The minister responsible at some point made the completely idiotic remark that that is the right way to go because Facebook and the like are making a lot of money, so they also should be responsible for these costs. It seems like you can be a minister in Germany and never have heard of this concept called "taxes" that other countries use to finance an independent judicial system.
The actual effects of this law in terms of possibly useful message lost are minuscule compared to the real culprits of goverment-enforced speech restrictions: namely copyrights ( and extras like DMCA) & libel laws. Those actually matter.
This doesn't.
It is a decision made to limit your constitutional freedoms due to legal obligations towards the public. That is very much the definition of a criminal case.
> People don't end up losing jobs, going behind bars, gaining criminal records.
Parking in the wrong spot also doesn't lead to any of that, but it's still a criminal case.
> They simply cannot spread hate-speech.
So, Titanic was spreading hate speech then?
> The actual effects of this law in terms of possibly useful message lost are minuscule compared to the real culprits of goverment-enforced speech restrictions: namely copyrights ( and extras like DMCA) & libel laws. Those actually matter.
Which is relevant to whether this is a good law how?
Just because your Facebook post is deleted does not mean your constitional right to free speech is limited.
The German Constitution is pretty long so it'd be really helpful if you could perhaps cite specific articles to provide some context for your assertions.
Nobody has articulated that this restriction is harmful; nor protected; and certainly not why. By contrast, the harms of the messages limited thusly are rather more clear.
Furthermore, you're trying to draw some really broad analogy, and find that facebook is the government and thus that constitutional protections apply to enforcement by facebook. I mean... that's murky at best - and note that even if this were direct government censureship it's not even clear this would be a bad idea or whether the hypothetical governmental corolloray would be constitutionally prohibited (which is particularly unclear since nobody knows exactly what that might be).
Facebook is excercising disgression in which content to publish to whom, and when. They also happen to make a lot of money like that. So regardless of the original authors rights; it's not at all clear that facebook should be immune from prosecution for publishing prohibited content. In a sense, this new law is still letting them off unreasonably lightly.
I think we as societies still need to figure out what the heck the age of data science means for free speech. I don't think being all fundamentalist about that is going to help, in any case.
The very first comment in this thread:
"A couple of comedians and satire magazines have been hit"
Yes, there are limits to the freedom of speech (and technically, there is not even freedom of speech in the German constitution, but rather freedom to express one's opinions). But satire is generally very firmly within the bounds of protected speech, the constitutional court has had to deal with such cases many times, and it has found over and over and over, some of the cases involving just the satirical magazine referred to above, that satire is almost always within the bounds of where the state may not interfere with the freedom to speak. The constitutional court has explained at length the importance of satire and controversial art for political discourse.
So, no, the harm of the messages limited is not clear at all.
> Furthermore, you're trying to draw some really broad analogy, and find that facebook is the government and thus that constitutional protections apply to enforcement by facebook.
No, nothing like that. Facebook is not bound by the constitution. The constitution only binds the state. Facebook may delete satire as much as they like. But the state may not incentivize Facebook to delete satire, because the state is bound by the constitution, and the state is forbidden from restricting satirical speech (for example), and by extension from making other parties restrict satirical speech. It's not Facebook's actions that go against the constitution, it's the state's actions that incentivize Facebook that go against the constitution.
> and note that even if this were direct government censureship it's not even clear this would be a bad idea or whether the hypothetical governmental corolloray would be constitutionally prohibited (which is particularly unclear since nobody knows exactly what that might be).
Well, except that it is. The constitutional court has dealt with that. Restricting satirical speech is an almost total no-go for the German state, the constitutional court will not have that.
> Facebook is excercising disgression in which content to publish to whom, and when.
That's indeed a good point, though on the other hand, they probably will say that they try to act as agents finding useful information for their respective users rather than as publishers selecting what they consider interesting. That's also a lie, of course, but still with some truth to it. Really, what they are doing doesn't really fit directly any traditional roles.
