france is such a weird place. In some ways it's a very free society. In other ways it's not free at all. Don't most of the euro countries have weird laws about hate speech like this?
In which ways is it "very free"? (not necessarily doubting you, but it does seem like I often hear of multitude ways they don't even have freedom of speech)
France provided part of that foundation. The philosophy of America's founding fathers regarding freedom of speech, and the First Amendment itself, were inspired by (among other sources) The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from revolutionary France.
The kids movie Shrek was hate speech for making fun of the king being short? People were actually offended by that but you want the movie outlawed which is extreme.
>What is intolerant? Anything that involves biological differences that people are unable to change.
You haven't provided a meaningful answer to your question. For example, praising someone's eyes would be intolerant. Providing a factual description would be intolerance.
It can be argued the U.S. is the “weird” country for not restricting hate speech. It’s not just the EU, most countries regulate hate speech. This is not perceived as restricting freedom, because it protects the freedoms of the group the hate speech targets (one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins).
I can think of no freedoms that I lose if I am simply mocked, insulted, or criticized. To lose freedom, we have to mix in something else, like for example a targeted harrassment campaign.
for one their physical safety. Hate speech has real consequences. Hate speech against homosexuals in countries like Russia motivates violent crimes against gay people. The keywords here being stochastic violence and propaganda.
Hate speech is used as an intimidation to restrict both the expression and physical safety of the groups it seeks to intimidate.
I think the fundamental issue of hate speech is in it's inability to be clearly defined.
From https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hate-...
"public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence toward a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation"
or from https://www.britannica.com/topic/hate-speech
"speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group identified by attributes such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, physical or mental disability, and others."
the definitions vary widely. Let's say we nail down a definition. Perhaps closer to Britannica. Then the issue is interpretation.
"speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group": Even alluding to a matter would deem it poor. I support basketball, as it was a sport I grew up with, and is a part of my identity. If someone says "basketball is a stupid game,", well then that's technically hate speech.
You can't have a free society with restricted speech.
I guess it is "weird" in a sense that in various places in Europe online platforms are (and have been for long time) liable for user generated content.
E.g. if a Swiss news site has a comment section where users violate anti racism laws, the site owner can be sued since they published and didn't remove it.
Regarding free society. I think each one has its own quirks and difference where they consider someone's freedom ends. E.g. the US's handling of nudity and swear words is absolutely bizarre to me as a European and as someone from the US you might think the restriction on speech and use of symbols many places in Europe have go too far.
>the US's handling of nudity and swear words is absolutely bizarre to me as a European and as someone from the US you might think the restriction on speech and use of symbols many places in Europe have go too far.
Does the law in the US actually regulate that? I was under the assumption that the nudity prohibition on TV and such was simply a voluntary measure. Facebook is welcome to allow it at any moment, they just choose not to, in order to prevent it from becoming a porn repository. I could be totally wrong on this one, but it makes sense, and it explains why it is still totally allowed elsewhere.
Similar to how videogame ratings in the US issued by ESRB are not legally binding and are just a voluntary system that stores use, to decide which games to carry (e.g., most stores won't be carrying Adults Only rated games) and who to sell them to.
E.g. The 2004 Superbowl where Janet Jackson flashed her nipples. Viacom paid out US$3.5 million to settle indecency complaints and got fined 500k which got later overruled because it was only "fleeting" indecency. It sounds to me that ruling could have gone either way.
'There are multiple levels of fines. It starts at hundreds of thousand of euros but it can reach up to 4% of the global annual revenue of the company with severe cases. The Superior Council of the Audiovisual (CSA) [0] is the regulator in charge of those cases.
'Germany has already passed similar regulation and there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level.'
>there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level
I suspect that if the EU really does implement this, the US will likely make it against US law to obey media censorship requests from other countries against speech that the First Amendment protects. They probably should have done that a little while ago (curating content under the request of a foreign government should be one of those things that revoke your Section 230 privileges), but better late than never.
Other countries dictating what can and cannot be said on US services is already a big problem, and will only get worse, and the EU's bargaining position is much weaker than China's given that the vast majority of EU citizens use US services.
