What will be the impact of the European Union’s sweeping new rules for Big Tech, not just on Europe, but also on America?
“The issue with this legislation is that there are extremely vague categories such as misinformation and hate speech that are very, very difficult to define in law … so this opens the door to a form of arbitrary bureaucratic power over the platforms,” says David Thunder.
He’s a political philosopher and a research fellow at the Institute for Culture & Society at the University of Navarra.
“They can also declare an emergency. And in the event of declaring an emergency, require the platforms to take special measures to counteract the emergency,” says Mr. Thunder. “So it can become part of a war machine, in a sense.”
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Mr. Thunder is the author of “Citizenship and the Pursuit of the Worthy Life.”
🔴 WATCH the full episode (48 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1128DavidThunder
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: David Thunder, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
David Thunder: Thank you. It's great to be here, Jan.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s jump right into it. What is the Digital Services Act?
Mr. Thunder: The Digital Services Act is a piece of legislation that just went through the European Parliament recently. It is concerned with the regulation of online platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. It covers a broad range of issues including child pornography, transparency of terms and conditions, and the standardization of the regulations across the European Union that affect these platforms. But from my point of view, this legislation is troubling.
It has introduced a form of censorship of these platforms by the European Commission specifically through issues such as hate speech and disinformation. It gives the European Commission oversight over these platforms and they can actually undertake a review of the platform's policies and regulations over the previous year. If the platform has not been in compliance with their requirements, these platforms can be fined a massive amount—billions and billions of dollars.
Mr. Jekielek: That is obviously of great concern to those platforms, but also to people who use those platforms. These platforms have become a kind of infrastructure for people the world over.
Mr. Thunder: Exactly. They have become a global, digital town square, where much of the news and commentary that happens in the world gets filtered through these platforms. Even though they are private platforms, they act as public forums. That's a very important point to make—they do have a public function in our democracies. Any form of oversight of these platforms by the European Commission is something that people who care about democracy should be concerned about. Of course, nobody would object to them taking down child pornography. That's not the issue.
The issue with this legislation is that there are extremely vague categories such as misinformation and hate speech that are very, very difficult to define in law. The auditors of Twitter or other platforms, the people who are auditing them on a regular basis, have to take these categories into account and decide whether the platforms have sufficiently enforced rules against disinformation and hate speech. If they haven't, they could be heavily fined and could even be suspended from operating in the European Union. But nowhere are these categories defined in law in a clear way. This opens the door to a form of arbitrary bureaucratic power over the platforms.
Mr. Jekielek: One of the features is that the system employs the equivalent of fact-checkers and fact-checker organizations.
Mr. Thunder: Yes. They will end up employing a small army of what they call trusted flaggers, and the trusted flaggers are not exactly fact-checkers. They're supposed to identify illegal content on the platforms. These trusted flaggers and trusted flagging organizations are nominated by the digital coordinators of each member state.
There is some outsourcing of the work to the member states, but fundamentally the oversight is going to come from the central power, which would be the European Commission and whoever it nominates to do this work of oversight. That's really when we're going to see the full impact. But not just then, but also before that, because these platforms have to anticipate that they're going to be reviewed. When these trusted flaggers flag certain content, platforms like Twitter or YouTube can either take down the content, or they can decide to keep it up and give some reason for keeping it up.
If they're consistently ignoring the advice or the recommendations of the trusted flaggers, that will come up in the annual review by the Commission. Then the Commission will probably say to them, “Why are you ignoring our recommendations?” There will be that kind of conversation. It is a mechanism for pressuring the social media companies to comply with the policies of the European Commission.
Again, I would emphasize that in European law there is no clear definition of disinformation, nor is there any clear definition of hate speech. These two categories are inherently expansive and inherently vague. Put in the hands of the European Commission, they can be used to advance whatever their political opinions are about these matters.
Mr. Jekielek: These trusted flaggers have the ability to take down content assuming that the platform is reciprocating. You can imagine a situation, given the extreme nature of the fines that one of these platforms could get, they may err on the side of self-censorship, in the sense that they will just agree with those flaggers. Effectively, they're working like one of these fact-checkers. If they don't comply, then they'll get audited and they might get this massive fine. Do I understand this correctly?
