Italy on the verge of the stupidest censorship law in European history

I’ll take that as a compliment. As it happens, a quick google search should tell you pretty much everything there is to know about me - I do live in England, but I was born and raised in Italy.

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Prosecutions for libel are widely known to be open to abuse by powerful interests, unless severely restricted. Italian law on the subject is famously very slow and fairly lopsided (although not as bad as, say, the British one), but it exists. Still doesn’t apply here - there was no libel whatsoever.

Nobody blackmailed this woman, she shared the material herself. Regardless, again, there are laws for that.

No, but the idea is the same: “since you can’t stop it, why bother?”

Likewise with the blackmail: “if you don’t want to be blackmailed, don’t do anything blackmailable. The answer to blackmailers is more childhood education.”

No, the answer is to create counterincentives for such harmful behaviors as libel, blackmail, and sharing intimate videos over the subject’s objections. The fact that we have laws covering the first two but are only now considering laws for the third (over the objections like yours) makes it clear where society’s priorities have been.

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the point is that I still have no idea about the grand risk commission. it seems to be a public board of experts, but this is a wild guess on my side - Guido Bertolaso was boss of the civil protection agency and mostly a functionary but I had to google the name to learn this.

You supply more detail, but can you point out where I am substantively wrong?

@abu should have answered that. again, in a rather wordy manner–because these things are complex.

@toyg & I were trying to give you some background on how government bodies / quangos work in Italy in general and also offer some general context.

This seemed important to me because every time the sidelining of experts / expertise comes up the case of these seismologists is rolled out on BBS.

AND they really are not (for many complex reasons) a good example of Academic freedom / integrity / independence or in any way a good case for why the public should heed scientific expertise. Their collusion in the Abruzzo tragedy is actually a case for disregarding experts and their public utterings (note many of them didn’t even turn up to the meeting in the region, and the notes were amended post fact.)

Any seismologist worthy of recognition as a scientific expert will shout from the roof top, that the models are just not good at accurately predicting the timings of earthquakes and vigilance is the peoples’ best friend. Every single time. And I promise you there are Journalist who would and will happily print that!

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detailled background without foreground is for persons without any knowledge about the topic only of limited help. but I found it and can now place your infos

presumably you are deciphering it with google translate. in my experience as a trilingual speaker pretty useless and totally inaccurate. language is about nuance not something algorithms are any good at.

okay, as I am not allowed to interpret machine translations I repeat my initial question about the functions of the Commissione Grandi Rischi (or we could simply drop the whole discussion string, I don’t understand how this got so confrontational)

Libel implies a falsehood; the fact that “lying is bad” is a cornerstone of Law, and offenders should be prosecuted. There was no falsehood here.

I actually think that, yes. It’s called “take responsibility for your own actions”. Regardless, blackmail is punished in a very limited set of circumstances, usually related to extortion or other illegal behaviour resulting from such. There was no extortion or exploitation here.

This is how I can see you’re just parroting some line. Blackmail and libel have been punished for thousands of (and again, in extremely limited circumstances, which get more and more restricted with the years as more and more hypocritical taboos are broken) because they could be done orally! When those laws were created in most places, videos didn’t even exist! “Society’s priorities” have nothing to do with it.

You don’t seem to grasp what happened. If tomorrow BoingBoing became “dishonourable”, you posted here anyway “in secret” and people were insulting you on the street for doing it, would you expect a law to be passed to forbid everyone from mentioning that you were a BoingBoing forum poster? Or would you just say “FUCK YOU, BB IS AWESOME!” to these people and move on? Because that’s what happened - someone miscalculated the “honourability” of their actions in a deeply hypocritical society, that’s all. She was not a victim of extortion, sexual harassment, falsehoods, nothing – she just couldn’t live with the consequences of her own action.

I’m all for punishing people exploiting other people, e.g. filming drunk girls being sexually harassed instead of helping them, profiting from and distributing such exploitative material and so on. But from here to punishing someone because they do the XXI century equivalent of sharing a “scandalous” photo that was consensually taken, without otherwise harassing anyone else, there is a huge leap that sends you straight in the abyss of wanton censorship. The real fix is to teach people to take responsibility for their actions and condemn hypocrisy in all its forms.

no confrontation this end. just trying to explain there is no simple answer to your question, with or without translation.

sometimes it’s worthwhile to listen to those more familiar with a locality.

for me, that is the joy of BBS to hear from people more familiar, knowledgeable… on matters. e.g. far more interested what Italians / or ppl who live in Italy and / or speak the language think of an Italian law than the average punter.

yes. time to drop.

it is always worth the time to listen to better informed. and if I would have known beforehand that the commission is formed on the nation/government level and has a handful of workgroups covering different fields presided by hand selected science functionaries I would have been able to appreciate your background details

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You’re still missing the point. I’m not claiming that there was any libel or blackmail here, I’m just pointing out that they are similar activities we treat as punishable.

