#VLOP

[mangomagicaart]

It's Christmas. Drawing some silly grumpuses for moots

@wiishingstarss @jenevipcoraz @orb-the-watchman (with a tiny Triffany)

[blopblog]

blopvlop

blopvlop

blopvl;op

[trendynewsnow]

European Commission Investigates Temu for Violations of Digital Services Act

European Commission Launches Investigation into Temu for Potential DSA Violations The European Commission has initiated formal proceedings against the Chinese online platform Temu, examining its compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Founded by PDD Holdings in 2022, Temu is currently under scrutiny for several issues, including the sale of illegal products and the design features of…

[head-post]

Pornhub challenges natural name disclosure under Digital Services Act at Europe’s highest court

Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, is appealing to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to avoid having to disclose the real names of users in its ad repository, as required by the Digital Services Act (DSA) designation.

The company “specifically requested relief from disclosing the natural names of those who advertise on Pornhub, which includes sex workers and performers, because it will make their names publicly available and searchable in the repository,” a spokesperson stated.

Aylo filed a separate appeal against the European Commission’s designation of Pornhub as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) under the DSA. Other companies, such as Amazon and Zalando, have similarly attempted to appeal their designation.

The DSA, the EU’s landmark content moderation law, considers platforms or search engines with more than 45 million monthly users in the EU as VLOPs or very large online search engines (VLOSEs), which must follow certain obligations, including transparency.

The list of companies includes social networks Instagram and TikTok, search engines, such as Google Search and Bing, and e-commerce sites like AliExpress.

Designation issues

Under the DSA, Pornhub is required to publicly disclose a database of all of its advertisers, including information about advertising and how it is targeted. Alessandro Polidoro, an independent lawyer coordinating the coalition of NGOs called the Digital Intimacy Coalition, which pushed for porn VLOPs designation, stated:

“Sex workers’ safety is a must, but now it looks like Aylo wants to use this as an excuse to delay the application [of the DSA].”

Once made public, the data would be difficult to manage and could seriously damage advertising strategies and partnerships, an Aylo spokesperson said, echoing Amazon’s arguments.

Natural persons are entitled to be recognised in legal documents through stage names, pen names, or other forms of artistic pseudonyms. By this logic, the court could rule that stage names can be used by natural persons in the ad repository as well.

Three porn sites first listed on VLOP as adult platforms, Xvideos, Stripchat, and Pornhub, sued the EU over their obligations in March. In June, the EU executive requested detailed information on DSA compliance from the three sites.

In an appeal of its VLOP designation, Aylo argued that the Commission had miscalculated the number of its users and stated that Pornhub did not exceed the DSA’s threshold of 45 million monthly active users. The Commission argued that its figures were correct, and Aylo’s legal challenge regarding that aspect remained pending.

This month, the Commission labelled XNXX as a VLOP, making it the fourth adult site to follow the digital law.

Read more HERE

[jenevipcoraz]

did some moots as well cuz why not :)

@mangomagicaart @wiishingstarss @orb-the-watchman

[wiishingstarss]

VLOP GIFS!!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Middlemen without enshittification

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me next in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

Enshittification describes how platforms go bad, which is also how the internet goes bad, because the internet is made of platforms, which is weird, because platforms are intermediaries and we were promised that the internet would disintermediate the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

The internet did disintermediate a hell of a lot of intermediaries – that is, "middlemen" – but then it created a bunch more of these middlemen, who coalesced into a handful of gatekeepers, or as the EU calls them "VLOPs" (Very Large Online Platforms, the most EU acronym ever).

Which raises two questions: first, why did so many of us end up flocking to these intermediaries' sites, and how did those sites end up with so much power?