Mr. Thunder: Yes, I agree with that. That's the most likely outcome, because it really is a massive fine that they would be facing, up to 6 or 7 percent of their annual turnover. I found it shocking the amount that they could be fined. Yes, they will anticipate that and take defensive measures. That's just good business strategy, otherwise they could be sunk in massive fines at the end of that review period.
Mr. Jekielek: What is the impact beyond Europe?
Mr. Thunder: That's a good question. I don't know if it's practical for a social media company to completely separate the visibility of tweets or posts in one region vs. another region, and whether, for example, the Twitter experience would be completely different if you're living in Europe than if you're living in the United States. I'm not a legal expert, but I would imagine that one of the obvious impacts is just the sheer cost for the social media companies of having to put in place an infrastructure to be constantly responding to these trusted flaggers. It would be a kind of regulatory infrastructure.
It's going to be a burden on the platforms, not to mention that they would be paying fees to the European Union for this service. Certainly, there would be an extra cost for the platforms. For the end user, it's hard to say. It would be up to the companies to decide whether they're going to standardize their policies across the world, or whether they could have a Twitter experience or TikTok experience for the United States and another one for Europe. Europe would be a more censored experience in this case. I'm speculating because I'm not sure exactly how the social media companies will respond to these regulations.
Mr. Jekielek: You're arguing that it does do certain valuable things that are highly defined, like restricting child pornography, which just about everybody would agree is a really good thing. But that is something that's very finely defined. It also incorporates these other very broad areas.
Mr. Thunder: One example was the use of algorithms that potentially could be manipulative. Part of the legislation requires social media companies to be more transparent about how they use people's personal data in designing their feed and their experience of the particular platform. That's a pretty good idea. It's actually a pretty neat idea to bring in more transparency and more respect for privacy. With the example you gave of child pornography, who would be in favor of child pornography? I'm sure there are lots of innocuous parts of the legislation, because it's a very long piece of legislation, as I discovered when I waded through it.
But there are key points that are pressure points like the disinformation issue and the hate speech issue which are inherently expansionist. They can also declare an emergency and require the platforms to take special measures to counteract the emergency. Now, what could that mean? We can only imagine what it would mean.
They're not very specific, but presumably it means if they think that there's an emergency because of a pandemic or a war like the Russia-Ukraine war, they could decide they’ve got to start censoring propaganda coming from the other side. It can become part of a war machine in a sense.
But again, it's about the vagueness and the open-endedness of these emergency powers. It's just not clear exactly how they will use them and what power they will have over these platforms. Any lawyer should be aghast at a piece of legislation like this, because it gives very vague powers to an unelected organ of governance, namely the European Commission.
Mr. Jekielek: You're one of the folks who was a voice of reason and thoughtfulness during the pandemic. What happened when you first saw that something was wrong with the pandemic response? Please give me some background on how you came to this awareness.
Mr. Thunder: I had been living in Spain for over 10 years, and I was one of the first cases of Covid myself, actually, because it was late February 2020 when I came down with Covid. I never really tested for it, but I lost my sense of smell and I had all the classic symptoms of Covid and it was dreadful. I was out of action for about a month and had a cough for about six months.
I wasn't hospitalized, thank God, and I got over it. But in the course of those months, the Spanish government ordered people to not only stay at home, but to not even go out for a walk, not even go to the park, and not even walk their kids outdoors. People were allowed to walk their dogs, but not their kids. Crazy stuff was happening.
When they said you couldn't take a walk and you could only go to the supermarket but not take a walk for any other reason, I knew that this stuff was just made up. It was just made up on the hoof by people who were panicking and wanted to make a power grab and make people feel like they were doing something. As I saw these Draconian measures being applied all over the world, I knew from an early stage that this was going to lead to chaos and that it was going to cause far more harm than good.