> So regardless of the original authors rights;
But you cannot disregard the constitutional rights of the authors because you want to achieve some other goal, that's the point of constitutional rights.
> I think we as societies still need to figure out what the heck the age of data science means for free speech.
Well, yeah, I guess society still needs to figure it out, but the answer really isn't that difficult:
Communication needs to be freed of surveillance/advertisement needs to be separated from communication.
Probably not really possible, but this fusion of communication technology with advertisement/marketing/manipulation technology is a huge problem and ultimately at the heart of all of this. The need to get people to pay attention to their advertisers corrupts all other actions of Facebook, Twitter, and the whole bunch.
In effect, the state is saying: we'll exempt you from the normal responsibilities you have when you say something, as long as you're just forwarding a message. The change is now that there's a caveat: you must now (sometimes) make reasonable efforts to avoid forwarding illegal content.
Frankly: as long as facebook (e.g.) is more than a dumb pipe this isn't merely a question of getting the laws right; it's intrinsic. You cant exercise editorial control (which they do, even if it's sometimes algorithmic) without being responsible for what you decide to publish.
So we get to choose: either platforms need to really be dumb pipes (i.e. facebook's entire model is essentially completely illegal), or they need to take responsibility for what they say, even if its forwarded content.
I think we'd have much more constructive speech online if platforms were forced to make such a choice: to the extent that they filter, they're responsible for what they let through.
I am not. I am talking about incentives.
> In effect, the state is saying: we'll exempt you from the normal responsibilities you have when you say something, as long as you're just forwarding a message. The change is now that there's a caveat: you must now (sometimes) make reasonable efforts to avoid forwarding illegal content.
As far as the constitution is concerned, there are no "normal responsibilities". The normal responsibility is for the state to not interfere with speech, everything beyond that is subject to the boundaries set by the constitution, not the other way around.
> Frankly: as long as facebook (e.g.) is more than a dumb pipe this isn't merely a question of getting the laws right; it's intrinsic. You cant exercise editorial control (which they do, even if it's sometimes algorithmic) without being responsible for what you decide to publish.
Either it is intrinsic or you have to get the laws right. Laws are what defines responsibilities, so I would say it's pretty obviously not intrinsic.
> So we get to choose: either platforms need to really be dumb pipes (i.e. facebook's entire model is essentially completely illegal), or they need to take responsibility for what they say, even if its forwarded content.
... or they get to exercise editorial control of sorts without being held responsible.
I mean, there might be arguments in favor of that approach, but just claiming that it's so isn't one. Also, I think it's really unhelpful to insist on a binary distinction between "publisher" and "transport service". A newspaper was a publisher. The post service was a transport service. A Facebook really just is neither, and there is no reason why everything has to fit into one of these two categories. A car is not either new type of horse or a new type of factory. It's just a car.
> I think we'd have much more constructive speech online if platforms were forced to make such a choice: to the extent that they filter, they're responsible for what they let through.
I'm not so sure, I suspect that just leads to two extremes with nothing in between: Completely unmoderated exchanges where trolls reign and strictly regulated ones where nothing remotely controversial can be said.
Rather I would think that deletion/blocking should be required only when ordered by a judge (or possibly a sort of low-level judge for preliminary decisions on such matters), where you have legal options to defend your right to speak, and where the judge has no incentive to decide one way or the other. So, there could be a penalty for when Facebook doesn't follow the order, but not for when they don't recognize something illegal as illegal.
As to the intrinsic responsibilities of editorial control: Sure: legal obligations are what you define them to be. But escaping legal consequences doesn't mean you're not conceptually responsible; it simply means the law isn't perfect. And of course there are lots of ways you can choose to distribute responsibilities. So perhaps I should of said: I don't see a way for the considerable influence that media platforms have to be held accountable except if they are also responsible. The obvious alternatives are that that power is completely unchecked, which is harmful, or that somebody else dictates what they can do - which I kind of doubt will work in the first place, and even where it does, that means you better have a lot of faith in those controllers. Simpler and more reasonable for the media platforms to actually be responsible for what they say, and not maintain the fiction that they have no influence or effect on the messages they "transmit".
