Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill | Hacker News Reader

Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

polandin.com

295 pointsandrenth362 comments

> Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law.

This is kind of insane.

So if I offer a free website- a private company operating as I like- I would be forbidden from removing content from my own website that I don't like because the person who wrote it- again, not a paying customer- wants it to be there. Not only does that person have free speech, but I have to foot the bill for them to promote their free speech.

> does not break Polish law

This is the real key piece. Poland's government can just ban saying anything that goes against their own viewpoints. Now their supporters can't have their comments removed, and their detractors will.

There is a distinction between website and the quoted "social media services".

Really? Define it then.

Facebook is a website by all technical terms.

Where is the hard defined line between social media services and a website?

What is a website that hosts a forum?

What is Discord?

What if I run a WordPress website with the BuddyPress plugin?

What about comments on my blog articles?

You could discriminate by just listing names of the platforms that this law is intended for or go by number of (polish?) users.

A while ago, I got a lot of flack here for suggesting that github wasn’t a social media website.

Technically Facebook/Twitter are not websites, but "social" applications (web/native). You need to have a user account to see (FB) or post (FB/Twitter) anything.

I need a user account to watch Netflix. Same for banking.

A user account is not the primary criteria of being a "social" application.

Where is the distinction between a company town and my living room? Define it.

Ben Thompson, of Stratechery, had an interesting way of talking about Facebook that might help with a future definition of "social media services."

He (and podcast co-host John Gruber[0]) talked about the idea that Facebook isn't the same site for any two people. Due to the algo, everyone has their own personal version of the site. Therefore, there's no individual snapshot of Facebook at any given time.

I found this an interesting concept to point out. If one needed to distinguish between a website and "social media services," perhaps a law could be drafted such that such a condition was true.

HN, for example, would be a website because commenting and voting is user-based. I suppose that might mean Spotify and Netflix would be swallowed by the definition. The definition would then need additional language about user-submitted content.

[0]: https://dithering.fm

Amazon.com isn't the same site for any two people. It shows you different product suggestions based on what you purchased or looked at before.

Websites that host user generated content are social media.

HN is a social media, your basement server isn’t, hosted content on AWS probably needs some definition workarounds but instinctively shouldn’t be.

What about my PeerTube instance hosted on a NUC in my kitchen? It hosts copies of videos and comments from other instances.

Boom you're a social media company. And you'll be naturally liable for hosting contents. Isn't that how Winny worked?

There is not even a draft of this law available, so you can't be sure.

Is HN a social media service?

Really?

What if I have a blog with comments? That is a website that involves social interaction. If I remove a comment on there, that is “removing content”.

Yup, under this law a post mentioning true facts about nazi collaboration in poland during ww2 would be illegal.

Out of curiosity, which facts do you mean?

The law is stupid of course and an attempt to fight for their point of view(that is: xenophobic, racist and intolerant), but history is a subject rather widely discussed in Poland with all the sides being represented in media.

https://time.com/5128341/poland-holocaust-law/

> The bill was proposed by the country’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and calls for up to three years in prison or a fine for accusing the Polish state or people of involvement or responsibility for the Nazi occupation during World War II

The law has since passed, tho it was later amended to remove the prison time portion.

Now I am not a lawyer, nor am I polish, so I don't know what the situation is on the ground - but I believe the law makes repeating much of the contents of this wikipedia page illegal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration_in_German-occupi...

No one sensible is accusing "the Polish state" or "the Polish people" of being involved with the Holocaust, and the Wikipedia page itself doesn't state anything like that. The law is aimed at hateful idiocy like talking about the supposed "Polish death camps", as opposed to the tragically real Nazi death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The wikipedia page I linked to clearly points out that polish people WERE involved in the holocaust. Not all, in fact I believe the vast majority of poles were not collaborators... but that doesn't mean this law doesn't make it legally sketchy to talk about the poles who were collaborators

I visited a Nazi extermination camp in Poland where you could literally see the adjacent town from inside the camp fences. It's absolute lunacy to pretend there weren't Polish collaborators.

It's an absolute lunacy to think that because a group of people lives nearby a place where something bad is going on, it is certain that among them are people helping with it.

Polish people were exterminated on a daily basis by German nazis. Over 5 million Poles were brutally killed. It is hard to miss German attack and occupation of Poland aim was also to depopulate it from polish people.

