Because they operated on the free market around them, forcing them to have good quality or they wouldn't get paid.
I lived in communism where the state owned practically everything - and everything, not just the food, was shit, and you couldn't get it anyways, we didn't even have toilet paper. Don't get me started on women's hygienic accessories. The recommendation from government was to use old newspaper - because propaganda is more important than hygiene, right?
Idk, you seemed to be claiming that communism works, I'm telling you it doesn't and that your example is true only because of the free market around these communist-owned restaurants. That's it.
Edit because I can't reply: because I hate it when people say that communism works even though they never lived through it and have no idea what it actually is to live in it. It's terrible, an entire country of multiple millions of humans is condemned to horrible life. Don't do it, there is enough examples of how bad it is already.
We're talking about experiences of hundreds of millions of people (most of whom don't speak English and don't frequent US forums but they still exist). Yes, their experience can predict the future. Communism always and very quickly failed and then became (or simply started as) oligarchist dictatorship.
> The recommendation from government was to use old newspaper
Ahhh, that takes me back. I was only there until the age of 8 or so, but I vividly remember our stack of newspaper squares. And, of course, you can't flush them so you have to put them in a bin (and presumably empty the bin, but I wasn't there for that part). Also we only had running water part of the day so we had to store some up in buckets for peak times. It seemed normal at the time, but looking back it's fucking crazy.
1. There’s a lot of backlash against Twitter’s new owner for his change in editorial policy. Users or tweets that would have been previously removed are no longer being censored. On a government-run platform protected by the first amendment, no censorship would be permitted. That’s mean you would have, for better or worse, a ton of racist content, conspiracy theories, violent images, pornographic images, and fake news.
2. There’s a lot of concern of data security and privacy. If you don’t trust Zuckerberg with your data, would you trust the government?
3. People flock to services that other people widely use. There are numerous social network alternatives these days, but people still flock to the major ones like FB, IG, TikTok, etc. Would anyone want to use FedBook? I have my doubts that a government-run social media platform would gain any real traction.
Spare me. Private medicine is a disaster, private utilities are disasters where they are tried, private roads are a disaster.
Governments screw a lot of things up. So do private companies. Arguing about which is better in the abstract is like arguing whether even or odd numbers are “better”: only possible for tribalists.
A good initiative in my opinion. As for oifjsidjf's criticism below, neither are they suggesting that a government would be in charge nor are all government services bad.
I am inexplicably reminded of the following great quote:
> As an European it was always hard for me to understand American culture. What was fascinating for me is that they like bragging about their freedom which was weird for me, because I didn't think that I have any less freedom than them. I always thought 'What is the difference'. However after this game I finally understand it. NA is just so fucking free.
What game? Also, NA meaning North America? Why would Mexico and Canada be lumped into it, they don't have the same constitutional protections that USA gets.
> A copypasta is a block of text that is copied and pasted across the Internet by individuals through online forums and social networking websites. Copypastas are said to be similar to spam as they are often used to annoy other users and disrupt online discourse.
also: most EU countries have laws that protect public speech and especially people's representatives from being prosecuted for expressing their opinions.
How is that not true? Yes you can say fuck trump or fuck biden(why are you self censoring yourself on the internet btw), but you can't say "I have a gun and I'm going to shoot you" to a police officer - you will be arrested and put in prison even if you were "just saying things". Your freedom of speech isn't absolute. For other examples - several states made it illegal for journalists to report on violations on farms, to protect their own industries.
>>That’s not the case in France for example.
I'm pretty sure you can say fuck trump or fuck biden in France and nothing would happen to you, in public or otherwise.
you picked a poor example though, insulting the French head of state hasn't been a crime for a decade now:
It’s actually how the EU mostly work. Country members do still most of law and merge upstream. GDPR for example originated from the CNIL which is French. And contain things that restrict freedom of speech at an EU level. [1]
In US you can go to jail for being black or not following police officers orders or responding to them in a way they do not like, or talking to them, or taking pictures of them.
And they can shoot you.
Just like any authoritarian police state.
EDIT: freedom of speech is not related only to offending the president or saying good things about Hitler, it also mean I can talk and eventually argue with a police officer in EU without worrying that they will arrest me or shoot me. It means I can take a picture of a firemen's truck without the camera being seized by the police (it happened to me in Florida) and no way of talking to them that there's no need to abuse of their power, you can actually delete photos from cameras.
etc etc
authoritarianism and control works best when it's not in the law, but in the people habits.