This is a straw man, right now (not tomorrow) posting sex tapes of someone against their will is a vile act, an extreme form of defamation, and your insistence that it is merely something “dishonourable” trivializes it unless you mean in the Neopolitan sense of something that the perpetrators should be killed for.

Your continued victim-blaming (“consequences of her own action”) coupled with your insistence that the perpetrators are not guilty of behavior meriting punishment puts you, I believe, pretty far out of the mainstream. That’s OK, I now understand that your response to my question is “we should do nothing, as there was no victim.”

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And I’m pointing out that they are not similar and they are punished in extremely limited cases involving falsehood or illicit financial gain.

Well that’s like, your opinion, man. By your reasoning, posting an email you sent me where you say something “scandalous” should also be punishable by law. And down the rabbit hole we go. (To be fair, the act itself could be punished as copyright infringement; which is fine but would not eradicate societal consequences, i.e. the “shame” that eventually killed her)

No, what she did in the video is considered “dishonourable” because she lives in a bad place. I personally don’t think it is, but clearly she also thought it wasn’t good, because she tried to run from it and eventually couldn’t bear it anymore. This is the exact equivalent to people having affairs in little towns back in the day, and running away or killing themselves because of “shame”; did we make it illegal to talk about who had an affair? No, we just changed our views on the matter so that having an affair would not be something that will stop you from taking out a bank loan or otherwise living in polite society, we legalized divorce, and so on. Stuff happens and we deal with it, we don’t try to pretend it didn’t happen. Yours is the same reasoning that gave use the terrible “right to be forgotten”, a principle so awful that now when I search for solutions to programming problems, I end up wondering if the guy who posted one was a rapist, because google says some results “might have been omitted” to protect someone’s murky past.

Until a law is passed anywhere punishing this behaviour, I’m afraid the one out of the mainstream is you - and that’s a fact. But good show trying to shift the Overton.

in legal terms, no, we shouldn’t do anything. In moral terms, we should keep fighting hypocrisy everywhere we see it. This is goddamn BoingBoing, for fuck’s sake, home of Burning-Man attendees and all that shit. We’re supposed to keep it freaky, not ask for censorship and reinforce the concept of sin and shame.

:slight_smile:
the key term here is science functionaries, which may lead to slippery slops and not necessarily interchangeable with scientific experts.

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[quote=“toyg, post:76, topic:85621”]
Until a law is passed anywhere punishing this behaviour, I’m afraid the one out of the mainstream is you[/quote]
That certainly doesn’t follow. Laws often lag opinion, or ignore it altogether.

However, people posting naked photos of ex-boyfriends and girlfriends have been successfully prosecuted in Australia and New Zealand, and while it is mainly a civil tort in the US 34 US states have enacted criminal laws against it. For example, in California it can bring you 6 months in jail (California Senate Bill 255). And as you surely know if you live in England, over 200 people have been prosecuted in the last year under the new UK laws. France has a similar law. So no, entirely mainstream, and even here on BB most people respect privacy and understand that posting people’s sex tapes against their will is not OK.

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Yeah, and to be honest, that law is another tilting at windmills, but at least it’s supposed to be limited to cases where intent to harass or embarass can be proven. It’s not the act of sharing that is punished, it’s the intent of doing it for malicious purposes. And again, none of this would be necessary if it weren’t for the fucking hypocrisy we perpetrate every single day.

The prosecution is limited to situations where the intent can be proved. If you upload a naked photo of your ex-girlfriend against her wishes the bad intent is probably there whether or not it can be proved. In any event, these laws do exist, in many places, even if not yet in Italy.

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Pardon Enkita, I started writing my reply, then watched a movie, and got back to writing without reloading the thread.
This was the only message of yours that I read before posting:
“This is the country that sentenced some seismologists to prison after they failed to predict an earthquake, which is a good way to encourage experts to make predictions in future.”

By your later replies, it’s clear that you have a way more nuanced and accurated knowledge of the matter.

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Alas, Cory chiefly shows that he doesn’t understand how the EU works. The notion that there was no legal recourse is plain wrong.

He also fails to understand that such laws in all regularity do NOT protect the rich and powerful against any kind of dissent because legal precedent is well established that the public has a justified interest in reading about them.

Not to mention that the law has to pass first and then needs to survive challenges.