Can Germany Fix Facebook?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Let's take the example of the photo of Angela Merkel and the Syrian refugee, mentioned in the article. If you publicly declare, that the person on the photo is a terrorist, and the person is not, you are clearly breaking the law, because you are damaging the persons reputation with arbitrary false claims. If you mention something as a fact, which you cannot prove, you are held responsible for the consequences of the claim and you are prevented from repeating the false fact.
If you would declare "There have been rumours, that the person on the photo is a terrorist", the legal perspective is completely different. Because there obviously have been the rumours this is not a false claim. It now depends very much on the context. If it was known to you, that the person is not a terrorist and you declared the fact of the rumours, but in a way, that it nevertheless makes the person appear as a terrorist, you might be breaking law, but this now depends very much on circumstances and can only be deciced individually in a court case.
Saying "I completely believe the person is a terrorist, even though there is no prove" would most likely be covered by freedom of speech in Germany, because the claim is not presented as a fact, but an opinion. There are limits here (you cannot hide abuse and revilement in an opinion), but interpretation is extremely generous in those cases and makes, in my eyes, the biggest difference to systems like China.
I am completely fine with this approach. I think that a proper differentiation between fact and opinion is the key for a healthy social discourse.
How would anyone be able to defend himself against false claims, if any utterance of whatever was covered by free speech?
A quote like "They call him freedom fighter, I call him terrorist" is clearly an opinion and yes, it makes a difference whether you use the word in the sense of a legal definition or an abstract concept or a hyperbolic metaphor. The level rod is dignity.
In the American Legal system at least, both domestic and international terrorism are very well defined terms:
Terrorism is well defined, by Alex P. Schmid in 1988:
Schmid and Jongman (1988): "Terrorism is an anxiety-inspiring method of repeated violent action, employed by (semi-) clandestine individual, group or state actors, for idiosyncratic, criminal or political reasons, whereby - in contrast to assassination - the direct targets of violence are not the main targets. The immediate human victims of violence are generally chosen randomly (targets of opportunity) or selectively (representative or symbolic targets) from a target population, and serve as message generators. Threat- and violence-based communication processes between terrorist (organization), (imperilled) victims, and main targets are used to manipulate the main target (audience(s)), turning it into a target of terror, a target of demands, or a target of attention, depending on whether intimidation, coercion, or propaganda is primarily sought".
As well as by "The Revised Academic Consensus Definition of Terrorism (2011)" by Alex Schmid available at [1]
The problems derive from definition being complex. Examples: laymen don't have the analytical power, powers that be have a conflict of interest as you describe. However that is certainly not the same as terrorism being an ill-defined term.
The revised definition is used world wide by terrorism experts such as Prof. Dr. Beatrice de Graaf and Prof. Dr. Edwin Bakker.
If this subjects is of interest to you I recommend the Coursera course "Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Comparing Theory and Practice" [2] by Prof. Dr. Edwin Bakker.
[1] http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/vi...
Can I just write 'terrorist?' instead of 'terrorist' next to a person?
"He is a terrorist." = claimed fact. Contravention, if false!
"He is a terrorist.", about a person during trial = claimed fact, contravention until the verdict, no matter how the verdict will be!
"He is a terrorist.", about a convicted terrorist = claimed fact, true, no contravention.
"I believe, he is a terrorist." = opinion
"I have evidence, that he is a terrorist." = claimed fact. Contravention, if false!
"For me, he is a terrorist, even though he was acquitted." = opinion
"All soldiers are murderers." = opinion (obviously false fact, but in an abstract, hyperbolic metaphoric way, no contravention - there has been actual trial about this in Germany).
"Soldier Frank Miller is a murderer, because all soldiers are murderers." = claimed fact, but with an obviously stupid reasoning, edge case.
"All refugees are terrorists" = claimed fact, but obviously false and therefore possibly hyperbolic metaphoric, edge case.
