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Comment by wolco | Hacker News Reader

That sounds possible for large players.

How? Can you even define "extremist content" in general terms without also making religious texts illegal? Or scientific articles that go against the politically correct narrative?

>Or scientific articles that go against the politically correct narrative?

Wut?

James Damore was fired for citing scientific articles, for example.

You can also watch the swedish documentary Hjernevask which shows what happens when science goes against the PC system, it's fascinating.

Damore was fired for what he said, not what he cited while saying it (I'm not saying it was justified). Misrepresenting events as a rhetorical tactic is essentially propaganda - it will never do anything but hurt both sides of the argument.

But what he said we're citations. Nobody is misrepresenting anything.

Norwegian documentary, actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVaTc15plVs&list=PLaJtMuDnR5...

(The links in the Wikipedia article go to videos with a bit higher quality than the Youtube playlist.)

Assuming there are already laws defining what you can say/publish, I'd assume that these laws are only relating to how material that is already illegal should be handled?

What is legal is of course varying between EU member states, but e.g. hate speech or nazi propaganda usually falls under the same paragraph and is already illegal.

I agree that this is a very difficult distinction, but the distinction isn't new in any place where there aren't already hate speech laws for example

These laws are extremely vague, and already applied very selecively. For instance, if you look at Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech, the European Comission admits that they want the websites to perform the function of the judge, jury, executioner:

"Isn't it for courts to decide what is illegal?

Yes, interpreting the law is and remains the responsibility of national courts. At the same time, IT companies have to act in line with national laws, in particular those transposing the Framework Decision on combatting racism and xenophobia"

So if you're a website operator, and it has the text that says "slaves, obey your masters", should that be deleted? Why or why not?

What about "do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man, she must be quiet"?

They’ve made it clear that they are not making exceptions for small players, specifically somas to preclude pushing extremists out into the fringes of the Internet. No small platform will ever be able to launch in the EU again.

The EU usually makes little distinction between a 3 man startup and a multi national 5000 people company with their laws. They don't get that such laws only re-enforce and strengthen the position of the big dominant players (Facebook, Google, Twitter...) that have the legal capacity to deal with all this nonsense.

That is how proper laws are supposed to work, there is no rich and poor's court.

I agree. Thats why you should not pass this law.

In theory. In practice, there are a lot of ways to abuse that, for example by establishing a high entry barrier. The reality is always much more nuanced than ideologies.

really? On youtube there are more hours of videos uploaded every minute than actual human reviewers can ever hope to police, let alone under one hour...

Google has $100,000,000,000+ in the bank and slightly more than that in revenue last year, so realistically if they need 100,000 more employees to handle this they will still be ridiculously profitable, especially when they call them contractors to avoid health care, and evade taxes on a global scale, and woo oppressive new markets like China.

Charging users to upload videos would solve the problem.

I doubt ISIS and the like lacks funding. If this is really what you want to prevent money wont be a big barrier.

You're not thinking laterally. The problem isn't extremist videos. The problem is that there are too many videos uploaded to reasonably check all of them. Charging would solve that problem, which in turn solves the problem of extremist content.

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