EU - Digital Services Act will launch heavy discussions on fiction

Art and fiction
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The DSA (Digital Services Act) from the EU will start heavy discussions on fiction and its censorship in a way that has never happened. As you know the DSA was approved October 4th, 2022 and will come into effect January 1st, 2024.

According to the DSA any big platform has to obey by EU law and the laws of one EU Member State. Do you see the problem? First, the DSA obviously prohibits child pornography, BUT it is written from the POV of the EU which defines CSAM as imagery containing actual children. However, the law does not clarify this, so member states adopting this law (which they must) are going to use their definition.

Secondly, the first point does not even matter ha! Any content banned by one (!) member state must be deleted even if said content is legal and protected by the constitution of anothers member state. Recipe for disaster.

Given the obvious problem of countries banning LGBT, or other stuff nationally that technically leads to a state where platforms must ban all such content internationally.

Fictional pornography is obviously affected here. There were some member states who had their own, national version, of the DSA, but these weren’t effective. Now it’s the entire EU enforcing such rules, so it will lead to mass censorship on Twitter, Pixiv and other art pages. “Social media” also applies to let’s say Pixiv, because User Generated Content can be shared with other users who can also communicate with one another. Seeing how Germany banned one of the largest platforms regarding fan fiction, because of a few russian fictional stories containing minors it seems very likely. So yes, a few bad apples can and will lead to legal actions if not acted on. Will platforms risk the entire EU as their Users, because of some art that is controversial anyways? Most likely not. Will they risk 10% of annual earnings in penalty, for every time they dont obey a request? Most likely not.

2024 will be a very interesting year regarding censorship and I am honestly very curious how the world, platforms and users will react.

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I don’t see it being much of a big deal. What it will lead to is more of the same - individual nation-states bickering with one another, pressuring other countries to remove content that is illegal in their own country but not the home of the service it’s being hosted on with said service owners stepping up and either telling them “no, it’s not CSAM, it’s not exploitative, piss off” repeatedly, or going out of their way to just host their services in a jurisdiction where such complaints can be more safely ignored, which is obviously not an ideal outcome since that would disincentivize content moderation in general.

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Nah. Why would a company pay millions to billions every now and then for a comic? It also, funnily enough, does not matter where the platform is hosted or who it is for. A social media platform has to obey the DSA if a certain user threshold is reached and if it is publicly accessible that is the nature of such a platform. That’s it. Complaints are also dealt with by a central EU body that acts for the national agency, so it’s a diff. power dynamic.

Also, there have been new attempts to censor porn:

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