Dem
51
GOP
49
While Congress is doing nothing to combat disinformation on social media, the E.U. is taking action right now. There are elections for the European Parliament in June and the E.U. is expecting loads of disinformation to be posted to social media sites. The E.U. Commission wants to nip it in the bud and is going to issue what amounts to an executive order next week ordering social media companies to do something about it or else. The enabling legislation (the Digital Services Act) has already passed the European Parliament. This law authorizes the Commission to take action to order companies to tackle illegal and harmful content on their platforms. Claiming to be a common carrier that has no right to censor content won't fly.
What is expected is a series of voluntary guidelines that can be used as a kind of checklist. If a social media company adopts them all and enforces them rigorously, that will be a defense if the E.U. tries to fine it. If it chooses to ignore the guidelines, it can be fined up to 6% of its global gross income for violating the Digital Services Act. For Facebook, for example, its global gross was $134 billion, so the E.U. can fine it $8 billion. That is serious money, even for Facebook. Failure to pay up would probably result in being banned from operating in the entire E.U. Ex-Twitter loses money every year, but the fine is based on gross income, not profit. Its gross in 2023 was $3.4 billion, so the fine could be $200 million. Elon Musk can afford that, but he won't like it.
Guidelines will include things like requiring all AI-generated content to be clearly labeled as such. AI-content is especially dangerous since it is easy and cheap to produce and often believable, especially for unsophisticated voters who don't realize that a photo can be entirely fake. (V)