Somini Sengupta in the NYT reports on Twitter’s agreement this week, after months of legal battling, to ID several users who posted anti-Semitic comments on its service, whom French authorities want to prosecute for violating hate speech laws. The case has important implications for Twitter users worldwide, as governments increasingly try to extract user information… READ THE REST
And this is why we have the first amendment.
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Don’t get started with “Europe doesn’t have free speech”. We have free speech, but we have a different definition - one that excludes hate speech. Free speech has it limits in the US too: ref. obscenity.
and free speech and guns is all whats left of civil rights and liberties in the US. France in contrast to the US has no secret courts/laws, no extrajudicial killings, no torture or indefinite detention or those other liberties lost in the US after 9/11.
BTW the first amendment didn’t help a certain texan teenager or the guy writing with chalk on a sidewalk.
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Americans are idiots about dealing with hate speech.
Hate speech is still speech.
America’s FREEDUMS have been slowly eroded in the last half century. Especially the Bill of rights.
1st - OWS crackdowns, “terroristic threats”,
2nd - AWB, gun control
3rd - maybe still intact
4th - Has been raped unmercifully - NSA, PATRIOT act, TSA, DHS, stop and frisk, etc.
5th - Tsarnaev
and a lot more
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Tell that to people who used to not be able to vote, marry etc. Hate Speech has nothing to do with the things you mentioned. It’s funny that you put “gun control” in there too, considering its easier than ever to get guns. Stay on topic if you can…
While I find plenty of Tweets offensive, including anti-semantic ones, this is crazy. Now France gets info to hunt down French Twitter users they don’t like and prosecute them. How long before they’ll want to go to another country and hunt down Twitter users? (Something the EC control freaks would no doubt approve) Twitter should put their foot down now before this gets out of hand and close their office in France and shut France off from Twitter completely until this stops.
We shouldn’t “deal” with hate speech at all. Restricting some forms of speech will eventually lead to suppression of dissent.
I take your point, but there have always been restrictions on free speech, even in the US, and with good reason.
America believes in individual rights. Europe, too, believes in individual rights, but it also believes that societies have rights, and that these may sometimes conflict with individuals’.
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Which must be why the U.S. with it’s broader definition of free speech has more people in prison than any other Western country, including those with restrictions on hate speech, along with more hate groups than those countries as well. Your slippery slope argument is a bust.
France might be one of the most anti-semitic countries in the world. It is perilously close to being state-condoned. You can be sure that, whatever the result of this case with Twitter, the French government will not pursue it.
And yes, I include all of the arab countries.
Pardon?
France has the world’s third largest Jewish population after Israel and the USA and if anti-Semitism has been on the rise it is far, far from being state condoned…
After a peak in the mid 2000s Aliyah figures are stable and around a quarter of those that migrate to Israel come back to France.
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