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Comment by theBobBob | Hacker News Reader

I really don't think that it should be a social media company's responsibility to police the internet. If a person posts something illegal, I think it should be that person that should be punished and it should be the job of the government/police/courts to do so. The social media company could then remove the content after that.

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I guess that's a valid stand point, but to be fair, analogous regulations are very common for other businesses, especially in the US. For example, bars have to make sure that their patrons do not smoke and that they have legal age. There are thousands of these regulations and they are rarely perceived as attacks on basic freedoms but rather seen as common sense. What is different about internet companies that they should not have the responsibility to enforce such rules on their premises?

It's one thing to "enforce such rules on their premises", as China does. But for each nation to impose its laws on the entire Internet? That's just insane. And won't end well.

But you seem to be saying it's okay for US companies to impose the extremist version of freedom of speech that the US has on other nations.

And that's not going to end well.

I'm arguing for more freedom of speech than the US has.

The German law doesn't require Facebook to censor hate speech in other countries. But if Facebook wants to do business in Germany, they have to obey local law.

Having different nation-specific versions of Facebook could get complicated, no? And what if a German accesses Facebook through a VPN with non-German IP address?

Facebook somehow manages to show me German ads and trying Google to give me a non-Germany version is surprisingly hard. Netflix has another catalogue here than in other countries (and tries hard to block access to their foreign versions) because their right holders demand so. Why should a society accept lower standards than movie studios? Even if we can't get 100% reliability we shouldn't just give up completely.

One set of ads vs another is a simple thing. And for Netflix, that's just static stuff. When you drop some set of Facebook posts for German users, that has complex downstream effects. Facebook isn't threaded, as I recall, but there's still the need to look for stuff being quoted, and so on.

Showing posts only to certain people (the poster's friends) has been a core feature from the beginning. Pages currently have the option to restrict posts geographically (although I'm unsure what that setting does exactly). I'm sure Facebook has already solved many harder engineering challenges than this. I know that Twitter already has geographical blocks in place based on content and they do have similar conversation, sharing, and like features.

In the law, costs of complying were estimated to be 28 Mio. € per year (for all social networks combined). I don't know how accurate this is but probably not orders of magnitude off.

That's a good point. And maybe doing this for the German market would be feasible. But folding is still a bad precedent, in my opinion.

I can imagine some amusing outcomes. Sure, Germany can censor "hate speech", however it wants to define that. But the "hate speech" will still be there. Germans just won't see it, unless they lie about their location and hit Facebook via VPNs or Tor. So someone could spread malicious rumors about you, and you might not even know it.

I don't think it's asking too much to require different country-specific versions of Facebook. It's simply the cost of doing business and very much standard in all other industries. If I want to sell electronics in the US, I have to comply with the local safety regulations which are different from those in other countries.

They do already, at minimum by supporting different languages.

That's simple. It just affects static stuff, but not user content.

No one is asking fb to "police the internet", they are being asked to abide by the law and stop disregarding the distribution of illegal content within their property.

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