As a student of the social sciences, I was aware that any dramatic large-scale social intervention is going to have inherently unpredictable and chaotic consequences that are very difficult to control. The experience of the pandemic has proven this principle to be true because of all the secondary effects of paralyzing people's lives and isolating people and shutting down businesses. From early on in the pandemic, I was aware that this was going to happen.
Mr. Jekielek: I keep coming across this theme as I speak to people who became aware very early in the pandemic that something was really amiss. Is this a principle that every social scientist would know, or is this something that was more focused in your particular area of discourse?
Mr. Thunder: Any attentive social scientist who is aware of very large social experiments like Russian communism, or Stalinism, or national socialism in Germany, or even the city planning movement to the United States in the '50s and '60s, should be aware that these interventions historically have been disastrous.
Mr. Jekielek: What happened?
Mr. Thunder: What essentially happened is that fear and panic kicked in on one side. There was genuine fear in the population. There were people who were well-placed in government circles who could begin to understand the problem, who actually reinforced that fear and perpetuated that fear. It became a kind of a self-reinforcing cycle of fear with more aggressive interventions, and then more fear. Because every time you lock down the population, people think this must be Armageddon. When a public authority locks people down, they receive the signal that there is a really dramatic problem here that they need to respond to.
It turned out that the authorities were mistaken. It was a serious problem, but it was not a problem on the scale that would justify locking people in their homes. Countries that did not do that, like Sweden, came out much better than many of their neighbors that did lock down. There really is no evidence the lockdowns worked in the medium to long-term to stem the spread of disease. It was not realistic. Human beings are not like that. They have to get on with their lives, they have to make a living, they have to go to work, and they have to eat, and they have to socialize at some point.
Mr. Jekielek: This is exactly what I was thinking about when you were talking about these emergency powers for extra censorship that are granted by this new DSA law.
Mr. Thunder: In a way it's a kind of a rationalization that they offer for these powers. Their idea is that somehow controlling the flow of information on the internet is vital to managing public emergencies. That in itself is a very questionable premise for a government, and it's a very self-serving premise as well. Whenever a government wants to make the case for having more power, we should be very suspicious.
In fact, you would think that during an emergency you would want a more open internet and a more open flow of information so that vital information that is concealed or that is not easy to access can actually come to the fore. You would not think the opposite, that shutting down information is the best thing you can do to manage an emergency.
Mr. Jekielek: Please share a little of your background. Then let's bring it up to what you're currently studying, which is highly relevant to this discussion.
Mr. Thunder: I'm a political philosopher. I've studied issues connected with the ethics of citizenship, what it means to be a good citizen, some of the obstacles to being a good citizen, and some of the corrupting influences of political institutions and practices. In my later career, I've turned towards the institutions of democracy. I've focused on the conditions under which democratic political institutions can contribute towards the flourishing of their participants, so that citizens can live more satisfying and well rounded lives under these political institutions. That's where my research is at the moment. I'm particularly interested in the decentralization of political institutions and the principle of federalism, which is a very, very cherished and familiar principle in the United States.
Mr. Jekielek: It's federalism in the United States that actually allowed for different approaches to the pandemic. The state of Florida ended the lockdowns very early on, basically within a month. There are other states that stayed locked down for a very long time. There were completely different approaches to various types of mandates, including mask mandates and vaccine mandates, and even messaging around the pandemic. It provided this laboratory of democracy scenario, where we can look back and ask, “Which approaches were better? Which ones worked and which ones didn't? I deeply appreciate this approach. This is very different from my home country of Canada where everything is much more centralized.
Mr. Thunder: This point about experimentation and about a laboratory of democracy is fundamental, because if you centralize a political system too much, then you deprive yourself of invaluable knowledge and understanding of public policy. Because if you only impose one policy across a region, then you'll never really know for sure whether that was the best policy or the optimal policy because you don't have a control group. You don't have a parallel universe where a different policy was applied. The federal system allows for these kinds of experiments in democracy and in public policy to run in different directions so that observers can then understand their outcome better.
