Liz Carolan takes the pen this week, sharing news of our newest team member, exciting events, and news that caught our eye, including getting insight into the EU’s VLOPs.
It has been another busy week here at Digital Action. On Thursday we held the second meeting of the brilliant global campaign Working Group looking to establish the “asks” for our upcoming campaign. The idea is to drill down into what will actually make a difference when it comes to what social media companies can do to ensure the 70+ countries facing elections in 2024 have protections relative to the risks they face. Next step is to firm up these demands, and get into the fun part – thinking about positioning & messaging at our next global partner convening in early March. Shout if you would like to be on the invite list for that.
We also are planning ahead to a number of events at the Skoll Foundation World Forum, happening in Oxford in the UK in April. We have just had approval to hold a community event, which will be open to the public, and will be a great opportunity to meet people from near and far. We should also have a speaking slot during the Forum, which feels like a really solid opportunity to continue to pursue our goal of bringing more great people (and funders!) into the tech accountability field. If you are planning to be in the neighbourhood let me know!
Our team Slack channel was abuzz this week with the ongoing drumbeat of news continuing to shape the context we work in. This included the Guardian / Le Monde / Der Speigel etc. investigative reporting into the “black ops” disinformation / manipulation “team for hire“, and the reporting of Center for Countering Digital Hate‘s report that Twitter stands to make $19m from reinstating just 10 previously banned “toxic” accounts. It had us thinking a lot about the question of different roles of bad actors vs. corporations, and where to think about both responsibility – and accountability – for harms.
This week was also the deadline for tech companies to declare how many active monthly EU users they have, which would determine whether they count as “Very Large Online Platforms”. This isn’t semantic, whether platforms have more than 45 million EU users is a key determine whether the most stringent of the EU new DSA rules will apply to them. Mark Scott has the run down of those that fall into this category – a great reminder in particular of the quiet power of YouTube which has 400m users!
There has been a lot of discussion among our partners outside of Europe about the potential impact the DSA might have globally, including fears of selective “copy + paste” jobs where more malign regimes pick and choose what they like. There is some really good work being done onto potential extraterritorial impact of the DSA by our friends at the firm AWO (led by Mathias Vermeulen), if anyone is keen to dig into this question more, they are the people to talk to.