Delete Hate Speech or Pay Up, Germany Tells Social Media Companies
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The idea that arresting people for "hate speech" online is going to make your country any better or safer is laughable. It just means people making jokes will get arrested because one of their jokes offends a few people [1].
Here's a great video by a German who is concerned about the expanded surveillance state and limitations on free speech: https://youtu.be/WFCKTvGU8oU
Here's another video about German hate speech crime and statistics that I found insightful: https://youtu.be/kX84h6aKpaU
Yes, holocaust denial and Nazi propaganda are prohibited in Germany for historical reasons, but the notion that his severely impedes the freedom of political speech is mistaken.
And yes, I've read my John Stuart Mill, and mostly agree with him.
As an aside, I'd still rate the level of public discourse in Germany as way above what's happening in many other countries (though it's going downhill, with all the private TV stations and social media, whose goal is not edification and education, but advertisement driven profit and "engagement").
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/world/europe/germany-36-a...
i was also posting it in response to GP's line:
> disregard the law to pay fines (not 'arresting people')
you may not treasure your rights enough to protect them even on behalf of people you despise, but you will forgive those of us who do.
And i invite you to read the very first law in the german body of law, that enshrines a right that does not exist in all countries:
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...
When you're banning "hate speech" without strictly and narrowly defining what it is, it's a pure censorship instrument with pretty much unlimited reach.
I, for instance, think The Bible and The Quran are full of hate speech, but do you think they should be banned in the whole country simply based on my view?
What about a Android vs iOS debates? Should we ban every shit-talking conversation on the internet?
What about BMW vs Audi? Tabs vs spaces? Chocolate vs vanilla?
Yet, the issue is not clear cut. There are legitimate limitations on free speech - the famous "screaming fire in a crowded theatre" thing.
So, in Germany (with a history of institutionalised genocide), the lines are drawn a bit differently.
The notion that the ruling party will use it against views they don't like seems far fetched, though again, I grant you that it's a slippery slope - Principiis obsta ("resist the beginnings").
But, I object to the notion that freedom of political speech is fundamentally under attack here.
[As for the Abrahamic texts, there is case to be made that they ought to be banned, though I grant that that wouldn't help much. As for your "reductio ad absurdum" (tabs/spaces): again, there's unproblematic speech, and there's legitimately prohibited speech, and then there's a grey area, and that's what we're discussing here - where in the grey to draw the line.]
By implication, hypothetical stricter laws might be defensible, even. Next, the Abrahamic texts do contain truly awful prescriptions (genocide, killing people for all sorts of silly reasons, such as blasphemy, apostasy, homosexuality, eating the wrong food, etc.), which one ought to argue against vigorously, and which could be illegal under (hypothetical, stricter) laws (insofar, for example, as quoting specific sections could be understood as a 'call for action' to murder people).
I don't see the mental gymnastics there?
Do I understand you correctly in saying "more stringent tests" that more types of speech (beyond that) are considered off limits today?
So what's the new thing then?
As I wrote elsewhere, the problem here is primarily not what the government does – because there are effective constitutional safeguards in place –, but what social media companies may do.
I am not predicting what the government will do. I am predicting what the Constitutional Court will do.
And if you actually get to a point where all these checks and balances do break down, you have much bigger worries than just suppression of speech (which at this point becomes just a further symptom of an autocratic or totalitarian regime, not its cause).
What if I agitate and undermine the right to "freedom of speech" itself? For self preservation, the society would need to agree that in this instance speech should be curtailed, and bit by bit it will get eroded.
The list of offenses that the law talks about includes a whole list of things that aren't remotely hate speech: they include things such as the creation of a criminal or terrorist organization or illegal distribution of pornography (pornography is not per se illegal, but you cannot, for example, sell it to minors).
The goal of the law is basically to enforce offenses that are commonly committed online by deputizing social media companies. And this is where the actual problem lies; the law does not regulate anything that isn't already an offense, after all.
1. Many of these social media companies do not even have a legal presence in Germany and it is questionable whether Germany even has jurisdiction under current EU law.
2. Even if Germany has jurisdiction, having social media companies adjudicate the legality of online content (even where there is a legitimate interest and we are not dealing with offenses that affect freedom of speech) is a bad idea in too many ways to count. The social media company is incentivized to err on the side of banning content; they generally do not have the resources and/or personnel with adequate legal training to properly adjudicate the issue in many cases; and if they get things wrong, there is often no practical way to appeal their misjudgment.
3. The law may (due to its crude mechanisms) have a chilling effect far beyond what any that current laws create, even though on paper we're talking about the same offenses. That's because the legal system generally subjects potential prosecution for many of these offenses to a high level of scrutiny in order to protect freedom of expression. It is unlikely that Facebook and Twitter are going to do the same.
