DSA

DSA: Political Deal done!

Logo of the Mediation Cabal: An informal, and lighthearted, process where Wikipedians provided informal mediation for disputes on Wikipedia.

European Union (EU) lawmakers have agreed on a political deal to establish general online content moderation rules. Several cornerstones include a notice-and-action regime, Commission oversight over very large platforms and certain rules for terms of services.

After the political deal, some technical wording remains to be worked on. The deal is expected to be voted on in Parliament in July 2022. We have previously compared the three stances from a free knowledge point of view. We also analysed the state of negotiations in April 2022. Here is an analysis of the trilogue deal, based on what we know. 

We welcome that during the deliberations  lawmakers began making a distinction between rules created and imposed by the services provider and rules written and applied by volunteer editing communities. It is a pity that “citizen moderation”, something the internet needs more of, wasn’t recognised explicitly.

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DSA: Trilogues Update

Wikipedia administrator checkuser oversight logo
The logo of volunteers who are administrators, checkusers, and oversight groups on Wikipedia. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

European Union (EU) lawmakers are under a lot of self-imposed pressure to reach an agreement on content moderation rules that will apply to all platforms. Several cornerstones have been placed either at the highest political levels (e.g., banning targeted ads directed at minors) or agreed upon on a technical level (e.g., notice-and-action procedures). But there is still no breakthrough on a few other articles, like the newly floated “crisis response mechanism.”  

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DSA: Parliament adopts position on EU Content Moderation Rules

Vote results during plenary session. Image: © European Union, 2022 – Source: European Parliament

Yesterday the European Parliament adopted its negotiation position on the EU’s new content moderation rules, the so-called Digital Services Act. The version of the text prepared by the Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) was mostly adopted, but a few amendments were added. 

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The EU’s New Content Moderation Rules & Community Driven Platforms

Illustrated by Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane, WP20Symbols "Community 1", Public Domain Dedication (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode )

The EU is working on universal rules on content moderation, the Digital Services Act (DSA). Its co-legislators, the European Parliament (EP) and the Council, have adopted their respective negotiating positions in breakneck time by Brussels standards. Next, they will negotiate a final version with each other.   
While the EP’s plenary vote on the DSA is up in January and amendments are still possible, most changes parliamentarians agreed upon will stay. We therefore feel that this is a good moment to look at what both houses are proposing and how it may reflect on community-driven projects like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.

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DSA in imco: Three amendments we like and one that surprised us

Jan Davidszoon de Heem: "Vanitas - Still Life with Books and Manuscripts and a Skull", public domain

Just before the summer recess, the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection committee released over 1300 pages of amendments to the EU’s foremost content moderation law. It took the summer to delve into the suggestions and are ready to kick off the new Parliamentary season by sharing some thoughts on them. Our main focus remains on how responsible communities can continue to be in control of online projects like Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.

1. The Greens/EFA on “manifestly illegal content”

AM 691 by Alexandra Geese on behalf of the Greens/EFA Group

Article 2 – paragraph 1 – point g a (new)

‘manifestly illegal content’ means any information which has been subject of a specific ruling by a court or administrative authority of a Member State or where it is evident to a layperson, without any substantive analysis, that the content is in not in compliance with Union law or the law of a Member State;

Almost any content moderation system will require editors or service providers to assess content and make ad-hoc decisions on whether something is illegal and therefore needs to be removed or not. Of course, things aren’t always black-and-white and sometimes it takes a while to make the right decision, like with leaked images of Putin’s Palace. Other times it is immediately clear that something is an infringement, like a verbatim copy of a hit song, for instance. In order to recognise these differences the DSA rightfully uses the term “manifestly illegal”, but if fails to actually give a definition thereof. We agree with Alexandra Geese and the Greens/EFA Group that the wording of Recital 47 should make it into the definitions. 

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Takedown Notices and Community Content Moderation: Wikimedia’s Latest Transparency Report

Wikimedia organizational and user rights hierarchy, under CC0 1.0

In the second half of 2020 the Wikimedia Foundation received 380 requests for content alteration and takedown. Two were granted. This is because our communities do an outstanding job in moderating the sites. Something the Digital Services Act negotiators should probably have in mind.

See the organisational chart in full here

Wikipedia is a top 10 website globally anyone can edit and upload content to. Its sister projects host millions of files uploaded by users. Yet, all these projects together triggered only 380 notices. How in the world is this possible?

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How the DSA can help Wikipedia – or at least not hurt it

Winter 2020 in Wolfsberg District, Carinthia, Austria by Naturpuur under CC BY 4.0

The Digital Services Act is probably the most consequential dossier of the current EU legislative term.  It will most likely become a formative set of rules on content moderation for the internet. It also means that it will shape the way Wikipedia and its sister projects operate. One can only hope that the DSA doesn’t try to fix what isn’t broken, specifically our community-based content moderation model. What are the scenarios?

A quick history of recent platform liability legislation

One of the reasons why the DSA became a thing, is the growing conviction that online intermediaries – from social media, through various user-generated content hosting platforms, to online marketplaces – will not fix the problems with illegal content through voluntary actions. In the previous legislative term we saw two proposals to change the responsibilities and liability of platforms. The focus was on types of content: copyrighted material (in the infamous Directive in Copyright in the Digital Single Market) and so-called terrorist content (in the Regulation on Dissemination of Terrorist content Online, or TERREG, with its final vote on April 28). 

The topical focus has its limitations, such as the number of legal regimes one platform would need to conform to simultaneously. This time around, the European Commission wants to impose rules on platforms that would cover all sorts of an intermediaries, content and services. 

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