To add to this comment which is unfairly downvoted, some example of laws in Europe that I collected over the years:
France's "hate speech" laws, which prohibit speech that is deemed to be insulting, threatening, or discriminatory on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or sexual orientation. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_France)
Germany's NetzDG law, which requires social media platforms to remove content that is deemed to be hate speech or fake news within 24 hours of being notified. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act)
The United Kingdom's Official Secrets Act, which makes it a criminal offense to disclose certain types of information deemed to be sensitive to national security. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Secrets_Act)
Sweden's "hets mot folkgrupp" law, which prohibits speech that is deemed to be hate speech or incitement to violence against certain groups of people, such as ethnic minorities or LGBT individuals. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_Action_League_of_S...)
Italy's "Lodo Alfano" law, which made it a criminal offense to publish transcripts of intercepted conversations, even if they exposed wrongdoing by public officials. (repealed)
Greece's "insulting the state" law, which makes it a criminal offense to insult the Greek flag, national anthem, or state symbols.
Austria's law against defamation of religions, which makes it a criminal offense to insult or denigrate the religious beliefs of others. (source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24739183)
Finland's law against ethnic agitation, which prohibits speech that is deemed to incite hatred or discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or national origin.(source: https://poliisi.fi/en/hate-crimes)
yes in the US you can wave Nazi flags, but if a police officer stops you for allegedly speeding and you remove your hands from the wheel or look them in the eyes, they can and will shoot you.
They shoot to kill over a thousand times a year.
If any of those EU countries had such stats, they would shutdown the police entirely for abuse of violence.
Fortunately, we are civilized and it never happened.
Anyway you are wrong about the Lodo Alfano in Italy, which I know very well being Italian. The law has been active for a few months before being declared unconstitutional.
I wonder how wrong you are for every other country
EDIT:
wrong on the French law too
"On 18 June 2020, the French Constitutional Council struck down core provisions of the law."
and probably on many others
I have no time to check them all, but I already have the feeling that most of them suffer from the same selection bias of the Italian and French one.
EDIT 2:
the article talking about the Spanish law is no different
Hasel was not arrested for insulting the Spanish monarchy, but for saying that the police and the monarchy were responsible of torture and for spreading terrorism in his lyrics.
Hasel has a criminal history and had already been arrested two times already for resisting to the police (which is a crime in most western countries) and housebreaking.
He knew he was going to be arrested because he had been found guilty in a trial that he could have won, but never showed up.
So he barricaded himself inside a university building.
I wonder how it would have ended in other freer countries...
The application of the law has in the meantime been changed to allow for more dissuasive measures instead of repressive ones.
And I must say that I despise the way Spanish police works, but in this case they did what they were supposed to do: they arrested someone who had been condemned for a crime by a regular court.
That's absolutely not true, definitely not in the criminal sense. Politicians are always allowed to bring a civil suit against you over the things you've said, but the same is true in US.
that's the right of every people here in EU. If you offend me (online or offline) I can sue you and you could face trial.
It's called defamation.
Nothing to see here.
EDIT: insult here must be read using its most informal meaning (offense sufers the same destiny), not the legal one. We have different wording for the two circumstances "ingiuria" for the legal term which has been depenalisedd years ago and "insulto" to mean offending someone.
Saying to someone "pedophile" is both an insult (a personal attack) and can be defamation, if the person is not a pedophile.
The system is designed to be highly protective of the presumption of innocence, a judge must decide if the circumstances need to be solved in a trial by another judge or the case can be dismissed because there isn't enough substance to call it defamation.
So every depiction of EU being swift to put people in jail for their opinions is highly exaggerated.
"Offending" someone is meaningless. Anyone can claim they were offended by anything, but that doesn't automatically make the thing illegal or injurious.
October, 2018: "In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction for disparaging the Prophet Muhammad."
I don't see the relevance of the account age as long as the person is engaging in a healthy discussion.
However, I have noticed that in other comment sections, such as those on „Der Spiegel“, some people attempt to dismiss the opinions of users with recently created accounts as well.
That's maybe part of a more general "perceived inability of some Muslims to handle polemics against their religion with grace" (from the article). Searching for "bobblehead Jesus" vs "bobblehead Mohammed" on Amazon is a good example of that.
I was in Scotland (pre-Brexit) watching a UK tv show about the KKK in America. When they were distributing pamphlets the narrator explains that what they were doing was legal in America because of the US Constitution guarantees free speech whereas in the UK inciting racial hate is a crime.
Because if you have a website you are legally liable for what someone else posts if you don't remove it within 24 hours of a report, which makes running a social network impractical. (NetzDG, KoPl-G, Digital Services Act (DSA), etc)
Having actual free speech would solve that (and a lot of other problems).