As to requiring a judge to get involved before censorship: I think that's actually worse than complete immunity. Involving a judge makes it appear as if there is control, and as if media platforms are held to some kind of unbiased or at least fair standard. But the whole point of a modern media platform is that you don't need manual control; and indeeed you can never keep up with manual control. Algorithms will win against judges every single time, simply because no society can have that many judges (not to mention even judges aren't a panacea: fairness isn't trivial). Judicial interventions will necessarily be only in such tiny fractions as to be meaningless - and even if punishment and enforcement were scaled to absurd levels (with their own costs), well, media platforms are international behemoths. A judge may well rule some post to be illegal, but many posters will be beyond the judges reach.
If media platforms get to exercise editorial control of sorts without being held responsible, then they will influence the debate in ways that undermine the very reason for freedom of speech to exist in the first place. I kind of expect that outcome is what will actually occur, and the consequences in the long run are hard to predict, but I'm guessing: dire.
The incentives for a media platform are all wrong. They want to push messages that encourage using the platform; and as such they're going to be enablers for needless tribalism, short, poorly-thought-out posts, for anybody who is willing to pay to influence regardless of the merits, for trying to shield users from being confronted with evidence that they're wrong, and more.
If you will: I think people have started to accept that the idea that metadata is somehow something completely different from data is false. Metadata is data, and similarly; the meta-control a media platform has over messaging is really huge. If anything: the fact that they don't actively edit the contents of the messages only grants them more power, because it makes the control they do have opaque and hard to judge the impact of. I don't mean to imply they're intentionally Machiavellian or whatever here: it's just that indirect, hard-to-observe control is really hard to value.
---- So, to go off on a tangent....
I sometimes wonder what the historical figures involved in the evolution of modern freedom of speech would think if they saw what actually happened. For one; we've grown to utterly fetishize the concept to the extent that rational thought has little to do with it. But simultaneously, it's like we're walking around with blinders on: we don't have freedom of speech, and never will be able to get it absolutely, and the idea that that would work or was the idea some long time past is... well, not exactly founded in anything.
And then, of course, there's the fact that obviously times change, technology changes, society changes, and it's pretty crazy to think that concepts like freedom of speech are somehow impervious to all of that. What worked hundreds of years ago may actually need some tuning. Yet that idea isn't exactly well received in my experience, at least not in the US: thou shalt not question The Founders.
Ironically, there have been some pretty major changes to how we use freedom of speech, and in ways that makes me feel like it's gotten worse. As if we're playing telephone/chinese whispers, and people are going through the motions even if the motivation to do so would seem obviously lacking to those in the beginning of the chain.
There have been obvious changes such as copyright evolution; but also other changes; e.g. lobbying was for a time seen as fraud; not protected speech.
So on the one hand we cry about the inviolability of free speech; yet on the other we've changed what that means repeatedly, and the world has changed too. I don't think that's a healthy mix.
Social media (and more broadly the data-science era) are still young. So far, the way they have affected public debate is probably still relatively random. There may have been been damage, but it's probably rarely been malicious. So whether you support the status quo - social media free from control and any obligations to the public - or a more constrained media somewhat depends on whether you think that's going to stay that way.
I'm not betting on it.
But what is "conceptual responsibility"? The thing is, responsibility is not really an aspect of reality, it is almost completely a social convention. Reality only shows you causal connections, and causal connections certainly are an important factor influencing how we distribute responsibility, but they do not determine responsibility in any simple way. Power plant operators are among the causes of people dying of electric shock. Does that mean that we consider them responsible? Generally no--because we as a society have decided that people running power plants is an overall benefit to society and we can prevent accidents in other ways and a whole bunch of other reasons.
So, yes, you can have opinions about how responsibilities should be distributed differently, but I don't see any sort of "inherent responsibilities".
> Simpler and more reasonable for the media platforms to actually be responsible for what they say, and not maintain the fiction that they have no influence or effect on the messages they "transmit".