I am not American, but I lived in America for at least 10 years. I'm very attached to the federal principle, and it is extremely important to preserve it so that power remains as dispersed as possible. I would further say that the federal principle should be applied within states, so that municipalities and counties can have as much autonomy as they can over their own affairs. That's really fundamental for democracy to work well.
Mr. Jekielek: We live in a world where we're told that we need experts to mediate our understanding of the world because the world has become so complex. With this pandemic response, one of the silver linings has been to show us that this approach doesn't work very well, given that a lot of poor decision making was made by people who were experts, and then the doubling down on failed policy. This has been a feature of the pandemic.
We discussed earlier the very idea that a small group of people could have the level of understanding to decide what is true and what is false. That itself is a serious question. We've been conditioned to believe this might be appropriate, but you argue differently. Please tell me about that.
Mr. Thunder: This has to do with how scientific, political, and moral knowledge actually works. We have to understand that in order to get to the truth, and in order to understand what's going on in the world, we actually have to engage in a back and forth argument with other people. We have to be able to examine the evidence openly. The evidence that's presented has to be contestable by other people in a court of law in an adversarial way.
You have to think, “I'm held accountable by other people for what I say because they can challenge me.” But if we set aside an anointed group of people and we say, “Those people have the truth. We'll protect what they say. It cannot be challenged,” then we're undermining the very basis for rational discourse, which is the ability to be challenged by others.
The notion that there is an anointed class of people is like something out of a sci-fi novel. It's absolutely, utterly implausible, and it has made its way into popular ideology. The reason it has such an appeal is because it makes the world very tidy. Instead of having to grapple with complexity and contradiction, I can just be fed the truth by an expert and that makes me feel comfortable.
Personally, it doesn't make me feel comfortable. It makes me feel uncomfortable to be constantly fed ideas by an expert class. But I can understand how that could be psychologically reassuring to think that these people like the NIH and the CDC have the truth. It's kind of crazy to think that a doctor who's outside the CDC should not have standing to criticize the CDC or challenge its ideas. It doesn't make any sense from a scientific or rational point of view.
Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely. I'm thinking back to Hannah Arendt's writings right now. Are we in a moment where we're poised to accept some kind of technocratic rule? It's not just a matter of there being a push for that kind of power structure, but maybe we're more accepting of it than we have been in the past.
Mr. Thunder: There was a very famous thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote his famous, wonderful volume called, Democracy in America. He was very prescient and predicted that modern governments, in promising people security and comfort, could effectively become what he called soft despots. They could be softly despotic, meaning that instead of relying on the police coming to your home and knocking your door and rounding you up, they would just get compliance by regulating the hell out of people's lives, so that people's initiative and creativity would be destroyed by having to go through bureaucratic hurdles for everything they did.
Hyper-regulation of people's lives by the state can really enervate them. It can really reduce their energy and creativity. It can infantilize them. Technocracy can feed on itself by creating habits of compliance with minute and complicated rules. I agree that people seem to be more open to technocratic control of their lives.
But there are other people who are resisting and pushing back, and we shouldn't forget that. There are pretty strong resistance movements in places like the United Kingdom. There are peaceful resistance movements and populist movements as well that are anti-establishment and anti-technocracy. It's not all doom and gloom. There are some signs of resistance to these kinds of tendencies in democracy.
Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely, I wholly agree with you. One of the things that this whole pandemic has exposed is that some of us are easily propagandized and we can come to believe things which are wrong. Yet, we can pick it up from it being in the popular culture and being pushed out through social media. We can come to believe things, which upon reflection, don't really make a lot of sense. We live in a society where some portion of us believe in things which another portion of the population doesn't. The idea is you want people to have a common set of knowledge and a common set of facts. You can't have alternative facts. Facts are facts, but that's not where we are today.
Mr. Thunder: All of that is inherently anti-philosophical. It's anti reflection, it's anti-thinking, and it's anti-freedom to present people with a very rigid worldview that they should accept on faith, essentially. Somehow, because it's unchallenged and it's authoritative, we should accept it. What you're talking about also points to the fact that our societies are quite polarized and divided. There is disagreement over fundamental issues that affect how we live together, that affect how we run our society, and how we regulate our society. The prospects of creating a feasible political system that we can all inhabit together seem pretty poor.
