These Trusted Flaggers are charged with eradicating “hate speech” and “fake news” from social media; platforms that ignore their Trusted Flagging can be fined or face other serious sanctions.
Are you one of those schoolmarm hall-monitor types?
Do you have a screechy voice and do you enjoy looking down your nose at other people?
Do your favourite pastimes include complaining to the manager, telling teenagers not to say bad words and levelling self-superior moral disapproval at everything you don’t like?
Well, then the European Union is just the place for you! Under our fantastic new Digital Services Act (DSA), you can engage in all these recreations, and what is more, you can do so in an official capacity, as a Trusted Flagger!
In places like the United States, censorship is a thing that the three-letter agencies and the major social media platforms have to hash out among themselves behind closed doors. Things are different here in Europe, where the DSA has imposed upon all of us a totally legal censorship regime for the purposes of cracking down on notionally “illegal” internet content. Any censorship regime of course requires censors, and that’s where you, the aspiring Trusted Flagger, come in. This is your golden opportunity.
It’s like this: The DSA requires all EU member states to empower a “Digital Services Coordinator” to enforce our happy new internet rules. And Article 22 of the DSA requires these Coordinators to appoint “Trusted Flaggers” to run about the internet reporting content violations, so that wrongthink can be deleted without unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles or “undue delay.” The DSA obligates all major social media platforms to take Trusted Flagger reports superseriously. They will be the new traffic policeman of our information motorways.
You’ll be happy to know that literally anybody can apply to become a Trusted Flagger, provided he can demonstrate that he has “particular expertise and competence for the purposes of detecting, identifying and notifying illegal content,” that he is “independent from any provider of online platforms,” and that he “carries out his activities … diligently, accurately and objectively.” In Germany, our Digital Services Coordinator is the Bundesnetzagentur, the federal agency responsible for regulating telecommunications. They are accepting Trusted Flagger applications at this very moment! All you have to do is fill out this brief online form! It’s amazing.
Klaus Müller, President of the Bundesnetzagentur, explains his newfound Digital Services Corodinator-authorities in this way:
Have you ever been annoyed, surprised or possibly horrified when you saw images, videos or texts on social platforms where people were defamed or discriminated against, possibly in violent confrontations, and you thought, you shouldn’t have to read or see that? Or where products were offered that couldn’t possibly be real? Many people encounter these kinds of things every day. The European Union has said that what is forbidden in the normal analog world must also in future be forbidden in the digital world. And thanks to the Digital Services Act, the Bundesnetzagentur now bears responsibility for this.
What can we do for you? Well, you can give us your complaints, you can give us information, you can help us to take action against platforms that do not react to your reports … You can help us identify systematic risks that we will address either together with the European Commission in Brussels or here in Germany, so that platforms are a safe place. What we will not do is censor content. That is not our job. It is, however, our job to ensure that people are safe and perhaps a little happier when using social networks and e-commerce platforms. That is our job, as the Federal Network Agency, as the new Digital Service Coordinator.
I want to implore the aspiring Trusted Flaggers among you not to lose heart at Müller’s claim that his new internet policing enterprise will not “censor content.” This is just a polite fiction he has to maintain to keep rabble who are still enamoured of quaint outdated concepts like freedom of expression off his back. In fact he hopes that you, his legions of Trusted Flaggers, will censor as much content as possible. This is why in the very next breath he emphasises that it is his job – and by extension, your job – not merely to make “people … safe,” but also to make them “happier.” As we all know, censorship concerns the enforcement of social and political harmony, particularly in that uncouth and untamed realm known as the internet. It is all about feelings, and it is especially about weaponising hurt feelings to make the online world a less threatening place for pink-haired gender lunatics, the racially aggrieved and everybody else with stupid and shrill political ideas.
In case you are a total idiot (which Trusted Flaggers are likely to be), our Digital Services Coordinator has published an entire sixteen-page instruction manual to help you through the Trusted Flagger application process. These instructions include a helpful appendix enumerating all the things they want you to flag. The third such category of Flaggable Things is “Disallowed Speech,” which includes the usual boring stuff like “defamation” and “death threats,” but also stretches well beyond the bounds of the merely illegal to encompass “discrimination” and “hate speech” too. These, happily, are terms borrowed from Anglosphere race activism discourse; they are totally alien to those sections of the German Criminal Code governing speech. While the DSA claims to be all about targeting illegal content, our aspiring Trusted Flaggers can take heart that those who have busied themselves with applying the DSA have a much more expansive vision. They’re going to make everyone happier online, and as we all know campaigns to make people happier always turn out well in the end.
The applications are rolling in, and our Digital Services Coordinator is happy to announce that he has approved our first Trusted Flagger to assist in forcing websites like X, Instagram and Facebook to remove not only “illegal content,” but also “hate speech and fake news very quickly and without bureaucratic hurdles … to make the internet a safe space.” And who is this first Trusted Flagger, you ask? Well, it is an internet tattle-tale operation run by the Baden-Württemberg Youth Foundation and funded by the Green-controlled Family Ministry.
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