To answer the first question, I want you to consider one of my favorite authors: Crad Kilodney (RIP):

https://archive.org/details/thecradkilodneypapers

When I was growing up, Crad was a fixture on the streets of Toronto. All through the day and late into the evening, winter or summer, Crad would stand on the street with a sign around his neck ("Very famous Canadian author, buy my books, $2" or sometimes just "Margaret Atwood, buy my books, $2"). He wrote these deeply weird, often very funny short stories, which he edited, typeset, printed, bound and sold himself, one at a time, to people who approached him on the street.

I had a lot of conversations with Crad – as an aspiring writer, I was endlessly fascinated by him and his books. He was funny, acerbic – and sneaky. Crad wore a wire: he kept a hidden tape recorder rolling in his coat and he secretly recorded conversations with people like me, and then released a series of home-duplicated tapes of the weirdest and funniest ones:

https://archive.org/details/on-the-street-crad-kilodney-vol-1

I love Crad. He deserves more recognition. There's an on-again/off-again documentary about his life and work that I hope gets made some day:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#putrid-scum

But – and this is the crucial part – there are writers out there I want to hear from who couldn't do what Crad did. Maybe they can write books, but not edit them. Or edit them, but not typeset them. Or typeset, but not print. Or print, but not spend the rest of their lives standing on a street-corner with a "PUTRID SCUM" sign around their neck.

Which is fine. That's why we have intermediaries. I like booksellers (I was one!). I like publishers. I like distributors. I like their salesforce, who go forth and convince the booksellers of the world to stock books like mine. I have ten million things I want to do before I die, and I'm already 52, and being a sales-rep for a publisher isn't on my bucket list. I am so thankful that someone else wants to do this for me.

That's why we have intermediaries, and why disintermediation always leads to some degree of re-intermediation. There's a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge and specialized skill required to connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, and other sides of two-sided markets. Some producers can do some of this stuff for themselves, and a very few – like Crad – can do it all, but most of us need some help, somewhere along the way. In the excellent 2022 book Direct, Kathryn Judge lays out a clear case for all the good that middlemen can do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

So why were we all so anxious for disintermediation back in the late 1990s? Here's a hint: it wasn't because we hated intermediaries – it was because we hated powerful intermediaries.

The point of an intermediary is to serve as a conduit between producers and consumers, buyers and sellers, audiences and creators. When an intermediary gains power over the audience – say, by locking them inside a walled garden – and then uses that lock-in to screw producers and appropriate an ever larger share of the value going between them, that's when intermediaries become a problem.

The problem isn't that someone will handle ticketing for your gig. The problem is that Ticketmaster has locked down all the ticketing, and the venues, and the promotions, and it uses that power to gouge fans and rip off artists:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/

The problem isn't that there's a well-made website that lets you shop for goods sold by many small merchants and producers. It's that Amazon has cornered this market, takes $0.51 out of every dollar you spend there, and clones and destroys any small merchant who succeeds on the platform:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

The problem isn't that there's a website where you can stream most of the music ever recorded. It's that Spotify colludes with the Big Three labels to rip off artists and sneaks crap you don't want to hear into your stream in order to collect payola:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

The problem isn't that there's a website where you can buy any audiobook you want. It's that Amazon's Audible locks every book to its platform forever and steals hundreds of millions of dollars from creators:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power. The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power. Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture their regulators and commit rampant labor, privacy and consumer violations with impunity. That capture also lets them harness governments to punish smaller players that want to free workers, creators, audiences and customers from walled gardens. It also hands them a whip-hand over their workers, so that any worker who refuses to aid in these nefarious plans can be easily fired:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

A world with intermediaries is a better world. As much as I love Crad Kilodney's books, I wouldn't want to live in a world where the only books on my shelves came from people prepared to stand on a street-corner wearing a "FOUL PUS FROM DEAD DOGS" sign.