Well, first of all, I would object to the idea that because you have influence, you should necessarily be responsible. Telcos also have a massive influence in principle. But, I would argue for good reasons, we have decided that they are not responsible.
Now, that doesn't mean that I think Facebook should not be held responsible for anything. But the problem that I see is that this kind of regulation does not hold Facebook responsible for what Facebook is saying/doing. It instead holds Facebook responsible for what other people are saying, with an in incentive to prevent speech that would be perfectly legal (and ethically somewhere between fine and really important), while actually missing the goal (or is it even the goal?) of holding Facebook accountable for the power they are exercising.
> But the whole point of a modern media platform is that you don't need manual control; and indeeed you can never keep up with manual control. Algorithms will win against judges every single time, simply because no society can have that many judges
Well, but what does that mean then? It's not obvious how judges could keep up, so let's forget about human rights?
> If anything: the fact that they don't actively edit the contents of the messages only grants them more power, because it makes the control they do have opaque and hard to judge the impact of. I don't mean to imply they're intentionally Machiavellian or whatever here: it's just that indirect, hard-to-observe control is really hard to value.
Yes, I agree. And that is precisely why I think this kind of regulation is dangerous. It causes collateral damage, and it doesn't even address the actual problem. Suppose this actually made hate speech go away. Does that change anything significant about the opaque and hard to judge power of these organizations? Or doesn't it rather just help hide it even better?
If you will, we need to restrict underhanded manipulative speech of Facebook, not hate speech of its users. Or at least, if we restrict hate speech of its users, we shouldn't do it by incentivising Facebook to exercise more underhanded manipulative power.
As to the human rights: there's no point in spending a lot of money deceiving ourselves; better not to pretend and face up to the fact there's a problem, than to delegate it to a legal system that will simply make matters worse. I'm not objecting in principle to a judicial solution; I just don't see how that has a hope in hell of doing more good than harm.
I agree this kind of law is likely to cause collateral damage, but I don't believe the collateral damage is going to be worse than the alternative. But it's clearly not ideal, sure! But the point really should be: what's the alternative?
I don't think there are any simple, politically acceptable alternatives. I mean, you could try to turn em into common carrier's or the like, or break up the companies, but that's all fairly extreme - try getting that past the lobbying.
It is not, it is an administrative offence.
Also, yes, "but with the government" is exactly what makes it a criminal case!?
See also:
It actually isn't. PArking ticket and the like are administrative violations, not criminal. Admittedly most people are unaware of this distinction; unfortunately that lack of awareness is exploited by, for example, politicians and pundits who describe all undocumented immigrants as criminals, when in fact many of them are in administrative violation and might be deportable but are not guilty of criminal acts or subject to criminal penalties.
So, Titanic was spreading hate speech then?
Against who? I have a feeling I'm going to roll my eyes at the answer, though.
Which is, as I pointed out elsewhere, a subcategory of criminal law int he broad sense (as opposed to civil law). Yes, Ordnungswidrigkeiten are not Straftaten, but that is not what this discussion is about. Ordnungswidrigkeitenverfahren have the exact same constitutional limitations as Strafverfahren.
> Against who? I have a feeling I'm going to roll my eyes at the answer, though.
Maybe ask someone who claimed that the NetzDG only limits hate speech?
Every large corporation makes money off people using their services for illegal purposes, that's not exactly a reason to give them powers to decide legal cases against their customers, is it?
Facebook is free to do whatever they want on their platform. There are no legal cases involved.
Your words.
Are you actually confused about the fact that Facebook is not actually a court, and thus by definition whatever Facebook does is not actually a "criminal case", and that thus my point is not about whether or not what Facebook does would be referred to by a legal scholar as a "criminal case", but about whether it quacks like a criminal case, it walks like a criminal case, therefore, it is a criminal case, in all respects except for exactly the detail that it is handled by Facebook and not by a court, which is exactly the problem that I am pointing out?