"All Syrian refugees are terrorists" = claimed fact, obviously false, but targeted at an ethnic group, possible hate speech and sedition.
It is a very complicated matter. Courts are dealing with this topics every day with sometimes very surprising results.
And you cannot reiterate enough that our laws regarding free speech were heavily influenced, if not outright imposed, by the Allies, and foremost the United States. This is one of the few articles out there that explain it.
To address one point in the article, I find the deflection of responsibility on facebook's part alarming. Imagine a scientist letting a wild chimera loose on the population, would we not hold them accountable? Companies like Facebook are getting rich off the infrastructure they provide, they are responsible for the consequences of the technology they put out into the world.
And also notably, in the digital space they have acquired the size of nation states, and even that might be an understatement. Facebook is essentially the policeman, the firefighter, the inkeeper and the landlord all at the same time. As well as the sole administrator.
I call this "externalization of costs". Private companies skim off the profit and leave the costs to society - be it in construction with the ÖPP (public-private-partnership) or "lease back" scams, or with social media where the victims of mobbing/nazis and police have to suffer.
I call it converting social capital into financial capital. People had friends, shared experiences, went to events and so on before Facebook somehow inserted itself into all these interactions.
big tech has basically monopolized the market, but if we enact laws of responsibility, they could be ones that make it even harder to disrupt the monopolies already in power
Note that Germany's "Facebook law" doesn't apply to social media platforms with less than 2 million users, which shows they took steps to protect small businesses from the compliance burden.
In the case of digital companies or spaces like Facebook this has only recently reached public discourse. Which makes it so much more problematic because they already have two billion users on the planet. It took Volkswagen a hundred years to get where they are now and the way we manage them has naturally followed. We are not up to speed at all as far as internet giants are concerned.
Jailing Facebook executives over the consequences of the right-wing resurgence they enabled makes about as much sense as jailing the actual conservative voters and politicians who are implementing it. It sure would be satisfying, but there are lines you don’t cross.
But the German constitution is a result of the Holocaust. We know that it is possible for unrestricted free speech to enable people to libel entire races and religions to the extent that it results in genocide. Every wave of mass violence or ethnic cleansing in the 20th century has been preceded by a propaganda effort to demonise the victims.
> jailing the actual conservative voters and politicians
It looks like in America they're going to end up going to jail for being unregistered agents of foreign intelligence services, and the good old standby of failing to declare bribes to the tax authorities.
The Nazis were continually repressed by mob violence and later by the state. Hitler specifically credits this repression as strengthening their convictions and helping them recruit.
That is, restrictions on freedom of speech led to the Nazis.
The Nazis had their own paramilitaries to start mob violence, and in Britain the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street is credited with preventing the rise of Fascism in the UK. Effectively it's where the "antifa" movement comes from.
If I read the article correctly, I could make a manifestly unlawful comment in this textbox by saying something libelous about you and presumably make ycombinator liable for a fine because you're a German citizen. What's more, under the law the burden of proof of the libel is placed on ycombinator, not you, or even myself who produced the content in the first place. Incredible.
And the scientist doesn't attack people the chimera does. The analogy is not poor. Perhaps a better example would be that the scientist gave a bunch of machine guns to kinder gardeners. Would you say that the machine guns don't shoot people the kinder gardeners do?
Do you think Verfassungsschutz (state dpt enlisted to protect the Constitution, and basically a spy/police agency) decided it's better to let them in for now and continue spying on them? Past events with informants and NSU do not fill me with confidence that Verfassungsschutz is doing their declared job.
It's clear why people vote for them, since they play the FUD strategy well, but I'm confused there hasn't been a concerted effort to expose them and their agenda.
Any insight?
[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/renaissance-militant-democracy
In Germany, well, just google for "Germany neo-Nazi march".
I want the ability to continuously erase everything I do on Facebook, except for the last N days, where N is a fixed number chosen by me.
The WWW works best when used as intended: decentralized communities that encourage people to be creators rather than consumers.