It is not constitutional for the US to make it illegal to remove content. Regardless of why you would remove it.
The 1st Amendment cuts both ways there - you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard. That's your freedom as a US entity to decide what you express. The reasoning behind why you removed content (a violation of your website's terms, a request from a foreign government, contractual obligation with McDonalds to not host Pink Slime videos in exchange for $1MM a year) doesn't matter from a constitutional perspective. So the US government revoking a protection of an existing US law as punishment for an expression (removing content) would be an unconstitutional violation of free expression.
They can certainly make it illegal to pay any fines, though.
Also,
>you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard.
Sure you can, you can just be treated as a "curator" rather than a "publisher" and thus liable for your curated collection. That's the whole point of S. 230, after all.
There is nothing in S. 230 that distinguishes between curators and publishers. It says:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
"Information content provider" is:
> The term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service
In fact, the point of S. 230 was to allow sites to block and filter offensive material without that making them liable for the material that their filtering or blocking did not remove. There's a decent history of how this came about on Wikipedia [1].
Removing content when you don't want but are required to do so seems like non-free expression. Although it might be difficult to distinguish between content being removed due to legal requirements vs just not wanting to host the content.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Modern racism probably is focused much more on cultural attributes, perceived to be universal or common among certain people, than melanin level. That makes your test useless for the most obvious thing a hate speech law would seek to protect.
With this law in place, your (or anybody else's) stance on what constitutes hate speech or whether it's objective doesn't matter at all. What matters is who is in charge of defining and applying these policies, and you wouldn't have noticed how you'd become a criminal one day. Capisce?
But what in case of the abuse of the system? Administrators will end up deleting whatever is reported. Not to mention it can be used in political fight.
These laws are often not thought through to that extent. And especially not thought through for the very-long term, e.g. what effect removing potentially-offending speech may have on societies across decades
It could also be argued the other way around: businesses put very little long term thought into how their systems would be used. One of the consequences is that their systems can be manipulated to propagate hate speech at a scale that would not be possible otherwise.
Now I'm not pretending that this is a new problem. It existed in the days of BBSes. It existed in the days of print. The list could go on. This should be been seen as forewarning. Doubtlessly, newspapers always received letters to the editor containing hate speech. Very few of them would be published, borderline cases may be published with additional commentary. It would take a very special publication to publish hate speech because it would affect their reputation. Yet they moved to the online world and opened the floodgates with "comments" that received little if any review before publication. There is a strong incentive for people to misuse this privilege against the best interests of the publisher since they immediately gain wide exposure. That is for a service that has a strong incentive to pay heed to what they publish, even in the digital world.
This short term mentality, coupled with the immediacy and global scope of the internet, resulted in certain parties using the Internet as a propaganda machine for speech that is detrimental to society and even the services that permit it. It is difficult to reign in short of shuttering the outlets for publication or giving them strong incentives to invest the resources into combating it.
How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this?
If every country with an economy the size of 1 or 2 large US states start making up their own censorship laws and trying to force companies to enforce them, at some point this causes huge inefficiencies.
I can see two end states to this:
1. If the censoring country has enough international legal influence, companies will probably have to block users from that country from using their services.
2. If the censoring country does not have enough international legal influence, the company ignores them and the government has to explicitly censor its citizens' internet connections.
I kind of prefer the second because it's more visible and dramatic - I think a lot of people probably aren't even aware when their country has censorship laws.
This also creates economic opportunities for two classes of alternative content distribution:
1. Content distribution based out of legally friendly countries, a la the Sultanate of Kinakuta. Expect to see the media start using terms styled after "tax haven", like "cybercrime haven", for countries that don't enforce US/EU censorship/copyright laws.
2. Content distribution based off of peer-to-peer networks that are harder to wage lawfare against. Bittorrent, IPFS, etc. fit the bill here.
> How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this?
We saw it happen with GDPR already. Though we also see many companies play ball with censors, e.g. in places like China. If suddenly a Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon is judged to be "hate speech", it's easy to just censor the cartoons. Most users won't exactly care, there's plenty of government-endorsed content that they're still allowed to access.
yes. Especially if they actually try to fine someone like reddit "4% of the global annual revenue of the company" for not deleting someone's hateful comment.