I just don't agree that if "it quacks like a criminal case, it walks like a criminal case, therefore, it is a criminal case", because is handled by Facebook and not by a court.
What's Facebook going to do? Fine you? Sentence you to Community Service? Send you to jail?
Maybe the crux of the matter is that I don't believe people have a constitutional right to be able to post to on Facebook.
Limit your ability to speak in public.
> Maybe the crux of the matter is that I don't believe people have a constitutional right to be able to post to on Facebook.
That is correct. But you have a constitutional right that the state does not prevent you from speaking in public (with relatively narrow exceptions), which includes the right that the state does not pressure/incentivise other people or corporations to limit your ability to speak in public. The fact that Facebook is allowed to prevent you from speaking does not mean that the state is allowed to tell them to stop you from speaking.
> Limit your ability to speak in public.
I disagree. I don't believe Facebook constitutes public speech. I'm open to be being persuaded though.
The constitution guarantees free speech only insofar it is not limited by "provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons, and in the right to personal honour".
And http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg... sets forth some pretty serious limitations.
Nowhere is it mentioned whether any of this happens in private or in public.
I mean, not that I agree, this law is obviously targeted towards public speech, but I still wonder why you think targeting private speech would make it less of a problem?!
Public speech (the legal concept) does not require that you have an audience of millions, it simply means that you are speaking to an audience of people who are not in some way personal acquaintances.
It could be argued that Facebook should be infrastructure.
That's not how the law in general and constitutions in particular work!?
Constitutions don't generally say something like "citizens may speak freely". Rather, they say "the state may not limit citizens in speaking freely". And that is intentional. The constitution does not grant rights to citizens, it limits the rights of the state. It's not that the state has to somehow allow people to speak freely somewhere somehow. The whole point is that the state may just not interfere with people speaking freely. Never, nowhere, and under no circumstances. That is, except for exceptions specified in the constitution or where the constitution allows for exceptions to be created in normal law.
And apart from the fact that that just is how constitutions work: It's absolutely essential that they do work that way. A freedom the exercise of which is subject to arbitrary limitations is just not a freedom. Freedom means that you can do what you want to do, not what someone else wants you to do. Now, that does not mean that you cannot do what someone else wants you to do. But it's only a freedom if it's your choice.
In the case of freedom of speech, that means it's your choice where and when to speak. Now, as I said, constitutions only bind the state, so facebook doesn't have to allow you to speak on their platform. But constititutions that contain freedom of speech make it illegal for the state to interfere with where and when people choose to speak, and that includes indirect interference where the state pressures Facebook to not allow someone to speak.
Just as freedom of movement doesn't mean the state has to allow you to move somewhere, freedom of speech doesn't mean the state has to allow you to speak somewhere. Freedom of movement means the state may not interfere with where or when you choose to move, and freedom of speech means the state may not interfere with where, when, or what you choose to say.
So, what's your point then? No judicial system possibly could, but Facebook can? Or Facebook can't either, so let's just ignore the constitution?
> More than that, it would be a textcase of privatising profits and leaving the costs to pick up for everyone else, while facebook siphoons the profits to tax havens.
Wut? Taxing Facebook more in order to finance an independent judicial system that takes care of the legal cases involving Facebook is a textbook case of privatising profits and externalising costs? I'm not sure I follow!?
Also, I'm not sure it's really exactly correct to say that Facebook is the source of these costs, given that it's citizens who say illegal things. If people meet in a pub to commit Volksverhetzung, is the pub the source of the law enforcement costs?
> Wut? Taxing Facebook more in order to finance an independent judicial system that takes care of the legal cases involving Facebook is a textbook case of privatising profits and externalising costs? I'm not sure I follow!?
Perhaps I missed where you mentioned raising taxes for Facebook as a solution. That's an interesting idea. I see two possible problems with that:
1) Facebook sells ads. Other companies sell ads. How do we decide who pays the higher tax and who not, and make it fair? For example, Google (sans Youtube and the irrelevant G+) is not a social network, but can still spread disinfo, hate speech etc. Should they pay the tax too?