Right? Isn't this just... a forum? PHPBB is still kickin' baby; probably has a one-click deployment, somewhere out there, too. What's stopping y'all, Article OP?
Yes it is weird that europe has public television, public education etc, but we don't have a public Mastodon. Even if it s not very popular, it is a necessity.
An additional benefit of publicly-ran communications is that they can't be censored unless it s something unlawful.
Yes, I’d very much like to pay a new tax in addition to the television tax (even though I never used it).
And yes, let some guys decide what’s “misinformation” and what isn’t. My guess is that anything that’s not aligned with a state’s foreign policy is “misinformation”.
I am not sure whether it is about the EU per se. It seems to trace more to the nowadays highly toxic questions of free speech and alleged censorship. Although much of values and rights are shared across all Western countries, the freedom of expression has always diverged between the US and the rest. Of course, they have a right to point out that this freedom is (slightly) restricted in most European countries. Personally, I've never quite understood the obsession of many Americans on this particular right, given that there are so many other important rights and liberties in the Constitution.
EDIT: While someone with a background in comparative legal analysis would be needed for a verification, I could also posit a hypothesis that both the EU's Charter and the national constitutions of most European countries grant more rights than the Constitution. That said, more is not always better from a constitutional law perspective, as the reform proposals in Chile clearly have showed.
Seeing a lot of the replies here focus on the EU's prevalence of anti-hate speech laws, there's clearly one genus of the audience that sees the EU as being "restrictive" on their kind of free speech. Which is not surprising in the least.
As an American, I see nothing wrong with the EU's measures against hate speech. In the past decade, I've seen exactly where no limits on it leads to.
And my response to that is: Laws and decrees have to be written in what manner they can oppress the least, but its on the public to hold the right people accountable so these laws remain fair.
I have a question, in the USA we have some common law basis of some public spaces being public commons in terms of free assembly and speech. In Europe there are two common law systems, one is the USA one based on non-roman common law and of course the roman common law used in Italy.
With those two common law systems in Europe are there public free speech assembly spaces that might be then copied onto the electronic world?
The part that people can't do themselves is the massive storage and indexing of posts/content/uploaded data (because expensive). I'm envisioning a more or less public (hosting is publically funded) API where anyone can build and host their own frontend, with each custom frontend having their own content discovery algorithm(s) and custom moderation options based on the underlying data and indexes provided by the API.
What I mean is that the publically hosted API itself will be minimally moderated, hosting anything except for illegal material. The rest will be solved by (highly granular and specific) indexing/tagging or similar such that each frontend can choose to leave out or otherwise moderate the presentation of certain material. That indexing will also be the basis of writing custom content discovery algorithms.
The API could even allow training of AI models on usage data (for recommendation or moderation) without leaking anything by declaring a set of available parameters and offering to train and deploy models proposed by the public.
This way we won't have to leave the innovation and the making-it-fun-and-usable parts fully up to the government, and we will hopefully avoid government-enforced censorship.
IMO it's naive to think there is going to be some large public space where reasonable and thoughtful free speech occurs. In my experience running public forums on an e-commerce site, you can have this for small groups of people, but as it gets larger, there are inevitably a few troublemakers that will turn it into a cesspool. You can't moderate them without violating their "free speech" rights, and once they are there, the reasonable, thoughtful people will leave.
I think it's a much better idea for individuals to have their own blogs, with comments enabled if they choose, and let them moderate these as they see fit.
81 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadIf there is no profit in it for someone the platform won't improve.
It's the classic "the capitalist owns a restaurant vs the people own a restaurant, but which has better food".
You’re just repeating cliches IMO
I lived in communism where the state owned practically everything - and everything, not just the food, was shit, and you couldn't get it anyways, we didn't even have toilet paper. Don't get me started on women's hygienic accessories. The recommendation from government was to use old newspaper - because propaganda is more important than hygiene, right?
Do you believe your life experience allows you to predict the future?
Edit because I can't reply: because I hate it when people say that communism works even though they never lived through it and have no idea what it actually is to live in it. It's terrible, an entire country of multiple millions of humans is condemned to horrible life. Don't do it, there is enough examples of how bad it is already.
We're talking about experiences of hundreds of millions of people (most of whom don't speak English and don't frequent US forums but they still exist). Yes, their experience can predict the future. Communism always and very quickly failed and then became (or simply started as) oligarchist dictatorship.
