On June 20, an EU committee will vote on mandatory copyright filters
– the idea that everything that gets posted to an EU service should be
checked for copyright violations by a machine learning system that will
decide what gets published and what gets censored.
These filters don’t even exist yet; the closest we come is YouTube’s
Content ID, which Google created voluntarily, and which is notorious for
acts of arbitrary, incorrect censorship. Google spent $60,000,000
building Content ID, so that’s the table stakes for any new online
service.
That’s what makes the far right European parties’ support of this
proposal so weird. The big online platforms have increasingly been
deputized to police their users’ speech, and right-wing forums were the
first casualties of this drive, prompting the right to start its own
versions of Twitter, Reddit, etc. They were able to do this, in part,
because they didn’t have to pony up $60,000,000 for a copyright filter
(if you’re not politically aligned with the far right, you should still
be worried about this: when the FBI classes #BlackLivesMatter as Black Identity Extremists and the US government uses anti-terrorism tactics
against the Dakota Access Pipeline protesters, the ability of people
with unpopular ideas to start their own services if they are made
unwelcome on the big platforms has never been more urgent).
In a rare and extremely timely incidence of coincidental providence, one
of the largest partners in the far-right block in the EU, France’s
Front National, just had its YouTube channel “TVLibertés” deleted
because Content ID claimed it contained copyright infringement, a claim
disputed by FN leader Marine Le Pen, who called it “arbitrary,
political, and unilateral.“
The vote is in THREE DAYS, and if the FN MEPs reverse their positions (they are Marie-Christine Boutonnet @MCBoutonnetFN and Gilles Lebreton @Gilles_Lebreton)
then the filters will almost certainly die. If they vote for the
radical expansion of the system that just killed their own party’s
YouTube channel, it will probably pass, to their detriment and the
detriment of hundreds of millions of EU internet users.