Instead of Facebook, participate in independent online communities around your interests (for example, forums).
Instead of chat apps that attempt to envelop everyone you've ever met into monolithic walled gardens, use SMS and email.
Instead of Medium, learn how to create your own independent blog with something like Metalsmith, Hugo, or Hexo.
Etc.
My theory is that it's all about convenience and network effects. So if a fully decentralized IPFS based/alike social network would come out with mobile apps and was marketed as the way to communicate, it could have success. The big fault such projects make is to stress the technical merits and forget to play the psych-advertising game.
I've seen non-technical people have the most number of messenger apps on their phones, and some even advocated the security of their favorite messenger. Technical folks seem to be harder to persuade to join a messenger network to communicate with a new person in their life.
So I want to say once we will have a couple more high profile data breaches and centralized SPOF downtimes, people will care about security and availability, though history doesn't support they would.
There are at least two ways to perceive the world: as an "architect" or as a "consumer". The Internet/WWW should teach people how to be architects, but it's failing in many ways.
We can't all do the same thing. We can all be sandwich makers.
The internet is teaching people to do all sorts of things other than be architects.
People can be taught to at least think like architects in order to make better choices in life and understand when and how they are being manipulated by malevolent architects.
Also, one doesn't need to build million-user products to architect small changes in local communities.
An analogy: not everyone can be a good philosopher, but they should at least read philosophical ideas and be aware of them as they make decisions in life. Collective intelligence/wisdom can increased, even if most individuals are not professional philosophers.
Replacing your actual social network with anonymous internet strangers leaves you in a much worse position on the axes on which people usually criticize Facebook. Facebook may be a poor substitute for meatspace interaction with your actual community, but your connecting with your actual community is surely more important than connecting with internet strangers.
>Instead of chat apps that attempt to envelop everyone you've ever met into monolithic walled gardens, use SMS and email.
SMS is a spectacularly low-quality monolithic walled garden. Email is federated in theory but in practice is almost always Google. Both systems have the uniquely privacy-hostile property of being in cleartext by default and in the overwhelming majority of real-world usage.
Strangers are only strangers until you start communicating with them. Most people I know these days were first met through the Internet.
I suspect that most people use webmail (HTTPS), and many people don't use Gmail. I can switch my number to another carrier and people can still reach me at the same number, so it isn't exactly a walled garden. I think it's a stretch to argue that Facebook is better than email from a privacy standpoint.
How do you figure? I can communicate with SMS to anyone in the world, on any mobile provider. Seems pretty federated to me.
Sure, you can rent access from Twilio, in the same way that you can rent access from Facebook. It’s extremely unlikely that you could ever become a full participant in either network.
It's not so much about whether I personally could federate with the network, as it is about whether some reasonably large number of other entities could. I don't have exact numbers, but it seems there are 1000+ phone providers worldwide.
Social media exists for a reason. It's not just email for stupid people.
I'm not really satisfied with how anything works in my life, but many things are good enough or I've learned to accept the trade-offs.
For some people, it may require a period of restructuring your life around other services before completing the process though. Here is one recipe for getting away:
First, get a browser extension that blocks the newsfeed. This will help reduce some of the psychological manipulations.
Delete all of their apps from your phone and other devices, including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Onavo.
Turn off all notifications from Facebook. If they don't stop sending notifications, start marking the emails as spam.
Download all of your FB data.
Start joining other, distributed communities to start replacing your online social life with something better: meetup groups, forums, IRC/Gitter/Slack/etc.
Whenever someone sends you a message on Facebook, immediately move the conversation to email or text message and tell them to use email or SMS to contact you, since you are moving all conversations off of Facebook in preparation for leaving the site.
Start deleting all posts, comments, and photos on the site. It can take a while, even with a script.
Don't post anything new on Facebook. Start a blog (using something like Metalsmith, Hugo, Hexo + Github Pages or Netlify) if you have an urge to post things online.
By that point, the pull of Facebook will have faded, and it should be pretty easy to leave the site and not look back.