The problem isn't intermediaries – it's powerful intermediaries. That's why the world's surging antitrust movement is so exciting: by reinstating competition law, we can keep intermediaries small and comparatively weak, so that creators and audiences, drivers and riders, sellers and buyers, and other groups seeking to connect will not find themselves made subservient to middlemen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

[azspot]

After decades of regulations aimed at making platforms behave better, we're finally moving into a new era, where we just make the platforms less important. That is, rather than simply ordering Facebook to block harassment and other bad conduct by its users, laws like the EU's Digital Markets Act will order Facebook and other VLOPs (Very Large Online Platforms, my favorite EU-ism ever) to operate gateways so that users can move to rival services and still communicate with the people who stay behind.

How to design a tech regulation

[themoodyestj]

Up it you go

Take it to it, don't merk it

Vlopping will see you

Do not fear the paw

Swipe it up

Blork the way of it

You'll be just fine!

POET ANON!

[mariacallous]

As part of a wider attempt to curb revenge porn and child sexual abuse, the European Commission has designated the well-known adult companies Pornhub, Stripchat and XVideos as Very Large Online Platforms, VLOPs, which means they will come under closer scrutiny.

“I welcome the designations of Pornhub, XVideos and Stripchat as Very Large Online Platforms. It will allow for higher scrutiny and accountability of their algorithms and processes. The DSA [Digital Services Act] demonstrates once again that it is an essential tool to ensure that technology respects the fundamental rights of European citizens,” Margrethe Vestager, Vice-President of Europe Fit for the Digital Age, said.

By February 17, 2024, the three companies will need to adopt specific measures to protect minors from harmful content and address the dissemination of illegal content.

Pornhub is a pornography video-sharing website based in Cyprus. Stripchat [Technius Ltd.], also based in Cyprus, is a live sex and entertainment community, and XVideos, based in the Czech Republic, is a pornographic video-sharing and viewing website. According to the Commission, the three companies fulfil the threshold of 45 million average monthly users in the EU.

“The criteria to determine if a platform is “very large” in the sense of the Digital Services Act are very straightforward,” stated Thierry Breton, Commissioner for the Internal Market.

“Any online platform with more than 45 million users in the EU has special obligations because of its scale. We have already designated 19 Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines. We will continue to designate platforms that meet the thresholds and make sure that they comply with their obligations under the DSA … creating a safer online environment for our children is an enforcement priority under the DSA,” he added.

Pornhub on its website wrote that it has 33 million average monthly users, not 45 million: “As of July 31, 2023, Pornhub has 33 million average monthly recipients of the service in the European Union, calculated as an average over the period of the past six months,” it said.

The Commission’s decision comes amid rising concern about revenge porn and child sexual abuse.

Revenge porn, on its own, is not defined as a criminal offence in most Balkan countries. Greece made it an independent criminal offence in the criminal code in 2022 following the case of a TV presenter, Stathis Panagiotopoulos, who shared the sexual content of his partner on a porn platform. Besides that change, the porn industry is unregulated in Greece.

The Commission under the DSA designated 17 VLOPs and 2 Very Large Online Search Engines, VLOSEs, in April 2023, aiming to protect users online, including minors, requiring the companies to assess and mitigate their systemic risks and to provide robust content moderation tools.

The designated platforms were Alibaba AliExpress, Amazon Store, Apple AppStore, Booking.com, Facebook, Google Play, Google Maps, Google Shopping, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, Zalando, Bing and Google Search.

[thisismissem]

So Mr Mullenweg's response to this isn't just absolved by a statement likely drafted in collaboration with a PR agency. It's easy to see when you're doing damage control.

Even though Mr Mullenweg's comments may not reflect the trans & LGBTQI+ folks that work at his companies, he still should be held accountable for his actions and the harm caused.

This incident was so bad it was even reported on by TechCrunch, a subsidiary of your former parent company Yahoo.

Your CEO should NOT be following users off site and disclosing potentially private information about users of the platform. That is a huge red flag and violation of user trust and privacy.

