The Machinery

YouTube’s automated filters were already pulling videos of documented war crimes because IS flags appeared in the footage. Not the propaganda itself—just footage showing what was happening. The machine saw the symbol and said no. This was already happening in 2019 with filters companies installed voluntarily. Article 13 would make it mandatory for basically every platform that hosted user content.

The EU’s new copyright law sounded reasonable on the surface—ensure creators get paid, stop unlicensed content. But the upload filter part, Article 13, was something else entirely. Any platform hosting user uploads would have to scan everything against copyright databases before it went live. Billions of files, most of them legal. The filter couldn’t distinguish between a copyright violation and a creative remix, between terrorism and journalism about terrorism. It would just see the match and kill the post.

The people pushing this claimed it would help creators. It wouldn’t. The payment stuff went to publishers and platforms, not the artists actually making things. Meanwhile, the filter requirement was technically impossible for most small platforms to handle. They’d have to outsource it to Google or whoever could afford the infrastructure. Which meant more power to the big companies, not less.

But that wasn’t even the worst part. Once you build the machinery for automated content filtering at scale, you’ve built a tool. And tools get repurposed. Today it’s copyright enforcement. Tomorrow it’s protecting children or preventing extremism or combating misinformation. You’ve created the infrastructure for censorship and handed it to whoever controls the algorithm. And nobody gets to look at how it works—the code stays proprietary, the errors go unchallenged.

The internet people loved—the memes, the remixes, the fan content, the weird recombinations of culture—all of that would choke under this. It’s not designed for that. It’s not designed for nuance. It’s designed to block things, and when your only tool is a ban, everything looks like a violation.

I wasn’t going to fix anything by shouting about it online. But there was a protest in Berlin, and the thing was large enough and strange enough to warrant actually showing up in person. Standing in the street with people who understood why this mattered, holding signs about Article 13 while the machinery of European bureaucracy kept grinding. Maybe it would change nothing. Probably it would change nothing. But the alternative was letting it happen unopposed, and there was something about that I couldn’t accept.