Free Speech Puts U.S. on ‘A Collision Course’ with Global Limits on Big Tech
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Consider duckduckgo's search results you can choose:
Strict
*No Adult content*
Moderate
*No Explicit images or video*
Off
*Don't filter content*The USA seems to be particularly offended by, and most likely to remove, harmless breast feeding or topless images. Facebook and eBay are absurdly prudish. Much of Europe finds this odd, to say the least. At the same time will let by highly violent images, and straight up hate speech as perfectly fine. So it's not even slightly consistent. It's as daft as the US TV habit of dubbing over slightly naughty words, whilst showing people getting shot through with a full magazine in the same programme.
My kids are grown now, but I would far rather have limited them from the violent and racist too soon than prudishly from an accidental nipple or baby feeding pic!
Simply put they should abide by the differing standards of the places they operate. Just like all those companies selling foods, electricals, consumer goods and toys do.
While different countries may have different laws. Do you really think the censorship that happens in China is good?
If you operate in such countries you may not have a choice, but to comply or pull such local operations. The end result is content is available in one place and not another which is unfortunate.
Do you really think the restriction on racist and hate speech that happens in Europe and elsewhere, and is often in legislation, is bad?
Most folks in those countries don't. We're unlikely to harmonise with the US on that any time soon. Does not mean we have a Chinese internet or we lost free speech. I can speak freely against the government until the cows come home. I can chain myself to a bridge against inaction on climate, and expect a entirely non-violent police response. I just can't reduce every conversation to lowest common denominator ignorant slurs - I can criticise my neighbour or government for what they do and choices they make, but not for their colour, religion (or lack) or gender etc.
Criticise the act, not the person. Personally, I think that's far more healthy.
Facebook et al do next to nothing to comply, whilst continuing to operate services. It's no surprise that governments around the world are finally starting to react to that.
Secondly, human language can be quite nuanced. Speech may contain satire, irony, jokes, indirection, differences of connotation, and idioms. It may be hard determine if such line has been crossed. Applying such a law across a population is bound create some injustices by such ambiguities of human language alone. Let alone something someone typed on the internet and may have not proof read.
However, countries are free to do what they want. However, I don't like seeing countries request websites be blocked ect... Again it sets a precedent that government has power to do something, and generally governments expand powers they have. So limits on what governments can do are important.
About US and European views on speech. This is an interesting table. I would say the US is not far off. The averages for Europe are not what I would call a small percentage.
https://www.pewglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/11...
A company who has a presence in country should operate by the countries laws. However, for a global platform like Facebook it either means they must segment their site based off country or apply the most aggressive policy across their entire platform. Both of these have their problems.
Most people dislike this, and so they stop using the website. But the racists love it, and they attract more racists.
Soon the website is full of only racists or the usful idiots who say that freedom of speech for the racists is more important than providing a welcoming atmosphere for everyone else.
This extremist version of freedom of speech is only in use in the US, and it isn't even particularly popular over there (if it were Americans would have more understanding of it). Just about everywhere else realises that limits on some types of speech are an important part of a functioning democracy.
1) Whatever entity determines the categorization of content wields great power over the reach of that content. In the FB case, this is likely sufficient to decide elections. Although one could argue FB has this anyway simply via control of the news feed.
2) There will likely be sufficient people who disable filtering that the amplification effect will still be present and large. Most people would agree that amplifying certain speech is dangerous. How should that be handled?
Really, your second point only applies to calls of violence. Even in the US the exceptions tend linger around violence. Then after that people worry about what is called "inflammatory speech". Mainly since it may lead to violence. However, policies to counter inflammatory speech that are punitive or censorious have problems. First it gives inflammatory speakers a potential real grievance. Secondly, and more concerning is it may limit nonviolent avenues for them to state their believed grievances or views.
They should be held responsible not for their content, but for whatever they’re recommending (and thus tacitly endorsing) for people to watch.
They don't want to be 4chan...
Of course that is their problem in the end.
This sentiment is a little odd. Tech companies like Facebook and Google are not at all like a newspaper. Someone can copy a copyrighted poem to their front page, and Facebook may spread the link around before being notified and removing the content. If the New York Times were to publish copyrighted material without the appropriate license, it would be obvious just how much they aren't like Facebook. And let's not even talk about the legal weirdness of being able to google The Pirate Bay.
The compromise of the DMCA seems like it hinged on the fact that tech companies are not publishers or editors, and as such do not have the same moral and legal liabilities for things that appear on their platforms. In a sense, OSP's and ISP's are just "tubes".
The demands being placed on tech companies seem to be increasingly reactive and contradictory. As bad as article 11 and 13 are, they seem to at least be consistent in that tech companies are now responsible for everything that appears on their infrastructure, much like the New York Times is responsible for everything they print.
The first amendment isn't going anywhere.
Any US speech legislation would likely be dead on arrival after it is shot down in court.
At the same time there is nobody successfully (legally at least) arguing Facebook can't remove content as it wishes...
If you're a big platform and you dominate the market, yeah you've got a lot of work to do but that's the price of success.
At lot of people I talk to want to have some sort of national consensus on regulating platforms instead of tech companies deciding for themselves. Government would be the natural mechanism by which to manage this, but we are extremely wary of putting speech in control of the government for good historical reasons.
Government also are small segment of the population, moreover politicians don't understand the topic.
Cloudflare and other tech pundits just want to be free from consequences of their decisions. If gov tell them to censor they would just say, its not us, its you country law.
This is purely PR endeavor.
Also, asking the govt. to ban "violent speech" is violent speech itself.