That's what I thought until I did it. It's a big illusion in most cases. Start the process now, and you should be able to reach a point where it won't be as difficult, even if it takes a couple of years.
I suspect that many (most?) people who believe that leaving Facebook will hurt their professional lives actually hurt their professional lives more by spending so many hours on Facebook.
The average person apparently spends 50 minutes per day on Facebook. That is over 300 hours per year. Many people spend much more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook. 2.5 hours per day, 7 days per week, is almost equivalent to a part-time job. There are much more effective ways to improve social and professional life with 50+ minutes per day to work on them.
I recommend keeping track of time spent on Facebook (including reading links visited via Facebook). Compare what you learned there vs. what you would learn from spending the same amount of time reading books, taking an online course, working, or meeting people in-person instead. Or multiply that number of hours by your hourly rate...
Boy, does that ring true...
How to prevent to get there in the first place? If of any help, I can testify that life post-facebook is as colorful as one would expect.
But it bothers me. Even if you don't have an account a determined researcher can learn entirely too much about you if the people around you use the service.
Which most certainly doesn't delete anything, just marks it as "deleted" in the huge FB stores.
Germany isn't the only country considering laws like this, and companies with large online presences need to find some way to get a handle on the user created content they're propagating. The fact that it's open season as far as what users post is going to eventually lead to the companies doing the propagating: Facebook, Google, etc, being the ones called before the state to answer for it. This ultimately isn't fair and is terrible for business, but the situation we have right now isn't fair either, especially to the individuals who are being slandered with no recourse.
From a technology perspective, that's a much harder problem than it sounds. To the degree it's even possible, it's a good way to make sure that social networking gets consolidated into the hands of a few companies and that never get challenged. Or that social networking breaks back up into country-specific sites, making the "world-wide" part of the WWW more of a technical possibility than a practical reality.
Also, the discussed German law (which I'm not particularly fond of) addresses the problem you raised: it only applies to the largest companies giving startups enough time before needing to solve these issues.
So, again, it's probably going to reinforce information bubbles as places to share thoughts and ideas will stay tied to a nationality and/or small.
> ...this is a bad excuse for giving up trying at all.
I think all of Western Europe is struggling with information bubbles as surprising election results have been happening one after another. Is it "giving" up to not double down on that phenomenon?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "just block the post" but it seems the algorithm for writing:
is_illegal(image, country)==true
If it's a large-scale service used by a billion people posting user-generated content, you have to rely on algorithms to filter it instead of depending on users manually flagging posts. Users themselves don't know their own country's laws and would flag things like the Vietnam naked girl photo as "illegal" when it really wasn't.
Even if a machine learning algorithm can be trained to flag a specific cartoon of 3 religious figures having sex as illegal, there are near-infinite variations of other drawings showing the same thing that would get passed as "legal". In fact, it doesn't even have to be a totally different comic by a different artist... just changing 1 pixel might do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15577885
Of course, The Atlantic, and many other websites continue to tolerate massive troll operations in their own comment sections, for the same reason that FB and Twitter do.
You don't need a cool website to practice law.
The government wanted heavy censorship for certain forbidden targets. Google picked up their toys and went home, and let the Chinese discover the joys of VPN.
If that's what Germany wants, Facebook should pack up and leave, and make people use a VPN to access Facebook.
Every time you give censors the ability to arbitrarily determine what's ok and what's not, the ability always gets misused by the government, in my experience.
For instance, compare and contrast the results shown for Tiananmen square in Baidu vs. Google. It's even forbidden to show relevant results for June 4th - most Chinese people get around that by searching for May 35th.
If you can control the present, you control the future. By forbidding speech that is not currently fashionable, you open the floodgates.
> statutory limits or freedoms are not magic that make things right.
You're right, they're not, we have to fight for them. But if the laws are on the books, you have at least some recourse given an independent judiciary.
