Shock European court decision: Websites are liable for users’ comments
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I want this applied to Facebook and all its racist, sexist and homophobic user content too.
The moment you need to moderate every comment, and worry that you might get sued/prosecuted by people whose discrimination is different to yours, is the moment you simply become a censor or simply drop comments altogether.
It's like arguing against firewalls on the open Internet.
Small players, like startups with innovative ideas, will have more and more difficulties to survive.
However once the government gets involved, that's when we've lost free speech. Free speech protections have always been in place to ensure you can't go to jail for what you're saying. What they aren't for, is making private individuals and corporations harbor any kind of speech on their property. It'll be truly scary if the government starts forcing corporations to censor speech. Let's leave the pressure we put on these firms to consumers, activists and shareholders.
Sure, governments have guns, but as long as there is a constitution preventing abuses and the rule of law, that is constrained.
The bigger danger is cooption of governments by corporations and other powerful interest groups that have no such protections/limitations.
In addition, in the European context the racism part will be used to censure comments critizing the immigration politics of Western Europe countries (which every citizen should be able to discuss given the importance of it) and any discussions about Islam that don’t go the way the government want it to go. In fact, this is already happening for years and it is a worrying fact.
Everyone is free to discuss the immigration politics on the Internet and elsewhere, and plenty of people are angry about it. There are even political parties that have this thing as their main agenda.
Will these websites prevent or bifurcate access from Europe?
Sarcasm aside, this ruling is the sort of insanity that one can expect from human rights courts in countries that lack a long-standing commitment to freedom of speech. The very notion of a "human rights court" is foreign to citizens of countries with nothing like the American Constitution's 1st Amendment and absolutist jurisprudence that we have here in the U.S. No such thing as a human rights court is necessary when the laws are themselves just and enforced by just courts. From the U.S., the notion of "human rights court" seems to exist only so as to impinge on individual freedoms rather than so as to strengthen them, and this follows from the idea that they should not be necessary in Western countries that should have just laws to begin with -- and this perception is supported by this sort of ruling.
One even expects that saying the above alone will be seen as evidence of racism/sexism/whatever-ism for even merely denying that a human rights court should be necessary in the West... implies denial of human rights simply because of the institution's very name. The very act of naming something in this way leads to suspicion that it is a euphemistic name, like all those People's Democratic Republics of yore (and, still, the DPRK), or the UN's very own not-remotely-sane human rights commission.
The Supreme Court spends plenty of time laughing unjust laws out of existence.
Having a court setup to evaluate laws seems like a difference in mechanism more than a difference in effect.