At the moment, according to your own statistics for press, you have 135 million monthly active users. The EU's DSA legislation defines any platform larger than 45 million monthly active users as a Very Large Online Platform. That means that the platform has specific procedures amd reporting it must follow. Whilst Tumblr hasn't yet been specifically named as a VLOP, you meet the threshold for classification. Here are parts of the legislation that you're not currently complying with:

Notice & appeals process: at the moment, when tumblr deletes an account, you just delete it without warning, and often our friends end up messaging us like "are you okay? noticed your account disappeared?". Contacting tumblr to ask if the account has been deleted often results in silence. Even Mastodon has a better built-in notice and appeals process!

Transparency Reports on Moderation Decisions: Currently Tumblr doesn't appear to publish any aggregate information regarding moderation decisions, nor the type of content being moderated against. In my conversations and experiences, you spend way more time policing queerness and adult content, than you do dealing with detrans content being published to the trans hashtag, which leads your recommendations system (which also must be opt-out under law) to push detrans content into the feeds of trans users.

Repository of all ads served on the platform: to my knowledge you don't have this, and additionally your ads very often do not comply with your community guidelines. I regularly get ads for violent content on my blog, despite opting out of seeing violent content. If a user opts out of seeing violent content, that should apply to advertising as well. Community Guidelines that are not equally enforced for both people using the service and advertisers using the service aren't community guidelines, they're reasons to ban people from the service.

Something that may also be worth doing is updating the site's rules following GLAAD's guidelines on Targeted Deadnaming, Misgendering, and Promotion of Conversion Therapies. Additionally, IFTAS, the non-profit that does trust & safety advice for the Fediverse has a good write up on these policies (disclaimer: I'm an advisor to IFTAS).

On the note of Community Labels, these are currently, from my experience, mostly used as a way to placate Apple, and to ban queer blogs which often feature sexual content as we connect with our communities that are ever so fractured in offline society. That hopefully isn't the intent of this feature.

If you want to encourage users to adopt community labels, you need to facilitate a culture of trust around them. If you want blogs that post content not suitable for children, then you need to do it in a way that doesn't carry harm, stigma or marginalisation, unlike your predecessor's at Yahoo & Verizon.

I'd suggest the following changes:

Allow blogs to mark themselves as adult-only spaces.

Restore images to the notifications on current "nsfw blogs"

Restore tagging and search within these blogs such that users can make full use of the platforms features (e.g., default adult blogs out of recommendations & site-wide search to other non-adult blogs, but keep them searchable from the blog itself and findable by other adult blogs.

Restore the ability to tag our friends that are tagged as adult blogs (very often this is broken)

Add functionality that notifies users when a post of theirs is potentially missing a community label, this encourages building the community you want to see.

Expand content labels further to cover other harmful or traumatising content (e.g., gambling, addiction, anorexia/EDs, political content, etc)

Restore the ability for adult blogs to have avatars and header images, if these blogs aren't available to non-adult audiences, there should be no problem here. Obviously, you may want to prohibit explicit pornography from this media from being allowed (we had a similar policy on Switter.at)

Allow blogs to require follow requests & to block empty blogs or blogs with no title from following them — often these are throw-away accounts of children trying to access adult content.

Basically, make the platform features that help build the community you want to see. Build tools that help build trust after over a decade of trust being eroded by the previous owners. Help blogs and people stay safe whilst using your platform.

One part of content moderation is punitive actions, which are all too commonly the only part of content moderation that very large online platforms focus on, but the other part is setting and promoting community standards and giving users the tools to accurately label their content & control who can see their content.

When you moderation features are used to police adult blogs, this results in a disproportionately larger impact to the LGBTQ+ community, who are often much more comfortable discussing and sharing their sexuality and material related to it. For instance, two women kissing in gifs, who may be naked but aren't explicitly so, does that need a mature or sexual community label to it?

Finally, please remember: You cannot have freedom of expression without prohibiting some expression (see the paradox of tolerance)

A message from a few of the trans staff at Tumblr & Automattic:

We want trans people, and LGBTQ+ people broadly, to feel welcome on Tumblr, in part because we as trans people at Tumblr and Automattic want it to be a space where we ourselves feel included. We want to feel like this is a platform that supports us and fights for our safety. Tumblr is made brighter and more vibrant by your presence, and the LGBTQ+ folks who help run it are fighting all the time for this, for you, internally. 

