Germany's new law can fine Facebook, Twitter up to $57-million for hate speech

So no anti-Semitic or other violence against minority groups then?

Glad to hear it.

I was trying to point out that while your argument was that open debate would be more effective, it doesn’t actually seem to do a better a job in reducing the incidence of violence. I’m thrilled to learn this isn’t the case.

I’m not saying that bans on kinds of speech are the answer but clearly just allowing a free-for-all also doesn’t appear to be working.

Clearly something else is necessary - obviously neither you nor I know what. More education has been tried but I think weirdly is often counterproductive.

For example, I and everyone of my generation had the lead-up to WWII and the rise of Nazism, the collective guilt of the German people etc., etc. pretty solidly rammed down my throat at school.

Anecdotally, I gather that pushed a whole bunch of people over into the Right/neo-Nazi groups or at least made them extra defensive to any accusation of racism or bigotry.

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Yes. Two reasons that’s different:

  1. Facebook is slightly bigger and more powerful than the bbs.
  2. The bbs is not a social network. A group discussion needs stricter moderation in order to work at all, whereas a social network doesn’t really need any rules that society at large does not need.

I did not say those things are the same. I was just pointing out a parallel. The point is, bar fights are made illegal in order to protect people from being involved in bar fights against their will, and for no other reason. By the same token, legislating against insults, libel or hate speech does not need to serve any purpose beyond reducing insults, libel, or hate speech.

Doesn’t compute.
A rise in infractions against those laws was pretty much to be expected, given that with the advent of the internet it has become much easier to break them and much harder to enforce them. Also, the political climate is currently slightly more charged, so insults are more likely to happen.

If pickpocketing crime is increasing in a country where the people are getting poorer and where there is more crowded public transport than there used to be, does that in anyway constitute an argument for legalizing pickpocketing?

But of course, in a way, I even agree with you. The Austrian laws against insults or libel, for example, protect nothing but the sensibilities of polite society. Just like laws against theft protect nothing but the sensibilities of a property-based society, and laws against bar fights protect the sensibilities of a nonviolent society. And while I might agree with you that these sensibilities are on different orders of importance, I do want all of these societal sensibilities protected.

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You’re right. It is different. But it is also similar. It’s a difference of scale and ability to monitor. But it also at its base a system for posting and replies.

But I’d still rather tell a private entity to fuck off and use something else, or begrudgingly adhere to their standards, than have the government directly involved. Your direct power to vote someone out is pretty damn small. With the dual party system, in places it is impossible to vote someone out because their voter base grossly out numbers the others. Plus when they pass a law it affects EVERYONE, not just users of one site.

Conversely, because Facebook and others are into making money, pubic back lash and voting with your dollars/use can force them to change much, much quicker than via the 4 year election cycle. Even voting in new people may not be enough as there isn’t still enough votes for what you want.

I always get very confused when people bring this argument.

Your power to directly affect voting outcomes is small - you have one vote (unless you’re cheating of course).

Ok, how is your power to directly affect an organisation the size of Facebook any greater?

You have one set of eyeballs. If you take them away, Facebook does not give a toss.

The only way to actually get them to change anything is if you get enough other people to agree with you and do the same thing.

Which is kinda the same for voting.

What am I missing here?

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I’d be really curious to see some good math comparing rise of hate crimes in the US vs Germany over the same time period as the official in question cited. Even given that it may be measuring different things, I’m gonna bet that your estimation may not quite be correct.

Seems to have worked better overall but I guess its a matter of perspective.

It may make a certain kind of “just so” sense, but I’m sure things are probably much more complicated. There’s the basic part of human nature that leads to this kind of thing and the fact that the whole concept of Volk predates the run up to the Reich by a good while as far as I know.

By my reckoning the purpose is to make someone feel they “did something” about the problem but pretty obviously in terms of reduction, that aint happening.

I think your a missing political power vs consumer power.

Politicians can afford to piss off nearly half the people they need to vote for them, as long as they can energize over half to vote for them.

Facebook, Pepsi, Dell, everyone, really, doesn’t want to piss off 50%, not even 20 or 30%. In an ideal world EVERYONE will use their product. So a misstep that cuts profits by 10% is most likely going to result in a private company doing something different. If they think said change will help.

As you can see with politicians, they rarely succumb to smaller pressures - only if it looks like their base is going to turn will they change. And even then not always.

You are right that its similar in that the only way to get them to change is to get enough people to agree with you and demand change. That is why companies won’t bow to EVERY whim. But enough outrage and lost of customers and they will.

Now, note I like this for some things, and not others. We are specifically talking about free speech, vs things like polluting the environment or making unsafe products. In that case government oversight is required because people are bastards and will try to get away with it if they can.

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It is, right up to the point where it isn’t.

It is always higher than the chance of voting out a board member of a private entity though.

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Hmm? Double standards - does not compute.

But seriously, I agree these things are difficult. I think we can all point to things we’re absolutely happy for governments to regulate (or even think that government regulation is absolutely necessary for) and others that we don’t want them regulating.

The problem is not everyone agrees on the same ones.

For those of you in the US, you can rest in peace knowing your right to spew whatever you want onto the internet will only be constrained by the benevolent invisible hand of the market (and of course the same apparently now goes for whatever you choose to spew into the environment :frowning: )

We in Europe will continue to languish under the totalitarian control of our elected governments.