Unless the market size for a population is not proportional to that population, then I'm missing something. France is ~67 million people. California is ~40 million people. There are ~330 million US citizens. So France is ~double California and ~ a fifth of the US.
That's only the case as long as complying with California's emissions laws is not too much harder than what they would otherwise have to comply with. That's a complicated analysis, it's kinda got a bit of prisoner's dilemma to it. As long as companies are following CA's restrictive emissions laws, there's little incentive for other areas to make their own laws more restrictive. If companies started to ignore CA's laws (and not sold there or sold different versions) you should expect other states to start to pass more and more restrictive laws.
It depends on what kind of market you're in. California is extremely high income relative to France (or pretty much any country) and so you're likely to see more revenue from there.
There is a third possible 'end state', which is that each restrictive country with a large market ends up in a 'sandbox'. This could look a lot like the Great Firewall, but outsourced.
Not really, many countries share languages but not regulations. In addition to that, many people move from one country to another, while staying in touch with their old friends.
Facebook has also been working hard on their translation features to reduce language barriers.
Practically speaking, businesses that lack resources and interest are just going to adopt the most restrictive censorship that they find worthwhile for access to their market.
For example, Chinese services are still available beyond the firewall, just not catered to the average non-Chinese.
To the consumer, most don't care, for most purposes; c.f. TikTok's popularity.
> How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this?
Hasn't the same thing happened with respect to copyright in the other direction? Any online business with proper revenue already needs to abide by laws to take down copyrighted material, and the same arguments had been made when enforcement of them became a thing. I don't see that the burden with respect to hate speech is fundamentally different, arguably even lower.
Who decides authoritatively what is or isn’t “hate speech” within the 24 hour period?
The conclusion TFA makes seems likely: these services will just err on the side of “delete first, ask questions later” to protect themselves from liability, making all sorts of legal expression impossible.
The current state of online publishing is really sad, and getting worse. Very few modern services used for hosting can be used to publish legal yet fringe or controversial opinions, which should terrify you even if you don’t agree with those things.
We’re moving toward a world where a dozen large companies will be the final arbiters of what can or cannot be published, regardless of what the law says. If you can’t see why that’s a grave threat to society, I question your imagination.
...and that’s just in peacetime. Imagine the special wartime requirements that will apply to these services if their hosting nations ever feel legitimately threatened.
Being made fun of for anything that people biologically cannot change is hate speech. It’s not some complicated quagmire of laws you are trying to make it out to be.
If only content moderation and human expression were that simple. Alas, it is not to be.
If you read it carefully, I just “made fun of” people who are unimaginative. Is that an innate trait? Should my content be censored?
Should a comment on a video of a tall person that says “how’s the weather up there?” be censored using criminal liability?
This criminalizes even hosting the discussion about what beliefs along these lines are or are not correct. Someone posts about their (mistaken) beliefs, in essence asking about a disproven theory correlating race and IQ. Other people correct them, educating them as well as any other lurkers. Should the sysadmins go to jail for not deleting the entire thread?
Being wrong on the internet should not be illegal.
There is absolutely not a bright line, and it is somewhat naive or perhaps even dishonest to claim otherwise.
We had a recent example along these lines with certain sports and records where there were some hate speech references to a potential biological basis for differences (men vs women and masters age vs non masters).
24 hours means it’s going to need some sort of automation for Reddit or any popular news website’s comment section.
So what is hate speech in a way that can be automated?
Will that automated approach squelch valuable speech too? What if a certain disease impacts an ethnicity more than others? Is ‘black people tend to Sickle Cell more often than white people’ hate speech? Could a moderator decide that, given the fines? Could automation?
This is where a very loud problem is and this is the complexity you’re claiming is ‘simple’.
It's easy to forget these days that we in the Western world are not all one big house with the same rules, and reality checks can be jarring. It behooves us to remember the differences, lest we be overly shocked when we see a diner in an American restaurant carrying a sidearm or a European getting arrested for teaching a dog the Nazi salute.