A few days ago, Matt Mullenweg (the CEO of Automattic, Tumblr’s parent company) responded to a user’s ask about an account suspension in a way that negatively affected Tumblr’s LGBTQ+ community. We believe that Matt's response to this ask and his continued commentary has been unwarranted and harmful. Tumblr staff do not comment on moderation decisions as a matter of policy for a variety of reasons—including the privacy of those involved, and the practicalities of moderating thousands of reports a day. The downside of this policy is that it is very easy for rumors and incorrect information about actions taken by our Trust & Safety team to spread unchecked. Given this, we want to clarify a few different pieces of this situation:

The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension.

Matt thereafter failed to recognize the harm to the community as a result of this suspension. Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic, and we were not consulted in the construction of a response to these events.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr. 

Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.

When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

Going forward, Tumblr is taking the following actions:

Prioritizing anti-harassment features that will empower users to more effectively protect themselves from harassment.

Building more internal tooling for us as Staff to proactively identify and mitigate instances of harassment.

Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

We’re sorry for how this all transpired, and we’re actively fighting to make our voices heard more and prevent something like this from happening again in the future. We know firsthand that having to deal with situations like this as a Tumblr user is difficult, particularly as a member of an already frequently targeted and harassed community. We know it will take time to regain your trust, and we’re going to put in the work to rebuild it.

We appreciate the space we have been given to express our concerns and dissent, and we are thankful that Matt’s (and Automattic’s) strong commitment to freedom of expression has facilitated it.

We will continue to fight to make Tumblr safe for us all.

— This statement was authored by multiple trans employees of Tumblr and Automattic.

[gerdfeed]

As a very large online platform (VLOP), X is already under the scrutiny of the Digital Services Act (DSA) for misleading “verified” checkmarks, lacking advertising transparency and restricting researcher's access to public data.

The Brief – Leaving X makes makes it worse

[darkmaga-returns]

What started out as the EU’s “voluntary code of practice” concerning “disinformation” – affecting tech/social media companies – is now set to turn into a mandatory code of conduct for the most influential and widely-used ones.

The news was revealed by the Irish media regulator, specifically an official of its digital services, Paul Gordon, who spoke to journalists in Brussels. The EU Commission has yet to confirm that January will be the date when the current code will be “formalized” in this way.

The legislation that would enable the “transition” is the controversial Digital Services Act (DSA), which critics often refer to as the “EU online censorship law,” the enforcement of which started in February of this year.

The “voluntary” code is at this time signed by 44 tech companies, and should it become mandatory in January 2025, it will apply to those the EU defines as Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) (with at least 45 million monthly active users in the 27-nation bloc).

Currently, the number of such platforms is said to be 25.

[korrektheiten]

„Was gerade passiert, ist eine Gefahr für die freie Meinung und damit für die Demokratie“

Tichy:»„Seit der Einführung des Digital Services Act (DSA) sind vor allem die Zensurbestrebungen der EU gegenüber den sogenannten very-large-online-platforms (VLOPs), allen voran Elon Musks X, im Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit. Dabei sollte nicht in Vergessenheit geraten, dass auch auf nationaler Ebene die freie Meinungsäußerung im Internet unter dem Banner des Kampfes gegen Hass reguliert werden soll. Der Beitrag „Was gerade passiert, ist eine Gefahr für die freie Meinung und damit für die Demokratie“ erschien zuerst auf Tichys Einblick. http://dlvr.it/TF910C «

[jenevipcoraz]

since @wiishingstarss is on tumblr,,,,,,

gonna post Vlop's voice headcanon vid (Manberg from Wendell and Wild being his voice) here as well!!!!

(Wii already saw it but gonna post it here too)