4. As a result, the law is probably headed for a collision course with the Federal Constitutional Court at the earliest opportunity.
Well, we already know what this law looks like. It's just the DMCA, expanded to other types of content. This is bad, but it's not nearly the end-of-the-world that the hypocritical US-Americans on HN have been claiming it is.
The problem is that these things often aren't "obvious". For example, one offense that is listed in the law is §185 of the penal code, which criminalizes insults (I'm not kidding). Because making every insult a criminal offense would make real freedom of speech impossible in practice, actual application of that law is subject to various and sundry constraints as the result of case law of the Constitutional Court. As a result, it's actually virtually impossible to commit such an offense in the political arena (in practice, the law has therefore been reduced to an institutionalized form of contempt of cop for the most part, and occasionally sees use as a modern form of dueling for the few bored and rich enough to pursue a private lawsuit: lawyers at ten paces, so to speak). But to understand that, you do have to be sufficiently familiar with the case law.
That's not much of a problem when an actual prosecutor examines the facts: the case against Boehmermann, for example, was pretty quickly dismissed, because the prosecutor knew it was going nowhere fast. But now let's have Facebook's staff – most of them without legal training – examine the same facts and they may very well get it all wrong. Or, worse: decide to simply not bother with getting it right and just err on the side of caution. The law does not penalize inadvertent censorship, after all.
I worry that the chilling effect, and people self-silencing/self-limiting, are already happening to an extreme degree. One might even regard this law as an expression of that. So I worry that this law is fruit of what is happening, not the other way around. I wonder whether there isn't already too much self-censorship going on, especially with people who just have their own nuanced (harmless) ideas.
HackerNews to me sits is remarkably well inside the eye of numerous storms. Really happy about that.
Outside from here though people might just risk so much when all they want is to try and express those (apparently "arguably") harmless thoughts. The risk of falling pray to all kinds of social dangers can be very scary. Not worth it at all, in fact. So devolves the discourse which obviously gives rise to agression and spite as the most popular clothing of free speech.
To an extent we're doing this to ourselves more than the governments are to blame. I'm not arguing that this law is any kind of solution to our problems. Au contraire - what I'm just saying is that individuals in positions of authority get more than their fair share of spite and hate, so, this is what happens.
Yet however also, not long ago the public discourses that take place at present were unfathomable! The whole world being able to talk together on to such an immense scale via thing called the Internet - which, somewhat hilariously ironically, apparently should be called just internet without a 'the' and capital I from now on, per decree put forth by some editors.
But never mind that. Point is, when we do a thing like this (give ourselves 'an internet' -o, hey!), pain is just bound to start flowing and we should be careful with that. Our social evolution is what feels to be at stake here, with the way things are headed.
"Obvious" wasn’t the term I’ve chosen, but the term chosen in the definition of the law and the official commentary of the law.
For example, if a newspaper company was about to publish something illegal (like something pro-Nazi), who polices that? My understanding is that its the newspaper company because they know the laws around print media. So, why is social media any different? Why are they not in charge of policing their content? I believe that in some ways, their policing efforts aren't the same as a newspaper because they're not the ones directly creating the content, but they still have a responsibility to police it in some way because it is on their platform.
If this continues, the only allowable content will be that which does not offend anybody, and if that happens, the open, free Internet we all knew and which has driven a lot of social change throughout the world will be dead. Think of an Internet where atheism is banned because it offends religious people, corrupt politicians's misdeeds are expunged pursuant to their right to be foegotten, exposure of police brutality is deemed offensive and disturbing and banned, and every country's human rights violations are suppressed because they can be.
Over reaching laws like this are the biggest adversary to free speech. Even if the current government believes that hate speech/propaganda needs to be restricted, what is gonna stop someone down the line from using this law to silence all of their opponents and criticism?
The politicans would quickly change their tune once the entire country's voting base wakes up to the fact they've been thrust into the internet dark ages by their own legislators.
You know there are countries where Facebook does not operate.. local companies get easy funding to recreate the service.. after all it's a proven business model
The eu is certainly a big enough market to support a local version
That's not a call to abandon values. It's just an acknowledgement of reality and market forces. Just because someone else will do it, doesnt mean that you have to.
So if google disappeared tomorrow in Germany because of this law.. do you think they pick up their protest signs and start marching? Or do you think they understand it's more complex than that and the answer isn't that simple.. and because they are busy people, they type bing.com into their browser instead.