Ahhh, that takes me back. I was only there until the age of 8 or so, but I vividly remember our stack of newspaper squares. And, of course, you can't flush them so you have to put them in a bin (and presumably empty the bin, but I wasn't there for that part). Also we only had running water part of the day so we had to store some up in buckets for peak times. It seemed normal at the time, but looking back it's fucking crazy.
1. There’s a lot of backlash against Twitter’s new owner for his change in editorial policy. Users or tweets that would have been previously removed are no longer being censored. On a government-run platform protected by the first amendment, no censorship would be permitted. That’s mean you would have, for better or worse, a ton of racist content, conspiracy theories, violent images, pornographic images, and fake news.
2. There’s a lot of concern of data security and privacy. If you don’t trust Zuckerberg with your data, would you trust the government?
3. People flock to services that other people widely use. There are numerous social network alternatives these days, but people still flock to the major ones like FB, IG, TikTok, etc. Would anyone want to use FedBook? I have my doubts that a government-run social media platform would gain any real traction.
Governments screw a lot of things up. So do private companies. Arguing about which is better in the abstract is like arguing whether even or odd numbers are “better”: only possible for tribalists.
> As an European it was always hard for me to understand American culture. What was fascinating for me is that they like bragging about their freedom which was weird for me, because I didn't think that I have any less freedom than them. I always thought 'What is the difference'. However after this game I finally understand it. NA is just so fucking free.
It's a popular copypasta that gets used in esports discussions whenever an EU team beats an NA team harshly.
"NA" as term in esports just refers to teams primarily based in the US or Canada.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/76bemv/tie...
> A copypasta is a block of text that is copied and pasted across the Internet by individuals through online forums and social networking websites. Copypastas are said to be similar to spam as they are often used to annoy other users and disrupt online discourse.
[Edit] Ref: https://news.yahoo.com/french-woman-faces-trial-insulting-16...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/25/insulting-fren...
also: most EU countries have laws that protect public speech and especially people's representatives from being prosecuted for expressing their opinions.
>>That’s not the case in France for example.
I'm pretty sure you can say fuck trump or fuck biden in France and nothing would happen to you, in public or otherwise.
you picked a poor example though, insulting the French head of state hasn't been a crime for a decade now:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/25/insulting-fren...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/eu-alphabet-privacy-idCNL5N2...
I’m increasingly convinced that LLMs are being used to spread propaganda
You can also go in jail for "insult to religious feelings".
In the UK people get fined for offensive tweets, including saying things like "men are not women".
In France people are facing trials for insulting Macron: https://news.yahoo.com/french-woman-faces-trial-insulting-16...
And they can shoot you.
Just like any authoritarian police state.
EDIT: freedom of speech is not related only to offending the president or saying good things about Hitler, it also mean I can talk and eventually argue with a police officer in EU without worrying that they will arrest me or shoot me. It means I can take a picture of a firemen's truck without the camera being seized by the police (it happened to me in Florida) and no way of talking to them that there's no need to abuse of their power, you can actually delete photos from cameras.
etc etc
authoritarianism and control works best when it's not in the law, but in the people habits.
France's "hate speech" laws, which prohibit speech that is deemed to be insulting, threatening, or discriminatory on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or sexual orientation. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_France)
Germany's NetzDG law, which requires social media platforms to remove content that is deemed to be hate speech or fake news within 24 hours of being notified. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act)
The United Kingdom's Official Secrets Act, which makes it a criminal offense to disclose certain types of information deemed to be sensitive to national security. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Secrets_Act)
Spain's "gag law," which restricts protests and demonstrations, and imposes fines for offenses such as insulting police officers. (source: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/3/1/spanish-gag-law-...)
Hungary's law against promoting migration, which criminalizes the publication or broadcast of materials that are deemed to promote illegal migration. (source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/hungary-passes...)
Belgium's Holocaust denial law, which makes it a criminal offense to publicly deny, minimize, or justify the Holocaust. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Holocaust_denial_law)
Sweden's "hets mot folkgrupp" law, which prohibits speech that is deemed to be hate speech or incitement to violence against certain groups of people, such as ethnic minorities or LGBT individuals. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_Action_League_of_S...)
Italy's "Lodo Alfano" law, which made it a criminal offense to publish transcripts of intercepted conversations, even if they exposed wrongdoing by public officials. (repealed)
Greece's "insulting the state" law, which makes it a criminal offense to insult the Greek flag, national anthem, or state symbols.
Austria's law against defamation of religions, which makes it a criminal offense to insult or denigrate the religious beliefs of others. (source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24739183)
Finland's law against ethnic agitation, which prohibits speech that is deemed to incite hatred or discrimination on the basis of ethnicity or national origin.(source: https://poliisi.fi/en/hate-crimes)
Poland's "Holocaust law," which criminalizes the attribution of Nazi crimes to the Polish state or people. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amendment_...