You do not react the same way if you are a platform (in which case you just deactivate or delete the contents as soon as it is flagged by anyone), or if you are yourself responsible for your website (in which case you will fight to defend that you don't need to take down the contents).
My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system, considered a platform under this law?
Just asking because, even if I am ready to be 100% independent from platforms when they mean FB or Youtube, I certainly am not ready to get rid of cloud hosting...
> My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system, considered a platform under this law?
They'll probably go after the first point of contact they can find in the chain hosting the text they don't like.
Facebook would clearly be hit with the demand before Level3 would. A peer-to-peer message board that is mostly decentralized, but has a homebase in AWS to coordinate the swarms? Yeah, probably AWS is going to be told to do what they can to take it down.
To soapbox for a second - this kind of policing is ridiculous on its face from my perspective as a US citizen. (And that's coming from someone who has no issue with companies themselves moderating their websites, I think that's a natural solution to cultivate the online community that the site operators desire. But the government compelling them to do so is beyond the pale.)
Uh... okay, then, if you are truly self-hosted (meaning, there is a big whirring, heating server in your living room), then would your internet provider company be compelled by the law to cancel your subscription?
Because, this is only the continuing of this logic...
Hate speech definition: 'abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation'.
How can this possibly be enforced? This is Bowdlerization of online debate. (removing material that is considered improper or offensive from (a text or account), especially with the result that the text becomes weaker or less effective).
Hate speech will just be pushed underground, it doesn't solve anything or make anything go away but it does reinforce 'the establishment view', something the French ENA currently have a tight control on.
From what you can see in France or more broadly in Europe, the hate speech is only characterized when you really offend the minorities (or some persons belonging), and more specifically when you do so by yielding a kind of wanting-to-sound-objective argumentation to harm them. This is worse when you call to harm them.
In your examples, which are clearly mere slurs, you do not try to sound objective in your bad depictions of them.
In my experience of what can be seen in the news, your risk something more if you are telling, for example, "white people just damage all the books they touch in bookstores, because they never care how they handle them".
But this broad "yielding a kind of wanting-to-sound-objective argumentation to harm them" is where the devil is.
I can consider the downvotes "hate speech" because they were targeted at me as a "protected minority," and it does not consider my emotions.
I felt very depressed about it, and HN did not make accommodations to make me feel safe expressing it without any prejudice.
And I demand it to be removed.
How about when people use master and slave names on Tech? -> http://antirez.com/news/122
I feel sick because of my past as a slave descendent.
We can find offense and hate in anything if we care to look deep enough.
It is more about "WHO" will be censored than about the message. Will it be used to repress science? News? What if News become "hate speech"? Or science?
But the first example is just unspecific, and attributing the downvotes to some reason is difficult without real replies.
And the example of master/slave is at most insensitivity, not at all hate speech.
Hate speech is really more characterized than that. Besides true insults and slurs, those are for example the theories that make some minorities the cause of societal problems by blunt reasoning, often using abusive generalisations at each of their sentences...
I understand your point though, and I agree, the law itself should be a lot more specific, explicitly.
"But the first example is just unspecific, and attributing the downvotes to some reason is difficult without real replies."
That is hate speech, can you see?
You can't see it because you are privileged.
That is the reason only me as a "protected minority" can relate and say what is or not hate speech against us.
You simply can't understand our life experience.
--> by simple "twist" I can bend your intent and make you a hater
Does the Law have space for replies? Don't think so. Who will decide a reply is good enough?
"Besides true insults and slurs, those are for example the theories that make some minorities the cause of societal problems by blunt reasoning"
I think it is more of "think about the children" slippery slope.
You sell it about a "good excuse" then later abuse it.
The countries that seems to implement it are doing it most in a way to curb criticism to some govt policies than protecting "groups". Then every criticism about govt policy is "hate speech".
E.g: govt decides to give iPhones to X group.
If you complain that will be "hate speech"?
Again this is very lax and prone to abuse.
We as good intended and polite can see it has to be more specific but the "govt" does not.