2) Even if we had the money for such a judicial system, there is still the question of effectivity - the damage spreads very fast in this case, can we even design such a thing that provides good value for money while staying reasonably objective? And of course Facebook has the same problem now, as other private media (newspapers, TV stations) had before them - and the cheap solution seems to be to err on the side of caution. Are you soure we can do better?
I think it is correct, Facebook (and twitter, ...) extracts value from communication between citizens, and it looks like (e.g. from the Economist article mentiond above) also creates negative externalities that did not exist before.
Given that this is about German law ... yeah!?
> I am sure they did not ignore it when writing this law, and if they did, someone will refer it to the BVerfG, which can then cancel the law.
Which is an unfortunate tendency in recent decades, yes. Normally, the BVerfG should be an emergency brake, not a method to create maximally invasive laws.
> Anyway, private media (as opposed to public media, such as the BBC, ARD etc where the rules are very different) are not bound by laws or constitution to publish everything anyone throws at them. The corporations and individuals are free to do anything that is not forbidden by laws. So Facebook is free to decide what to publish, unless it is forbidden by law.
Yes, but that is missing the wood for the trees (and also potentially not completely true).
Facebook and the like function as sort-of public space, in that people go there to express their opinions to the public, even if the space is privately owned. Now, the state could not just prevent people from speaking in public without a proper legal process as a matter of constitutional freedoms, and that applies no matter who owns the venue. The legal process exists to make sure that only speech that really falls within the bounds of what the legislature (and by extension the constitutional court) have deemed inacceptable is stopped, so as to protect your constitutional rights. If the state tried to just broadly stop any speech that isn't obviously legal, that would be a massive violation of constitutional rights.
Now, private entities in principle are not bound by the constitution, so Facebook is free to delete whatever they want. However, that does not mean that it is therefore legal for the state to incentivise private entities to act in a way that would be unconstitutional if the state did act that way itself, as that would effectively allow the constitution to be circumvented completely. Imagine we got rid of the Strafgesetzbuch and instead created a law that entitles companies who imprison murderers to receive money from the state. Also, if you are such a company and fail to imprison a murderer, you are hit with a heavy fine. Without the StGB, the imprisonment by a private entity would be legal, and the private entity would not be bound by the constitution, so the constitution doesn't directly prevent them from imprisoning innocent people--so, everything is fine, right? Well, except it's not. The state cannot hide behind private entities when creating rules that affect constitutional freedoms. In the case of the NetzDG, the state incentivises private entities to limit legal speech, and limiting legal speech is not something the state is constitutionally allowed to do. The fact that Facebook also is allowed to delete stuff as much as it wants is not really relevant here.
But also, even property rights are limited in effectively public spaces. If you open a shop to the general public, for example, you cannot just throw out people without a good reason. I think it's conceivable the BGH might come to a similar conlusion about public online spaces at some point.
> Perhaps I missed where you mentioned raising taxes for Facebook as a solution.
I didn't explicitly mention that, but my point was that if your opinion is that they should pay for the enforcement because they make money by causing the problem, then it's a complete non-sequitur to say that therefore, they should get to make the decisions.
And not only is it a non-sequitur, it's also the complete opposite to how the rule of law normally works in a state--namely, if you want to enforce laws, you have the state do it, and if you need money to pay for it, you tax people, and if you think that a particular class of people or actions is responsible for the enforcement costs, then you try to tax them specifically. The idea that you instead effectively outsource law enforcement to a private entity is a really strange one.
How exactly to tax them correctly? I dunno! What seems pretty obvious to me is that the way taxation of such companies works right now is broken, but no clue what the correct approach would be. Though I'm not sure we should have a special tax for social networks, they simply should pay taxes here based on how much money they make here. It's just one purpose of taxes that you pay for externalities that are difficult to account individually, and that generally applies for all companies. Some cause wear to streets, some "cause" drunken people to have accidents, some "cause" people to commit Volksverhetzung. If we don't tax pubs specifically for drunk driving incidents, I'm not sure we should tax social networks specifically for hate speech incidenty.
