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The EU’s tough new moderation rules are about to cover a lot more of the internet.
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Soon: large platforms firing everyone but 49 employees, and outsourcing all their operations to hundreds of companies with fewer than 49 employees each... all owned by the same shareholders.
or they could just comply with the law:
Doesn't seem like a big deal to me.
It is at the scale they are working on, there's a reason you can't get an actual person to contact you... It's too expensive to have actual people working these cases
It's mostly actual people. I know some of them at different platforms (for some reason this city has become a bit of a moderation hub). Most of these companies take moderation very seriously and if AI is involved it's so far just in an advisory capacity. Twitter being the exception because.. well, Elon.
But their work is strictly internally regulated based on a myriad of policies (most of which are not made public especially to prevent bad actors from working around them). There usually isn't much to discuss with a user nor could it really go anywhere. Before a ban gets issued the case has already been reviewed by at least 2 people and their 'accuracy' is constantly monitored by QA people.
Most are also very strict to their employees. No remote work, no phones on the workfloor, strong oversight etc.. To make sure cases are handled personally and employees don't share screenshots of private data.
And most of them have a psychologist on site 24/7. It's not much fun watching the stuff these people get to deal with on a daily basis. I don't envy them.
Making sure their turnover also gets split into hundreds of companies seems like an administrative nightmare though. And I suspect the EU regulators are smart enough to see through such a ruse - eBay would still be one website, not hundreds, after all.
Yeah, exactly. 10MM is peanuts to huge tech companies. It's not reasonable to split up services in a way that would still be profitable.
The Fediverse would likely be exempt, but any social media with advertising and any scale at all will hit 10MM revenue pretty quickly.
Yeah, I think the fact that the Fediverse is genuinely and legitmately multiple small websites, each of which can be proven to be run by different people with no connection to each other, would mean it's exempt.
Well, most are run by 1 person or a small team. None have profits. Some have donation pages, and that's it. So they are exempt by definition.
Just put the moderation business into a separate entity with no real revenue, which has no more than 49 regular employees and employ the rest as freelancers. Bam.
That would probably work in the US, but I'm not so sure it'd work in the EU. Even the UK is capable of cracking down on "freelancers" who are obviously just regular employees with bosses trying to dodge regulation.