumer-facing business in 2026 you *must* be on these platforms.

Given that these companies have actively pursued these positions they now hold, do you not feel they have a responsibility to be fair, reliable and trustworthy? That they have some obligation to their users, paying or not. They are choosing to offer the service for free, and they do make money on you regardless.

Losing your business accounts on Meta or Tiktok or Youtube can have catastrophic real-world consequences. And mistakes happen all the time, so you can't realistically assume every ban or cancellation is justified or correct.

> Having an account on a company's platform is a privilege, not a right.

Businesses can lose a lot traffic by not being present on Facebook and Instagram, so being unjustifiably banned is doing measurable financial harm in many cases.

Even as an individual it can be a huge pain to not have Facebook. The local individual sales market (e.g. classified ads) is dominated by Facebook Marketplace now, for example, and not having access to that market makes it difficult to sell things.

Meta has a responsibility to the community because of their position as the de facto platform for many activities. They've even intentionally positioned themselves to dominate. Having laws requiring them to act responsibly is totally justifiable.

Then there's no reason why a government shouldn't regulate these companies, and use sanctions of all kinds - including fines, and the potential for an outright ban - to enforce those regulations.

From what I understand nothing in the EU regulation prevents a company from arbitrarily banning people. You can read it in full here: https://www.eu-digital-services-act.com/Digital_Services_Act.... It basically just establishes how the dispute should be handled between the parties

"Whims" skew discriminatory.

Enough of the real world interfaces with online services that arbitrary bans cause actual damages, more harm than banning an annoying player from your obscure MUD.

i would support this if local/state/provincial/federal governments were not allowed to post exclusively on social media. other companies should also not be allowed to use social media as their only method of customer support.

Then there should be a law that requires the platform to interoperate with independent clients. You can't have both. The social network is a common good. If you want to benefit from it, then you need to treat people fairly.