Here, decentralization plays a really critical role, and not only territorial decentralization, but also things like school vouchers so that people can select the kind of school they want their children to attend and to have some control over their social world. I would argue that precisely because our society is so diverse, and because there is so much disagreement and conflict; moral, cultural, and religious, precisely for those reasons, we should try to facilitate people to organize and to join communities that can agree on fundamental issues concerned with how they live together.
Yes, of course, you need an overarching constitution and some kind of a regulatory framework. But I would argue that the umbrella regulatory framework within which all these communities can exist should be minimalist. It should go to the bare minimum of non-aggression with some kind of rules against criminal conduct and some rules about public order, so that communities can then develop their own life in their own way.
They don't all have to be celebrating a gay way of life, and they don't all have to be against a gay way of life. In a way, we have to understand that it's a practical issue and it's a practical problem. It's not about deciding what the best and most ideal society is going to be. It's about getting these people, as they are, to be able to interact with each other, engage in a common market, and pass each other in the street. That's not going to happen if we think that all of the important moral and cultural issues have to be settled for everyone in a state. It's just not going to happen. It will only polarize the population and it'll accelerate the demise of that society.
Mr. Jekielek: Some people would be forced to take on a set of values in this type of context.
Mr. Thunder: It would end up being that either a majority or a powerful political faction, which may be just a strong minority or powerful minority, would end up dictating the terms of our common life in a way that goes completely against the will and the interests and the opinions of the rest of the society, and they would feel trapped. When people feel trapped, they become resentful, bitter, and angry, and it is a recipe for an unstable society. It would be inherently unstable and explosive.
People get complacent about Western democracy. They think, “Oh, well, we don't see bombings in the street,” but that's a mistaken attitude. Because ultimately, underneath the veneer of peace and respect, there can be a lot of tension and resentment. If you allow it to bubble and develop over time, there will come a time when it explodes.
Democracy relies on mutual respect and on recognition of the legitimacy of our shared institutions. If those institutions become polarized or only are perceived to represent the ideological or economic interests of a special class of people, then many citizens will just switch off and will defect. They will reluctantly go along with what they're told to do until they see an opportunity to overturn those institutions. It sounds dramatic to say it that way. I would say the United States is on course for a form of dismemberment. If people attempt to resolve these issues at the federal level, it's a recipe for dismembering the United States.
Mr. Jekielek: What do you see as a solution here?
Mr. Thunder: There is no completely satisfactory solution because politics is very messy. Living and sharing public spaces is inherently a messy process when people have different opinions. But having said that, there are ways to mitigate the pathological effects of political partisanship, division, and polarization. One of those ways that has been recognized by scholars is called polycentricity.
It basically means decentralized governance is to decentralize power and allow communities to run their own affairs in their own way. They need to have a very strongly protected right of exit and right of mobility, so that essentially citizens can vote with their feet, so to speak, and they can move to communities that are more amenable to their outlook on life.
Maybe that's an example that's been discussed or cited by a lot of people. Apparently, a lot of people have moved to Florida during and after the pandemic. You can bring that down to a smaller scale, and you can even bring it down to the level of municipalities and counties to some extent. You can actually have different rules for different regions and different governments. I know people think this sounds very radical, but honestly, we're up against fairly radical problems now. We need to start to open our minds to radical solutions such as decentralization.
Mr. Jekielek: Roger Simon, an editor-at-large at Epoch Times, has a new book out called, American Refugees, which is precisely about this phenomenon of people migrating from blue states to red states, and the phenomena associated with that.
Mr. Thunder: Yes, in terms of people finding their life meaningful and worth living, it's very important how their social environment is structured. The people you hang out with, the people you cross paths with, and the kinds of activities you engage in, and your social activities are fundamentally important for your self-development, for how you view yourself, how you move in the world, and how you navigate the world.