Are we smart than people that make laws everydays? I don't think so.
Then I rather not have it.
Better hate people for what they think/say than for what they hide.
Yes, but the point is whether the judge will buy that or not. There already is a crime of hate speech in France, and until now the tribunals do not fall in the traps of the kind of manipulation you emphasize. Of course I hope it will stay this way...
I think it was a long time coming. Ever since Yahoo ruling ( also in France ), the internet was in a downward spiral. I am not arguing it is a good thing, but the trajectory was clear for a while.
Poor admins and moderators... I genuinely never understood what the fuss is about. Hear me out here. I spent a good amount of time of my life living abroad. Almost 6 years to be exact. And this was during a time when commenting stuff online was relatively rare still. That said, an eastern European in a western European country is inevitably going to face racism/xenophobia. If you are a man it will hit you even sooner. And if you are in the late teen age group like I was, I'd say give it 2 weeks tops, regardless of your background. Sure, it was unpleasant but I felt far worse when someone from the crowds stood up for me. I've lived in eastern Europe in the late 80s and 90s, do you honestly think that some moron blabbering is making me feel insecure or threatened? I'm more than capable of standing up for myself if it comes to that, let them talk. If I'm not doing anything about it, chances are I've worked out that this is the best course of action. If anything, that helped me become who I am today and made me a lot more resilient. Fun fact, some of the people who gave me the hardest time coming in are the ones who have me a hand several years later when some dark moments hit me. And I can't thank them enough till this day and though we live on the opposite ends of the continent, we are now close friends.
And till this day, whenever I hear some "hate speech" as they call it, I don't even bother registering it in my brain. "Yeah, cool story bro".
My point is that censoring and forcing people to work like machines around the clock to hide comments is completely redundant. What this does is forcing people to fragment the internet into decentralized echo bubbles, where the two camps can ramble on about their own views and claim that that's how everyone thinks. And historically that has never worked and thinking that it will now is beyond absurd.
Threatening someone personally in public is one thing and it should be dealt with accordingly. But the general "f {insert any nationality, race, religion, etc.}"... Meh... Ok, whatever...
"A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to." -Anthony Daniels
Fully agreed. Just "hate speech" on its own seems like a non-issue.
If it gets to a point where it obstructs your way of life or people spewing that kind of language are following you and such, it sounds more like "harassment" or "threats", and we already have laws in effect that protect people against that. Same with calling for harm to certain groups of people, as that would fall under "inciting violence".
(there is both a French and an English PDF at the bottom). Interestingly to me, one of the main concerns of that writeup is the non-transparency of the editorial function of social networks, e.g., the secret algorithmic choice of what posts/tweets to show you and what order to present them in.
This kind of suggests that a service can avoid some amount of censorship attention simply by acting more as a neutral carrier, instead of the current tendency of the large players to present a filtered and adjusted view.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadThat said, this law is heavily criticized at the moment, for good reasons.
Trying to block intolerance by force is wrong.
Teach how to overcome it, or just teach to keep it to one's self.
You haven't provided a meaningful answer to your question. For example, praising someone's eyes would be intolerant. Providing a factual description would be intolerance.
Which freedoms would that be?
Hate speech is used as an intimidation to restrict both the expression and physical safety of the groups it seeks to intimidate.
or from https://www.britannica.com/topic/hate-speech "speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group identified by attributes such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, physical or mental disability, and others."
the definitions vary widely. Let's say we nail down a definition. Perhaps closer to Britannica. Then the issue is interpretation.
"speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group": Even alluding to a matter would deem it poor. I support basketball, as it was a sport I grew up with, and is a part of my identity. If someone says "basketball is a stupid game,", well then that's technically hate speech.
You can't have a free society with restricted speech.
E.g. if a Swiss news site has a comment section where users violate anti racism laws, the site owner can be sued since they published and didn't remove it.
Regarding free society. I think each one has its own quirks and difference where they consider someone's freedom ends. E.g. the US's handling of nudity and swear words is absolutely bizarre to me as a European and as someone from the US you might think the restriction on speech and use of symbols many places in Europe have go too far.