They shoot to kill over a thousand times a year.
If any of those EU countries had such stats, they would shutdown the police entirely for abuse of violence.
Fortunately, we are civilized and it never happened.
Anyway you are wrong about the Lodo Alfano in Italy, which I know very well being Italian. The law has been active for a few months before being declared unconstitutional.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodo_Alfano
I wonder how wrong you are for every other country
EDIT:
wrong on the French law too
"On 18 June 2020, the French Constitutional Council struck down core provisions of the law."
and probably on many others
I have no time to check them all, but I already have the feeling that most of them suffer from the same selection bias of the Italian and French one.
EDIT 2:
the article talking about the Spanish law is no different
Hasel was not arrested for insulting the Spanish monarchy, but for saying that the police and the monarchy were responsible of torture and for spreading terrorism in his lyrics.
Hasel has a criminal history and had already been arrested two times already for resisting to the police (which is a crime in most western countries) and housebreaking.
He knew he was going to be arrested because he had been found guilty in a trial that he could have won, but never showed up.
So he barricaded himself inside a university building.
I wonder how it would have ended in other freer countries...
The application of the law has in the meantime been changed to allow for more dissuasive measures instead of repressive ones.
And I must say that I despise the way Spanish police works, but in this case they did what they were supposed to do: they arrested someone who had been condemned for a crime by a regular court.
> She stands accused of "insulting the president of the republic" and will stand trial on June 20 in Saint Omer, the prosecutor said.
It's called defamation.
Nothing to see here.
EDIT: insult here must be read using its most informal meaning (offense sufers the same destiny), not the legal one. We have different wording for the two circumstances "ingiuria" for the legal term which has been depenalisedd years ago and "insulto" to mean offending someone.
Saying to someone "pedophile" is both an insult (a personal attack) and can be defamation, if the person is not a pedophile.
The system is designed to be highly protective of the presumption of innocence, a judge must decide if the circumstances need to be solved in a trial by another judge or the case can be dismissed because there isn't enough substance to call it defamation.
So every depiction of EU being swift to put people in jail for their opinions is highly exaggerated.
"Offending" someone is meaningless. Anyone can claim they were offended by anything, but that doesn't automatically make the thing illegal or injurious.
Insults != defamation
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...
A post is either relevant or not, regardless of when account was created.
However, I have noticed that in other comment sections, such as those on „Der Spiegel“, some people attempt to dismiss the opinions of users with recently created accounts as well.
The more disturbing issue is the ECHR's ruling.
Having actual free speech would solve that (and a lot of other problems).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
An additional benefit of publicly-ran communications is that they can't be censored unless it s something unlawful.
And yes, let some guys decide what’s “misinformation” and what isn’t. My guess is that anything that’s not aligned with a state’s foreign policy is “misinformation”.
- It's much better when the limits of speech are determined by the courts than by private company owners
Don't know why, but it's something that is happening and I also noticed that the same arguments are used Evey time
- EU is not free
- EU is descending into authoritarianism
- You can be jailed for saying things
- EU politicians are puppets working for some gray entities that want to cancel the right to privacy for (reason unknown)
and so on
EDIT: While someone with a background in comparative legal analysis would be needed for a verification, I could also posit a hypothesis that both the EU's Charter and the national constitutions of most European countries grant more rights than the Constitution. That said, more is not always better from a constitutional law perspective, as the reform proposals in Chile clearly have showed.
As an American, I see nothing wrong with the EU's measures against hate speech. In the past decade, I've seen exactly where no limits on it leads to.
'Hate speech' is a highly subjective category, and most proposals for hate speech laws that I've seen could be abused terribly.
With those two common law systems in Europe are there public free speech assembly spaces that might be then copied onto the electronic world?
What I mean is that the publically hosted API itself will be minimally moderated, hosting anything except for illegal material. The rest will be solved by (highly granular and specific) indexing/tagging or similar such that each frontend can choose to leave out or otherwise moderate the presentation of certain material. That indexing will also be the basis of writing custom content discovery algorithms.
The API could even allow training of AI models on usage data (for recommendation or moderation) without leaking anything by declaring a set of available parameters and offering to train and deploy models proposed by the public.
This way we won't have to leave the innovation and the making-it-fun-and-usable parts fully up to the government, and we will hopefully avoid government-enforced censorship.
I think it's a much better idea for individuals to have their own blogs, with comments enabled if they choose, and let them moderate these as they see fit.