It's not just geographic decentralization, it's also allowing civil society organizations such as educational institutions to have maximum autonomy, to be able to cultivate a shared way of life without being constantly micromanaged and constantly hyper-regulated by overseeing powers.
I'm not an anarchist. I'm not saying that universities should have zero regulation by the state. But I'm saying that in terms of ideology, in terms of philosophy, universities should have a lot of freedom to develop their own research programs and their own educational programs. Then citizens should be free to go there or not go there as the case may be, so that there will be a market effect as well, where people can choose what kind of education they want for themselves and their children. This can be applied to many different sectors of social life. Yes, the freedom of civil society is a fundamental part of federalism.
Mr. Jekielek: Here in America, a lot of people will say that the educational system, especially higher education, is irrevocably lost and has been caught up in this woke Marxist ideology and it's very difficult to get an education. There is this whole parallel set of institutions that are forming in this process. A lot of people don't think that the existing institutions can even be reformed, because they're so ideologically saturated with this view of the world.
Mr. Thunder: If you were to look at it positively, then people should see this as an opportunity, because if those institutions were not quite so saturated, then there would be less of an incentive to set up new, vibrant, fresh, alternative institutions. Starting from scratch, even though it's very difficult, can give rise to great projects and do an awful lot of good in society. Just getting by and just more or less surviving in old worn out institutions may not be a satisfactory response. Whereas, trying to set up independent institutions that are not stuck in these patterns of wokeness can be a huge service to society and can open a new path of discovery and a new path of development for many citizens.
I like to see this in a positive light and think if we see pathologies in our institutions, then maybe it means we need to bring up fresh shoots and fresh life. We need to grow that from small to big by starting small, obviously, but it can be very exciting as well to start up new ventures.
Mr. Jekielek: David, you've written a book about the meaning and importance of citizenship. Here in the U.S., one of the regulars on this show is Victor Davis Hanson, whose book, The Dying Citizen, is chronicling how that role in society is actually dying out.
Mr. Thunder: We are living in a time when there is a retreat by many people into the private sphere into the sphere of family and entertainment. There is a retreat away from the public sphere, the sphere of politics and public engagement, whether it be at the local level or at the national level. Taking an interest in public affairs and engaging with a public spirit in public affairs is fundamentally important for the future of democracy.
But I also argue in my book that caring about the common good, caring about the good of my neighborhood and city is actually something that makes me a better person as well. It actually helps me develop virtues like justice and magnanimity. It also helps me become someone who looks outward towards my society and helps it become better.
Mr. Jekielek: On the one hand, we see a lot of people that are very disillusioned and wondering whether there's any point in participating in the political process. On the other hand, there's been a huge increased interest in school boards, very much a local political office and political role. This actually has had some profound impact on school districts across the United States recently.
Mr. Thunder: It's so important that people do not have contempt. They should not have contempt for citizenship at a very local level and not to underestimate the importance of engagement with the school board, or engagement with the governance of your university or of any civil society organization, or even good governance in a business. These are all ways in which, in my view, we can practice good citizenship to the benefit of everyone.
Mr. Jekielek:Any final thoughts as we finish?
Mr. Thunder: Sometimes people can become discouraged and disheartened because it seems like so many things are going in the wrong direction. I like to say that, and I say this for myself as well, that we only get one life to live. Even if you live under a very problematic government, there are so many good things that we can do with our life for the people around us, including building institutions, but also just in our neighborhood and in our family and among our friends. The meaning of our life does not turn on our success at changing the whole world. That's just a fundamental, very important point.
The meaning of our lives comes from the way we live our day-to-day life and touch the lives of those around us, not whether we change the whole world. I almost have to say that to myself as a mantra, because the ideological atmosphere tends to encourage us to think we have to change everything or we've failed. Whereas, maybe just making small changes can be very meaningful in itself.
Mr. Jekielek: David Thunder, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Mr. Thunder: Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation.
Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining David Thunder and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.
🔴 WATCH the full episode (48 minutes) on Epoch Times: https://ept.ms/S1128DavidThunder
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