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True, close races are decided by a few votes. They still had to wait how many years it was since the previous vote, and now have to wait more for them to pass a new law - if they can. Government is SLOW to change. It’s the nature of the Bureaucratic beast. Corporations can be slow too, but they can fast track hot topics.

My point though on these matters is not giving government that much power. (Though in this case, Germany already had it, now they are enforcing it.) Not a week goes by with out some article on BB cautioning about government wanting to regulate encryption, or increase copyright laws, or the government surveillance, or have access to private data.

So pardon me if I am not ready to applaud Germany’s new law quite yet.

So can governments, but it tends to be frowned upon except in cases of emergency.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not applauding it. I just don’t trust Facebook and twitter to self-police themselves. It’s one of those issues where I go all anarcho-communist and annoying.

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But giving/not giving governments that sort of power is a democratic process in itself.

If you think corporations won’t do the right thing in one field (environmental protection), why would you think they’ll do it in another?

Governments can move damn quickly when they think their voters are against them.

If their voters aren’t, well you’re in the same boat as with a corporation except that a country’s voters number far fewer than say Facebook has total users. Your chances of persuading enough voters in your country to vote your way are much better than getting enough people in the entire world thinking your way.

See for example the fact that Facebook does sod all about speech that many Germans find entirely unacceptable (and it’s clearly not some principled stance against interference with free speech because they happily remove all sorts of content).

That’s ok, I don’t think anyone is asking you to.

Edit to add: I’m just going to leave this to @the_borderer! Their posts are making the same points in less than half the words. :wink:

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Ever heard of the DMCA? Similar situation. If Youtube does not remove copyright infringing content uploaded by someone else it will get sued and have to pay a fine too.

Let’s not forget that hate speech can radicalize youthful/vulnerable populations. We have very stark recent proof of that fact. It’s not just about decency.

There’s enough hate now on the internet under the auspices of “freedom”. History has showed us that hate can be learned by it being socially acceptable, costing actual lives.

Censorship is a hard problem to solve, (hell I wrestle with the proper application of such rules daily here), but the lack of it has proven irrefutably that it is necessary to prevent violence.

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Oh right, you just “accidentally” vote them into office. My mistake.

Also, it’s not a new law really, they’re just applying their current and long-standing “We’d appreciate it if you would not be nazis, thanks” regulations to websites that have been harboring nazis for the last decade with impunity.

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I wasn’t aware of actual proof, like verified proof. For sure there may well be correlation between people checking out stuff on the internet and then taking lives, but it seems theres a whole lot of other factors involved that make proof kinda hard to establish as causation.

Even if so, wouldn’t the “Superman vs the KKK” be a case for free speech countering bad speech and thus it would cut both ways?

Merely because something can be uttered aloud does not mean it is “speech.” There are many things which are not protected speech:

  • Libel
  • Slander
  • Plagiarism
  • Threats against an individual
  • Incitement to violence
  • Yelling “FIRE” in a crowded theater that is not actually on fire

These things are not regarded as speech because no right is absolute. Your comparison with serial murderers being given due process is irrelevant to the issue.

So my question is still: why should hate speech be protected speech?

A similar excuse is made by Facebook for obliging the time of volunteers instead of paying them for moderation; this is merely a left-handed defense of corporate parasitism. (Also pertinent.)

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Current UK figures off racist attacks quoted by several news outlets recently had an increase of more than 100%. I’m not sure if this qualifies as proof in your sense, nor an I sure about the source of the figure, etc., but I think this might possibly be an interesting research subject for you.

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To come back to this: I don’t know, yet. But I will soon find out, I believe. This is the casus knactus, as my uncle would have said: the whole thing might break if no-one is actually enforcing it. But who has the person-hours to do that? Surely not the courts?

[Edit just FTR: the law speaks about “obviously” punishable content which must be deleted within 24h. This might actually mean that the platforms need to employ some humans with basic legal training in local law to review flagging from Germany. IDK, is this really different from what they should have done some time ago?]

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Before, you asked why it was considered “speech”. Now, you’re asking why it should be considered “protected speech”. So you fixed the thing I was objecting to.
My point was that you should be explicit about weighing the right to free speech against other rights. I have the right to say anything I want unless there is a specific reason why my exercising that right interferes with other people’s rights. So all those things are speech, they just lose out against other people’s rights and are therefore not protected.
And my due process example is very relevant. When people say “libel is not speech”, they are pretending that this is always a clear-cut case and no further consideration (“due process”) is needed, when in fact the speech in question should be considered innocent until proven guilty.

It is much easier for a big, profitable company to do the necessary moderation at scale than it is for a small startup. All the current giants got big without having to moderate (much), and now they can afford it.

What reduction are you looking for? The new German law is a new, untried and in my opinion misguided, attempt to enforce existing laws. We don’t know yet if it will work and how bad the collateral damage will be.
The laws against insults, libel and hate speech, however, have been in place for a long time. What kind of “reduction” are you expecting from a law that has always been on the books and was much easier to enforce until very recently?

There has been nothing comparable to Gamergate around here, though. Politicians are less likely to talk about having someone assassinated, executed or locked up. It’s been a few decades since religious leaders have publicly condemned anyone to hell.
This might not all be a consequence of the laws, but neither does it support your conclusion that it “obviously aint happening”.

I posted a link to the law earlier. The law obliges social networks to delete “obviously illegal” content within 24 hours and “all illegal” content within 7 days of being notified by the general public. The Bundesamt für Justiz may impose a fine if the complaint handling has not been implemented properly. To do that, they must ask a court to judge on specific cases.

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