Does the law in the US actually regulate that? I was under the assumption that the nudity prohibition on TV and such was simply a voluntary measure. Facebook is welcome to allow it at any moment, they just choose not to, in order to prevent it from becoming a porn repository. I could be totally wrong on this one, but it makes sense, and it explains why it is still totally allowed elsewhere.
Similar to how videogame ratings in the US issued by ESRB are not legally binding and are just a voluntary system that stores use, to decide which games to carry (e.g., most stores won't be carrying Adults Only rated games) and who to sell them to.
But as I understand it public access television is quite heavily regulated in terms of profanity and nudity and you will get fined for violations
https://www.fcc.gov/general/obscenity-indecency-and-profanit...
E.g. The 2004 Superbowl where Janet Jackson flashed her nipples. Viacom paid out US$3.5 million to settle indecency complaints and got fined 500k which got later overruled because it was only "fleeting" indecency. It sounds to me that ruling could have gone either way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_sh...
But don't know how much of that extends to others forms of media than tv.
I would use the word fantastic instead.
'Germany has already passed similar regulation and there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level.'
[0] https://www.csa.fr
I suspect that if the EU really does implement this, the US will likely make it against US law to obey media censorship requests from other countries against speech that the First Amendment protects. They probably should have done that a little while ago (curating content under the request of a foreign government should be one of those things that revoke your Section 230 privileges), but better late than never.
Other countries dictating what can and cannot be said on US services is already a big problem, and will only get worse, and the EU's bargaining position is much weaker than China's given that the vast majority of EU citizens use US services.
The 1st Amendment cuts both ways there - you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard. That's your freedom as a US entity to decide what you express. The reasoning behind why you removed content (a violation of your website's terms, a request from a foreign government, contractual obligation with McDonalds to not host Pink Slime videos in exchange for $1MM a year) doesn't matter from a constitutional perspective. So the US government revoking a protection of an existing US law as punishment for an expression (removing content) would be an unconstitutional violation of free expression.
Also, >you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard.
Sure you can, you can just be treated as a "curator" rather than a "publisher" and thus liable for your curated collection. That's the whole point of S. 230, after all.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
"Information content provider" is:
> The term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service
In fact, the point of S. 230 was to allow sites to block and filter offensive material without that making them liable for the material that their filtering or blocking did not remove. There's a decent history of how this came about on Wikipedia [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
The hate speech slope is slippery and unscrupulous politicians will always want to interfere.
- I don't like short men
- I like blondes
- We want to hire smart people
- man how can he/she be so dumb?
So now I can't say any of these things?
Now I'm not pretending that this is a new problem. It existed in the days of BBSes. It existed in the days of print. The list could go on. This should be been seen as forewarning. Doubtlessly, newspapers always received letters to the editor containing hate speech. Very few of them would be published, borderline cases may be published with additional commentary. It would take a very special publication to publish hate speech because it would affect their reputation. Yet they moved to the online world and opened the floodgates with "comments" that received little if any review before publication. There is a strong incentive for people to misuse this privilege against the best interests of the publisher since they immediately gain wide exposure. That is for a service that has a strong incentive to pay heed to what they publish, even in the digital world.
This short term mentality, coupled with the immediacy and global scope of the internet, resulted in certain parties using the Internet as a propaganda machine for speech that is detrimental to society and even the services that permit it. It is difficult to reign in short of shuttering the outlets for publication or giving them strong incentives to invest the resources into combating it.
If every country with an economy the size of 1 or 2 large US states start making up their own censorship laws and trying to force companies to enforce them, at some point this causes huge inefficiencies.
I can see two end states to this:
1. If the censoring country has enough international legal influence, companies will probably have to block users from that country from using their services.
2. If the censoring country does not have enough international legal influence, the company ignores them and the government has to explicitly censor its citizens' internet connections.
I kind of prefer the second because it's more visible and dramatic - I think a lot of people probably aren't even aware when their country has censorship laws.
This also creates economic opportunities for two classes of alternative content distribution:
1. Content distribution based out of legally friendly countries, a la the Sultanate of Kinakuta. Expect to see the media start using terms styled after "tax haven", like "cybercrime haven", for countries that don't enforce US/EU censorship/copyright laws.
