Twitter should not enforce ridiculous German laws. The tech companies need to call the bluff of countries that demand censorship.
Germany is considering a stable, open, democratic, peaceful, constructive and successful country. There are any number of rankings/scoring regarding freedom of the press and of expression, resilience to corruption, democracy, economic opportunity etc in which Germany scores better than the US.
These are laws passed by the national parliament, elected to represent its constituents. The law is subject to approval by not only the national courts, but the European Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights.
To somehow consider it a grave injustice when Twitter is now required to act when they are informed of activity considered illegal in that jurisdiction is ridiculous. Because presumably you're doing so out of some understanding of "democracy". Yet you are ignoring quite a bit of the local democracy that lead to this.
One of the reasons people regard these rankings as a total joke is exactly because of incidents like this - Twitter being forced to delete satirical tweets.
More broadly, I think most people would agree that beyond the extremes (say, US vs North Korea), the precise rankings of countries on these metrics are based on questionable methodologies with vague priors and are generated largely by politically motivated organizations.
I'm sorry but in the extensive travels of tons of people who've been around the world, those rankings are usually right on the money. It is obvious to most people who've been around that Germany or Norway have much greater levels of freedom of expression than Venezuela, as a rather trivial example.
I would feel more free in New Zealand than in the USA, even though New Zealand has hate speech laws. However, in New Zealand, the police don't carry guns, I'm not at risk of getting shot because of a blown tail light.
Personally, I don't measure freedom by what tweets Twitter is required to remove.
It is not at all though. The law very clearly spells out that for unclear cases (and the satire tweet definitely falls under that) there are significant exceptions and leeway.
The supporters of the law said exactly what you said, ignoring that reality. The result is in the article.
Additionally, from outside Germany, this looks less like "stopping hate speech" and more like enforcing the "basic consensus" of the CDU cited in the article.
For one, the law doesn't require deletion. They just have to make it publically inaccessible pending outcome of inspection. And if they're unsure about the legality they can punt it to another org and won't suffer consequences.
In fact, the law even stipulates that the data must be retained for 10 weeks to allow further action.
If they make the wrong call, they face fines. The supreme arbiter of what is lawful and unlawful is not Twitter; it is the German courts, but Twitter is the one responsible for removing unlawful tweets, and Twitter is the one who is fined if they do not remove unlawful tweets promptly. Twitter is not fined if they wrongly remove lawful tweets. Especially (but not only because of) given the volume of tweets and reports, the only rational course of action for Twitter is to delete/block if there's the slightest chance a court somewhere might declare it unlawful.
Here is the full text of the law: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/netzdg/BJNR335210017.html
> For one, the law doesn't require deletion. They just have to make it publically inaccessible pending outcome of inspection.
I think everyone understands that, on the scale of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., that deletion entails precisely that: making content publicly inaccessible, even if the company can hypothetically restore it. Not even on that scale: it's pretty typical to have a "deleted" flag in your database for content for normal web applications.
More to the point, supporters of the law have claimed over and over that it won't affect legitimate content, but here is exactly an example that the opponents of the law were talking about that we're commenting on right now.
Having seen the tweet in question i'm not sure it is legitimate content.
As for the rest: Eh, can't be arsed to try and argue more.
Ban this user for ageism /s
The German people have always had a strong authoritarian "we know best" streak and it has caused a lot of problems in the past.
Hence why the peoples of other nations are much more concerned by Germany trying to dictate what constitutes free speech on the internet than they are by a few tweets.
It would be better if they could just reliably block the account from reaching German users only, while other users would continue reading the tweets. It, of course, is impossible unless Germany implements a country-wide firewall, the way China did.
I don't think it's likely, though. The point of actions like this is not to strictly eliminate any last vestige of hate speech. It is to send a message, so that other would-be-satirists could reconsider starting an account that breaks the law, and that other international companies which deal with UGC knew what to expect, and took preventive measures.
i mean, i get that it's attempting to appeal to one's aversion to a very bad idea, but random bob can't cause a genocide. a strong dictatorship a la hitler or stalin on the other hand... well, that's a much bigger problem than trying to regulate mean words.
If you're a member of the subject group, then they most certainly are. Instead of constructing silly examples, let me suggest you look into the history of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia or Hutu-Tutsi animus in Rwanda.
invoking real world violence as a stand-in for which one calibrates their regard for a person's tweets seems more like an emotional appeal rather than a logical dialog.
Another reason not to leave it up is because it's frightening to the subjects of such eliminationist discourse, who shouldn't have to put up with being considered acceptable targets for systematic violence.
do the companies engaging in policing actions receive the same protections and considerations as actual police and government officials when it comes to legal issues involved with the act of law enforcement?
i feel it's better that the state should be expected to take responsibility for and enforce it's own laws.
that's what i mean by deputized. if the law doesn't say the company is required to take an action, the company should be mostly indifferent to the law's interaction with third parties. further, it's a bit silly for a law to say that a company should make assessments of criminality or civil offenses, especially if they aren't provided the same legal privileges that police receive for doing the same thing.