> Even if we had the money for such a judicial system, there is still the question of effectivity - the damage spreads very fast in this case, can we even design such a thing that provides good value for money while staying reasonably objective? And of course Facebook has the same problem now, as other private media (newspapers, TV stations) had before them - and the cheap solution seems to be to err on the side of caution. Are you soure we can do better?
That is a very good question that is very hard to answer, and I suspect that the problem really needs a broader and more long-term approach than just criminal law enforcement, in particular including education.
But my primary point is that we shouldn't just ignore the constitution just because it's more convenient at the moment, and erring on the side of caution is very much the opposite of what the constitution requires when it comes to the state acting to limit constitutional freedoms. Or rather, as far as the constitution is concerned, the "side of caution" is the side of freedom, not the side of repression.
The obvious solution then would be to make it public space and not a private one. Make social networks a public utility. Then it can be governed without all the contradictions between the interest of public and private profit.
> If we don't tax pubs specifically for drunk driving incidents
However there is a special tax on alcohol (although I am not sure if this applies to all alcohol in Germany, even beer, in my country it does).
> But my primary point is that we shouldn't just ignore the constitution just because it's more convenient at the moment
Yes but what if the society is already damaged beyond repair when we finally do find a good solution?
Why does the social network have to be publicly owned for law enforcement to be "publicly owned"? Supermarkets are privately owned, but still, if I assault another customer, the case isn't decided by the legal department of the supermarket ... so what's the fundamental problem with applying that approach to social networks?
> However there is a special tax on alcohol (although I am not sure if this applies to all alcohol in Germany, even beer, in my country it does).
Well, sure, though I think the justification for that had little to do with drunk driving, given that those taxes are way older than cars ;-)
> Yes but what if the society is already damaged beyond repair when we finally do find a good solution?
Then we need to change the constitution?
I mean, the point of a constitution is that you don't just willy-nilly cross certain boundaries. You usually can still change it to a reasonable degree, but you need a large majority to do so, which should ensure that you have really thought about what you are doing.
Trampling all over the freedom rights of individuals in a panic over some perceived danger is exactly what a constitution is there to prevent, as history is full of cases where that didn't end well. There is no guarantee that that is always the right approach, but overall it seems to me that what groups of people do in a (moral) panic leads to way worse outcomes than letting some individuals do some not so nice things for a while, and constitutions exist to warn us of that danger, so we should be very careful with ignoring them.
Also, a state disregarding its constitution may be pretty damaging to society as well, as a lot of trust builds on that foundation.
I have to admit I moved the goalposts a bit. My thinking now goes like this: Many posts on facebook are not of strictly criminal nature, but are bad enough that they should not be public. And in the public sphere, there are many things that do not usually happen, that are frowned upon but not exactly criminal. Like defecating in public squares. Everyone can do that, but the absolute majority doesn't. And the reason we don't is peer pressure, public coercion, shame etc., not the threat of fines or proescution.
Now Facebook is a bit like a rundown shopping mall with gaming parlors, it stinks a lot, but lots of people use it and many use it specifically for the smell, so Zuckerberg has no motive to clean it up (unless a law forces him, like now, but then we get this discussion). What if facebook was instead a public square ran by citizens themselves. There would have to be some executive structure of course, but it would answer to the users and not to shareholders and advertisers, and that would change the whole dynamic of this situation, including moral/ethical norms of behavior.
And my experience from helping to run a small but general social network site (few thousand users at peak, no ads, 14 years running now) is that eventually this would work out better, because 'concerned citizens' gain the upper hand over trolls and hatemongers and most of the rest just accepts the prevalent norms and behave like decent people, without the thing getting too restrictive. Of course I know this won't happen with facebook and at that scale it's a completely different game but still, it would be nice.
So, no, I absolutely would not encourage anyone to use Facebook, very much the opposite, but at the same time I think that constitutional protections of freedom of speech still do apply to people who choose to use Facebook when they are using Facebook, and this law seems to me to be in conflict with that freedom.
