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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

And as a German citizen I am thankful for them. The concept of dignity has, in my opinion, an important place in our society and cannot become obsolete in the digital sphere.

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.

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> Companies like Facebook are getting rich off the infrastructure they provide, they are responsibility for the consequences of the technology they put out into the world.

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.

Jaron Lanier characterizes these kinds of companies as "Siren Servers": http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/the-vibrant-religious-...

You are implying that people who use Facebook are not free agents who can decide for themselves what their impact on society should be.

They are not. If the public plaza is private, you have only the option to not participate and be a social outcast or to bow to the allmende-renteers laws.

I call this "externalization of costs"

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.

“Holding them accountable” for the crime of enabling an opposition party to distribute its message and court its base has not worked out so well in history.

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.

Perhaps we should be talking about Catalonia rather than Germany then.

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.

> 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.

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.

Have you considered the possibility that Hitler may be lying or deluded?

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.

Your analogy of a chimera is a poor one because Facebook doesn't produce content, it is a vehicle for it.

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.

Seems reasonable to me. If you're going to run a bar you must make sure you stop fights that break out and don't serve people who are already drunk etc.

>Your analogy of a chimera is a poor one because Facebook doesn't produce content, it is a vehicle for it.

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?

i agree big tech needs to be held accountable more, but we also need to be careful. a lot of the freedom tech was given was to enable start ups.

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

The solution to that is to aggressively enforce antitrust laws already in the books, not to oppose "laws of responsibility" because it might have disproportionate impact on small companies.

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.

I really like your analogy but I am concerned that analogies take you only so far. Human presence in digital world is simply unprecedented and deploying existing ideas without adapting them might prove to be difficult and ineffective.

If FB was a German company like Volkswagen, Airbus or Deutschebank you can bet your ass German law would look the other way. This European moral/ethical superiority is unnecessary. There are no saints on both sides.

Before FB had global world domination, a clone called StudiVZ was fairly popular in Germany. It was regarded at least as controversial.

I wasn't trying to make it a superiority issue. I am very much aware that the same issues exist in the 'analog-world' and that it applies to big German conglomerates as well. It's just that in their case people are more sensible and at least try to hold them accountable. Very few people would argue that Volkswagen is supposed to stand above the law or operate outside of it.

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.

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