2. Content distribution based off of peer-to-peer networks that are harder to wage lawfare against. Bittorrent, IPFS, etc. fit the bill here.
We saw it happen with GDPR already. Though we also see many companies play ball with censors, e.g. in places like China. If suddenly a Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon is judged to be "hate speech", it's easy to just censor the cartoons. Most users won't exactly care, there's plenty of government-endorsed content that they're still allowed to access.
1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3278912
It's not. US Population is maybe ~1/4th of India. Apple has a huge market in the US and is relatively niche in India.
Both France and California have a GDP of about 2.7 trillion USD. Interestingly, India's GDP is also at about this level.
Facebook has also been working hard on their translation features to reduce language barriers.
For example, Chinese services are still available beyond the firewall, just not catered to the average non-Chinese.
To the consumer, most don't care, for most purposes; c.f. TikTok's popularity.
Hasn't the same thing happened with respect to copyright in the other direction? Any online business with proper revenue already needs to abide by laws to take down copyrighted material, and the same arguments had been made when enforcement of them became a thing. I don't see that the burden with respect to hate speech is fundamentally different, arguably even lower.
The conclusion TFA makes seems likely: these services will just err on the side of “delete first, ask questions later” to protect themselves from liability, making all sorts of legal expression impossible.
The current state of online publishing is really sad, and getting worse. Very few modern services used for hosting can be used to publish legal yet fringe or controversial opinions, which should terrify you even if you don’t agree with those things.
We’re moving toward a world where a dozen large companies will be the final arbiters of what can or cannot be published, regardless of what the law says. If you can’t see why that’s a grave threat to society, I question your imagination.
...and that’s just in peacetime. Imagine the special wartime requirements that will apply to these services if their hosting nations ever feel legitimately threatened.
If you read it carefully, I just “made fun of” people who are unimaginative. Is that an innate trait? Should my content be censored?
Should a comment on a video of a tall person that says “how’s the weather up there?” be censored using criminal liability?
This criminalizes even hosting the discussion about what beliefs along these lines are or are not correct. Someone posts about their (mistaken) beliefs, in essence asking about a disproven theory correlating race and IQ. Other people correct them, educating them as well as any other lurkers. Should the sysadmins go to jail for not deleting the entire thread?
Being wrong on the internet should not be illegal.
There is absolutely not a bright line, and it is somewhat naive or perhaps even dishonest to claim otherwise.
Given that reddit is banning the word "retard"... the answer may soon be "yes, it should".
So what is hate speech in a way that can be automated?
Will that automated approach squelch valuable speech too? What if a certain disease impacts an ethnicity more than others? Is ‘black people tend to Sickle Cell more often than white people’ hate speech? Could a moderator decide that, given the fines? Could automation?
This is where a very loud problem is and this is the complexity you’re claiming is ‘simple’.
You do not react the same way if you are a platform (in which case you just deactivate or delete the contents as soon as it is flagged by anyone), or if you are yourself responsible for your website (in which case you will fight to defend that you don't need to take down the contents).
My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system, considered a platform under this law?
Just asking because, even if I am ready to be 100% independent from platforms when they mean FB or Youtube, I certainly am not ready to get rid of cloud hosting...
They'll probably go after the first point of contact they can find in the chain hosting the text they don't like.
Facebook would clearly be hit with the demand before Level3 would. A peer-to-peer message board that is mostly decentralized, but has a homebase in AWS to coordinate the swarms? Yeah, probably AWS is going to be told to do what they can to take it down.
To soapbox for a second - this kind of policing is ridiculous on its face from my perspective as a US citizen. (And that's coming from someone who has no issue with companies themselves moderating their websites, I think that's a natural solution to cultivate the online community that the site operators desire. But the government compelling them to do so is beyond the pale.)
Because, this is only the continuing of this logic...
But who knows. Dumb laws like these are rarely thought out to a meaningful degree of detail.
And that would the return of the web as I liked it.
One can dream.