What you won't find is engineers, of any kind, developers, or any kind of practical education.
Which means laws very often ignore practical considerations as to how they were applied. An example often given is equality between men and women. Since 1980s and up to 2005 in various countries laws were passed that married and unmarried couples are equal before the law. Including of course same sex couples, or "couples" involving more than 2 people. I'm not complaining about that concept, but it's implementation is emblematic of just how bad governments are.
However ...
1) Okay, they're equal. So when are 2 or more people a couple ? Not specified, of course (courts seem to have settled on when you share address for a given amount of time you're married. So Good News (tm) ! You were legally married if you had a roommate in college).
2) Related. When are people not a couple anymore ? Not specified.
3) What if these people separate ? Are the any obligations ? Not specified.
4) What if people are living together and one, unbeknownst to the other, incurs a great debt ? Can that debt be held against the other (like for married couples) ? Unspecified.
5) What about shared ownership ? What about registering a property/house in both their names ? Unspecified.
6) Does entering in a couple relationship (as in living at the same address for a while) give raise to obligations in case of separation ? What about kids, adopted or otherwise ? Does one party owe the other alimony if they separate in less than amicable circumstances ? Unspecified.
7) What about all of tenancy law, family law, contract law, ... all of which applies ("applied") differently to couples and separate individuals ? A million questions. All of which are unspecified. What if 3 people are living together and one adopts a kid ? Do all 3 have custody now ? How about separation ?
Congress, however, merely wanted to look good voting a very generic law into existence. There was close to zero consideration of how that affected all existing systems, and even when problems became apparent, no reaction from parliament.
And if it's this bad for things that are directly in the domain of lawyers themselves, you can imagine just how bad it is for things they don't understand.
When a government passes a law prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of (say) gender identity, it essentially inherits the previous caselaw from previous employment discrimination acts - so if you know how not to discriminate against women, you have a pretty good idea how not to discriminate against transwomen.
Finally, quite a lot of changes are made piecemeal by caselaw anyway - that's the basis of the Anglo-American common law. So even as adoption law (say) evolves, it does so casewise, not generally by handing a large edict from on high and breaking people's understanding of what the law is.
At least in the UK, parental responsibility (and, separately, custody) are well-defined, including the cases where there are zero, one, two, or more people holding it. Grandparents and friends raising children has, after all, been a thing for centuries. Ditto handling splitting partnerships, ditto handling unconventional domestic arrangements.
Ditto tenancy law. Ditto contract law. Particularly ditto shared ownership, which can even legally handle weird situations where people bought houses on behalf of other people who died, and...
I'm really not sure what basis your argument is actually on.
This breaks the HN guideline against name-calling in arguments. Please don't do that, regardless of how bad someone's argument is.
(Source http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/neue-finanzstruktur-wi...)
The private company is a publisher which is being held responsible for what it chooses to publish. Individual citizens have a right to hold and express their views, but not an automatic right to publication. If their views are so odious as to invite criminal sanction, it's entirely reasonable for them to incur extra costs/difficulty of publication.
Now this is where someone usually pipes up with 'but my freedoms!' and that's all very well, but if the freedom they wish to exercise involves proposing limits on the freedom of others (perhaps even by ending their lives) then that person is proposing a zero-sum view of freedom for others and cannot complain about having a zero-sum calculus imposed upon their own political expression.
Popper's paradox of tolerance may be explicable in terms of the boundary between positive and zero-sum games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> Individual citizens have a right to hold and express their views, but not an automatic right to publication.
Well, yes, that is what that means. They have a right to not be hindered by the state in publishing their opinion (unless hate speech, essentially).
Source? Because as a German I strongly disagree with that statement.
This is not to say that the law is fine. Its intentions, however, arguably are. To oppose this viewpoint, you would have to defend a world where hate speech and libel go (erratically, but mostly) without defense for the victims. From a very libertarian viewpoint, that may be an acceptable sacrifice, though.