Their history contributes directly toward their motivation to fight for a change in those laws (for the benefit of a foreign company I might add), and their willingness to use inferior alternatives. Given what they believe they are protecting against, I don't think they will bow to pressure easily.. they'll change them when they believe the threat is gone.
All major tech companies accompany their services with user accounts that hold a treasure trove of personal information, and that users are likely to be invested in to some degree. Facebook (the subject of the article) happens to be the best example of this, because you can't simply go to some other site and have all your personal connections be present; the lock-in factor is very high there.
Moreover, if tech companies coordinated their efforts, simply using the competitor as your example suggests would not work.
Large companies like Google have a global presence, and assets that can be targeted within the jurisdiction of most major governments, while a fragmented - and more competitive - market would make it more likely that "holdouts" can rise beyond the reach of a given government. These platforms would provide a redoubt for regulated speech, because it would be much harder to compel them to pay fines (though of course a country can simply block them).
At the same time, these new regulations give a competitive advantage to the companies with the scale and resources to invest in automating the removal process, and increases the challenges for upstart platforms, which now need to develop the infrastructure to aggressively police content on their networks if they want to grow beyond a certain size.
I think that in the long run, this will evolve into a stable equilibrium where governments periodically levy large-but-not-devastating fines in the name of "antitrust" in order to show their dedication to "competitive markets" and "customer choice", while simultaneously working hand-in-glove with these companies to enforce what they consider to be acceptable standards of speech in online communities. In the long run, no major competitors will emerge, and both the established firms and the government will silently thank their lucky stars.
In other words, governments have already repeatedly proven they should not have authority over what speech is acceptable, even in Germany currently.
Now, as it happens, Germany has a paragraph on its criminal code, § 103, that prohibits insulting foreign heads of state. Thus, prosecution was initiated. However:
1. The case was dropped.
2. In fact, legislative proceedings to drop § 103 are on their way.
So, I'm not too worried about the freedom of political speech in Germany. Holocaust denial and nazi propaganda are prohibited, for historical reasons, but apart from that political speech is free and vigorous.
The right to offend is also considered by many to be an important part of free speech-1.
In fact, I'm not so sure why the person responding to me is not at all worried. Even if the law is dropped, and this particular prosecution dropped, the fact remains: "a political artist was prosecuted for a poem insulting a politician."
If his point is simply Germany has better free speech than other countries, naming Thailand; then OK, I agree, but they're still getting close to treading a dangerous line.
1-https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/16/free-s...
It sure is (as for example, highlighting, insulting and mocking absurd religious beliefs), fully on your page there.
That is also the consensus in Germany, and consequently that particular paragraph of the penal code is scheduled to be deleted by 2018. That's one reason I'm not worried about it.
Another is this: Reporters Without Borders has consistently rated Germany in the top 20 in its Press Freedom Index over the last decades, indeed better than, say, Thailand (at 142), the USA (at 43), or the UK (at 40). US-based Freedom House in their "Freedom of the Press" report rates Germany at 25, US at 33, and UK at 39.
§103 is being removed, a paragraph that had a useful existence when it was easy to start a war by insulting a foreign head.
The "right to offend" is not being instated however, as §185 (law against insults) still exists and won't be removed, as it serves as a useful outlet for insulted people other than e.g. violence.
That's like the definition of political speech.
Also, I'm glad that this §103 will be canned - it's uncomfortably close to the Lèse-majesté laws e.g. in Thailand (that are actually used to suppress political opposition).
Many sites that use e.g. Disqus for comments are filled with vile racist, homophobic, and other hateful comments.
You only have to remove content if it is obvious that it is violating existing law, and someone has filed a report, within of 24 hours. The original poster can also oppose this.
The law is basically the same as the DMCA.
The law's definition of social media - telemedia providers who operate commercial platforms that allow users to exchange or share any kind of content with other users or make such content accessible to other users (“Social Network”).
"Why, cant we go back to the days - where you all pretended that we represented the public, and the angry with there lifes citizens where firewalled from one another?"
Well, guess what, these people know now that they are not alone- and even if you burned the whole internet to ashes- they would just meet in real life. Some people in germany have a serious freedom of expression is only my opinion attitude. And they radicalize there opponents regularly by not discussing with them (That opinion is beneath me).
Here in Germany racebaiting, holocaust denial and so forth are not protected under freedom of speech, never have never will be. Americans will probably not understand it in the near future, but in German jurisdiction German law still applies. Digital business or not.
I mean, Facebook basically censors every naked piece of skin already and I have to live with it because apparently this is offensive to Americans. Now I find banning nazi propaganda to be much less controversial than a naked human body, but apparently tastes diverge