As #Poland is now enacting the EU #DSA into its law, there’s a significant outcry about “censorship” from some political groups… and, of course, the usual #BigTech suspects - #Facebook and #Twitter. Just like the infamous Rubio statement about what these companies were really fined for by EU (for mass-scale scams, not opposition to “censorship”), the censorship argument in DSA is a complete manipulation.
I have many friends who work in incident response, fraud prevention in Poland (and elsewhere) and they seem to be absolutely disgusted by the scale to which these platforms became literally facilitators of the crime, protecting scammers rather than their victims. Here’s what one of them just wrote on LinkedIn:
Why does Facebook, in its business model, consciously profit from scams that are advertised? Why do they accept money from criminals who steal from platform users?
The same Facebook recently banned posts in which CERT Polska and others (including me) warned about the filth pouring into the feed on this portal. They made a silly excuse that ‘it’s the algorithms’…
Here, as a reminder, is a post that quickly disappeared from Facebook for a long time. https://cert.pl/posts/2024/11/Oszustwa-reklamowe-na-duzych-platformach/
So just to reiterate: you can report obvious scams on Facebook as much as you like, but they’re almost never deleted. But then a Polish CERT (computer incident response organisation) posts a warning about scams to Facebook users and Facebook moderation jumps on it in an instant, hiding that post from everyone.
And that’s precisely why not only EU but every country protecting its citizens needs law like DSA.
P.S. on my last visit to Poland I, as usual, had to remove a ton of spyware from my mom’s laptop. She spends plenty of time on Facebook and it’s always “the computer told me I need to install updates”, meaning of course the scam pretending to be Windows messages displayed right in her Faceboook feed.
Dmitry Grozoubinski
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Andrew Stroehlein