How can this possibly be enforced? This is Bowdlerization of online debate. (removing material that is considered improper or offensive from (a text or account), especially with the result that the text becomes weaker or less effective).
Hate speech will just be pushed underground, it doesn't solve anything or make anything go away but it does reinforce 'the establishment view', something the French ENA currently have a tight control on.
"prejudice against a particular group."
So if I call Trump supporters "ignorant red necks and backward people," Will it be considered Hate speech?
Or when people say:
"White people are <slurs> <negative adjective>"
Will that be considered hate speech too?
Disclaimer: I am a "protected" minority, but I am in favor of free speech. Even if what you say is ugly or garbage.
PS. I consider downvotes here as offensive and "hate speech".
In your examples, which are clearly mere slurs, you do not try to sound objective in your bad depictions of them.
In my experience of what can be seen in the news, your risk something more if you are telling, for example, "white people just damage all the books they touch in bookstores, because they never care how they handle them".
But this broad "yielding a kind of wanting-to-sound-objective argumentation to harm them" is where the devil is.
I can consider the downvotes "hate speech" because they were targeted at me as a "protected minority," and it does not consider my emotions. I felt very depressed about it, and HN did not make accommodations to make me feel safe expressing it without any prejudice.
And I demand it to be removed.
How about when people use master and slave names on Tech? -> http://antirez.com/news/122 I feel sick because of my past as a slave descendent.
We can find offense and hate in anything if we care to look deep enough.
It is more about "WHO" will be censored than about the message. Will it be used to repress science? News? What if News become "hate speech"? Or science?
And the example of master/slave is at most insensitivity, not at all hate speech.
Hate speech is really more characterized than that. Besides true insults and slurs, those are for example the theories that make some minorities the cause of societal problems by blunt reasoning, often using abusive generalisations at each of their sentences...
I understand your point though, and I agree, the law itself should be a lot more specific, explicitly.
That is hate speech, can you see? You can't see it because you are privileged.
That is the reason only me as a "protected minority" can relate and say what is or not hate speech against us.
You simply can't understand our life experience.
--> by simple "twist" I can bend your intent and make you a hater
Does the Law have space for replies? Don't think so. Who will decide a reply is good enough?
"Besides true insults and slurs, those are for example the theories that make some minorities the cause of societal problems by blunt reasoning"
I think it is more of "think about the children" slippery slope.
You sell it about a "good excuse" then later abuse it.
The countries that seems to implement it are doing it most in a way to curb criticism to some govt policies than protecting "groups". Then every criticism about govt policy is "hate speech".
E.g: govt decides to give iPhones to X group.
If you complain that will be "hate speech"?
Again this is very lax and prone to abuse.
We as good intended and polite can see it has to be more specific but the "govt" does not.
Are we smart than people that make laws everydays? I don't think so.
Then I rather not have it.
Better hate people for what they think/say than for what they hide.
And till this day, whenever I hear some "hate speech" as they call it, I don't even bother registering it in my brain. "Yeah, cool story bro".
My point is that censoring and forcing people to work like machines around the clock to hide comments is completely redundant. What this does is forcing people to fragment the internet into decentralized echo bubbles, where the two camps can ramble on about their own views and claim that that's how everyone thinks. And historically that has never worked and thinking that it will now is beyond absurd.
Threatening someone personally in public is one thing and it should be dealt with accordingly. But the general "f {insert any nationality, race, religion, etc.}"... Meh... Ok, whatever...
"A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to." -Anthony Daniels
If it gets to a point where it obstructs your way of life or people spewing that kind of language are following you and such, it sounds more like "harassment" or "threats", and we already have laws in effect that protect people against that. Same with calling for harm to certain groups of people, as that would fall under "inciting violence".
(there is both a French and an English PDF at the bottom). Interestingly to me, one of the main concerns of that writeup is the non-transparency of the editorial function of social networks, e.g., the secret algorithmic choice of what posts/tweets to show you and what order to present them in.
This kind of suggests that a service can avoid some amount of censorship attention simply by acting more as a neutral carrier, instead of the current tendency of the large players to present a filtered and adjusted view.