Hate speech and marginalizing other groups is such a maddeningly vague category that either everything falls into, or nothing does.
I don't know if you can tell, but I'm highly individualistic and freedom oriented. The fact that there's an ill defined law on the books that can be enforced with no recourse raises my hackles.
Just like the beef I have with the TSA and the "no fly list". You can't figure out why you're on the list, and there is no real way for you to get off the list. I think due process is the most important thing. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.
As an american you trust europeans with free speech more than the US? Doesn't sound like an american to me considering how heavily europe censors.
> Germany already bans Nazi imagery and wording in many forms except for history purposes and they seem to be fine.
Fine by what standard?
> We already have problems in the USA where now nonviolent political protestors are being prosecuted by the federal government and officials are encouraging people to commit violence against the protestors in spite of the protestors having the First Amendment to back them up - statutory limits or freedoms are not magic that make things right.
Can you cite an example?
Why?
Europe has had a lot of really serious internal problems over the last 150 years.
> nonviolent political protestors are being prosecuted by the federal government
> and officials are encouraging people to commit violence against the protestors
Have they?
I think you have been listening to a bit too much fake news.
There has been a concentrated media effort to make the US look ignorant and backwards and to make the EU look enlightened.
Oh, it would be so nice if all the other countries did that, so Facebook would pack up and leave everywhere.
Also, here's the LRB on Zuckerberg and China (https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n19/-huangyuan/national-trolls):
> FB would be pushed to outperform it, but Zuckerberg seems determined to get into China, and there’s no limit to his prostrations before the leadership. In 2016, in an attempt to win their hearts, he jogged with his entourage in Tiananmen Square in heavy smog (pollution index 300+) without a mask. In 2015 he humiliated himself by asking Xi to name his daughter: no luck. In 2014, when he hosted our former internet tsar Lu Wei at FB’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Xi’s book The Governance of China was conspicuous on his desk.
Two wrongs do not make a right. I think that Germany has a right to regulate speech, and Facebook should pull out.
Just like they should have pulled out of Pakistan.
Facebook is pandering to China because they need places to grow. And 1.4 billion people is quite attractive.
Cool, so an ideal "group of people who wants separation from the state" would also be banned? (Let's say like the Catalan party which is going on since years...)
> But what makes content “manifestly” illegal is left up to human
The least biased would be to have 1 person from each political party to assess these things and reach an agreement.
EDIT: downvoting without comments... come on guys, you can be better than this.
If I can casually browse through my friends' friend list or posts on groups and see obvious fake/bot profiles with ridiculously easy to spot names, then FB has a huge problem. They don't even "catch" the obvious ones.
Some users are businesses, too. I used to report both of those groups and then wait for them to get removed. It happened once only. I don't bother anymore.
We are to stifle free speech because of "human dignity"? That's what dictators say. That's what extremists say. Theo Van Gogh was stabbed to death over a short film that insulted the "dignity" of muslims. North koreans kidnap or kill people because their "dignity" is insulted. Following that logic, aren't neo-nazis human? Don't they deserve "dignity"?
It isn't facebook that needs fixing. It is germany. What germans, chinese, saudis, russians, the extreme liberals and those who are anti-free speech don't understand that free speech is a necessary component of human dignity. You can't have human dignity without it. It is an essential characteristic of human dignity.
A shop can be only in one place at once, so even a very big and optimized supermarket won't reach everywhere. Smaller shops can survive somewhere. I may be ignorant about both networking and logistics, but apparently Internet lets one deliver a whole supermarket to the most remote corners of the world. And once you're the only game in town, you can set your rules.
Banning them from insulting other people’s dignity and threatening their safety is not diminishing of their dignity.
> Banning them from insulting other people’s dignity
So you support banning anti-nazi speech right? All the speech attacking and insulting nazis should be banned right? Because it's wrong to insult people right?
tl;dr: I'm sick of neo-nazis.
Yes, you can -- antifa is just as dangerous as neo-nazis, and they have to be stopped. Period.