Social Media, Hamas and the EU Digital Services Act

It is no big surprise that disinformation and misinformation is running rampant on all social media in the wake of the war between Israel and Hamas. What is different this time is that, at least for large social media platforms like Meta and Twitter, is that they have two choices – Block all traffic from Europe or deal with the problem.

Item 1: EU industry chief Thierry Breton on Thursday gave TikTok 24 hours to detail measures taken to counter the spread of disinformation following Palestinian Islamist group Hamas’ attack on Israel.

Breton told TikTok’s CEO to get their act together. He told TikTok that he had indications that it was being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation.

The EU Digital Services Act has significant teeth including fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s global revenue and/or blocking them from the continent.

The EU sent similar letters to Twitter, Meta’s Facebook, so TikTok is not being singled out. Credit: Cybernews

Item 2: Twitter says they have removed hundreds of Hamas affiliated accounts and taken action to remove or label tens of thousands of pieces of content since the beginning of the Hamas attack.

The EU gave Twitter 24 hours, like with TikTok, to get moving.

The challenge for Twitter is that they laid off virtually all of their content moderation team, so they don’t really have the staff to comply. Twitter’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, said they had “redistributed resources” and “refocused internal teams”, whatever that means. My guess is that words like that, alone, are not going to keep Thierry happy.

Twitter really doesn’t need a massive showdown with the EU right now.

They said that they have responded to “more than 80 take-down requests received in the EU within the required timeline and has not received any notices from Europol regarding illegal content”.

Assume that the EU will escalate this and it will take significant resources on the part of social media to corral this. Credit: Cybernews

For social media, this is going to be new normal when any new high-profile news item appears. They are going to need to figure out how to dynamically scale up when the need arises.

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