Are people too dumb to understand this or would they actually love to live in a totalitarian dictatorship?
Now we suffer from the consequences.
Many countries, and citizens of those countries, expect their government to take reasonable steps to protect groups from racist or other hate speech. We don't feel that makes it a totalitarian dictatorship. Germany has some very particular regulations around speech and certain political symbols and groups - because they very clearly don't want to become a totalitarian dictatorship again. The US allows those - because free speech.
You'd expect me to follow US standards if I had a company selling food or electrics there, wouldn't you? Why does it become "people are dumb" to expect a US company to follow European or Far Eastern law? Don't like it? Don't operate there.
It's that simple for all other products and services, why not tech?
The point is that under that same logic, you should ban practically all opinions that involve politics.
"Selling cocaine should be prohibited" implies that you want the state to exert violence against people who sell drugs, either to incarcerate them, force them to pay a fee (which if not paid will likely result in incarceration, i.e. violence). Wanting cocaine to be prohibited is violent speech.
"Bald people should be incarcerated" is also violent speech.
Allowing one while prohibiting other is an arbitrary decision, since both are violent ideas. The fact that most people agree with the former and disagree with the latter is not a good way to decide, since you might as well just ban every idea that people disagree with (or that the state disagrees with) which is exactly what totalitarian dictatorships do.
> We don't feel that makes it a totalitarian dictatorship
Given a big enough cage, animals don't notice that they are in a cage.
I wouldn't call Germany a totalitarian dictatorship, but it doesn't have freedoms that I consider important, such as freedom of speech. If that freedom is taken away by a dictator or by a crowd voting against it, it doesn't make much difference to the individual that wants freedom.
Keep in mind that not everyone in Germany, or other countries is against freedom of speech, they lost it because most people don't want it.
It's not an American view, it's a view of people who care about freedom. I'm not American, and I'm sure there are many non-Americans that want freedom.
That does not follow at all.
> Allowing one while prohibiting other is an arbitrary decision
You neglect, to include freedom from. In both the US model and your interpretation of freedom to do and say whatever you like, freedom from is little considered. Just freedom to.
Yet you can't ever consider one without the other.
Your freedoms will impact those around you. Your neighbour will be impacted by your building a wall as it may cut their light or view. They'll be impacted by your words as much as installing a 2,000w sound system in your garden.
The "freedom" of the majority to stand out side the polling station calling out the "fucking niggers" - or jews or whatever - for daring to want to cast a vote, express their will. Literally putting the minority in fear of their life. That freedom has taken a freedom from another.
Such fundamentalist freedom is often espoused by those seeking a racist or oppressive regime. The freedom to call out the niggers, to have the neo-Nazi rally, to require the jews to wear a yellow star in public. That "freedom" is one of the tools to put and keep the minority in their low place and get second class service or bus seating.
> it's a view of people who care about freedom
NO. Emphatically no. Just for people who care for a fundamentalist selfishness of the majority. To be a racist jerk, or bring the tyranny of an oppressive majority outside the polling station. To be white in Alabama or apartheid South Africa. To not be white in other places.
Those who really care for freedom attempt to balance freedom to against freedom from. It's always a balancing act, it's just that 98% of it is really easy to allow.
Germany absolutely does have freedom of speech, they just attempt to set some common-sense limits on when that freedoms takes from others more than it gives you. You can complain against the government as much and as often as you like. You can't pretend the holocaust didn't happen or promote a new gassing of minorities. You don't have the freedom to incite violence with your words.
The only country that really goes with "freedom to" as the main consideration with little to no consideration of "freedom from" is the US. Mainly due to what often looks like deliberate misinterpretations of their constitution over the years.
(I'll agree that there have been things that look like deliberate misinterpretations - particularly of the Commerce Clause and the Tenth Amendment. Freedom of speech doesn't look like one of those to me.)
Seems like the constitution, and early amendments, were a decent attempt for their age to do something a little better. Laws and texts of that age did not take the endless paragraphs of today's legal language.
As written it can be interpreted in a 20th century way and encompass everything, including commercial, pornography, campaigning and every damn fringe thing. Given the context of everything else from the 18th century, the known history of how they arrived where they did, and the rest of the constitution it seems far more probable that they simply meant freedom to choose religion, criticise the regime, free press and right of assembly. The "classical" definition of freedom of speech, if you like, without bending society out of shape by chasing the letter rather than spirit. 18th century laws rarely delved into precise and perfect definitions of all the edge cases.
As it is open to interpretation, we'll never know what precisely they had in mind. :)
Saying "Gays should be treated the same as straights by the law" isn't necessarily violent.
Saying "You can't refuse to sell a cake to a gay person" is violent, because it implies forcing a person to sell something.
What I'm criticizing is banning speech because it's "violent" while at the same time allowing other forms of violent speech. You're not banning it because it's violent, you're banning it because you don't agree with it.
Am I pushing this violence thing to the limits? Kind of, I can see a counter-argument saying that I'm being overly literal, etc. but hear this: Many of these moral inquisitors that want to ban violent speech have ideas that are actually violent, not only in the "philosophical"/overly literal sense that I described, but ideas that actually would affect good people negatively, and many times they don't only want to ban nazis and that sort of stuff, sometimes they want to censor liberal (in the British sense of the word) and conservative ideas that are held by a non-negligible amount of "regular" people.
So it's important to spot these lies when they start, even if they seem like edge cases and overly literal interpretations, I think it's good to deconstruct these ideas to their fundamental concepts and analyze them before saying "Yeah, they're Nazis anyway, ban them".