Collaborators were punished because they were traitors and everyone seen and sees them like such.

Below is a link to a Wikipedia where you can learn more:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_(1939%E2%8...

I hope you will understand how offensive and false your comment is.

Just one example from your link:

> Especially in the early weeks of the German offensive, many thousands of Jews were murdered by members of local communities in the western parts of the previously Soviet zone, such as the Baltic countries, eastern Poland, and western Ukraine.

I am absolutely not trying to paint a complex situation in black and white. The article you linked to also points out how many non-jewish poles were killed, how many non-jewish poles helped jewish poles at great risk to themselves, etc. but the idea that you can “other” collaborator poles out of being poles is denying the reality.

Polish people were also murdered in huge numbers by the Russians, but people often forget that.

There are some who like to call Nazi death camps 'Polish death camps' because they were located in Nazi occupied Poland. This, of course, is frowned on by Poland. It is seen as a way of blaming Poland for Germany's crimes, while the people who do it play innocent and claim they are merely stating 'true facts' about the locations of the camps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Polish_death_camp"_controvers...

Note the last part of that article, though[1]:

You're also not allowed to refer to camps like Zgoda or Jaworzno - which were labour camps operated by poles on behalf of the communist regime - as 'Polish concentration camps'.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Polish_death_camp%22_contro...

These laws are in response to people, some of them misguided but many of them doubtlessly neo-nazis, calling Auschwitz a 'polish camp'. The law has unfortunate edge cases but I think it was well motivated. If you tally up all the Poles who knowingly and willingly collaborated with Nazis and compare that with the number of Poles murdered by the Nazis, I think it's clear that calling Auschwitz a 'polish camp' is monstrous. And while the matter of Zgoda should be taken seriously, it should also be kept in context. Less than two thousand people died at Zgoda, which is certainly a horrible crime. But that number represents what, a few hours at Auschwitz? It was more at Jaworzno, but still less than a single day at Auschwitz. It is any wonder the matter of these camps was overlooked in the formulation of a law targetting neo-nazis who want to disassociate Germany from Auschwitz?

It's not what I'd call a great law. But I think it's a law with a wholly reasonable motivation.

I'll tell you a secret. Poles are exceptionally adept at duplicity and censoring their history. Chopin, Konopnicka were likely gay? LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU! Józef Bem converted to Islam and still acted like a Polish patriot? Let's talk about something else. Such and such poets or composers etc were jewish? You're either a Jew or a Polish Catholic, obviously. Poland never attacked any countries. Poland didn't initially try an alliance with Hitler and annex a part of Czechoslovakia. The word "pogrom" doesn't come from Polish, no no. And before "pogrom", "tumult" wasn't used as an euphemism. Aggression towards immigrants doesn't contradict Christianity. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was perfect and it collapsed only because it was attacked by neighbors. All countries bordering with Poland love Poland. Poland is the fountain of innovation, it's only a coincidence the most famous Polish people lived outside Poland.

There's literally a common phrase "Poland is the Christ of nations." - Mickiewicz, the chief poet. You can only be the Christ if you're without fault.

edit: this post is getting downvoted :D. I was never good at Polish doublethink, cared too much about facts.

it's getting downvoted because you said this in the most racist sounding way possible.

"Various polish governments have done XYZ" vs. "polish people lie". It's similar to "Israel does XYZ to Palestinians" vs "Jews want XYZ to happen to Palestinians" (to use a common antisemitic trope trying to justify antisemitism)

Incidentally, Poles are one of the purest or most inbred nations in Europe, and you have no one else but Adolf Hitler to thank for it. You see echoes of that in Witcher 3, I know it caused some controversy overseas because of how uniformly white everyone is. No malicious intent there, just modern Poles projecting their world back in time. Between WW1 and WW2, percentage of people identifying as Poles was less than 70%. Today it's 97%.

There's a point after which you can say there's a pattern and not just a bunch of samples. When we're talking about populations we're talking in terms of averages and distributions, and the average in Poland is much like I described. In my opinion history of Poland is the second state religion, after catholicism, 91% as of 2018. And if you say many young people don't actually go to church, you're making my point (duplicity and appeasing peer pressure).

97% and 91%. Maybe it's you who don't know what you're talking about?

You posts remind me of how Goebbels propaganda machine described the jew: crooked nose, small eyes, greedy,...

Fine.

I only found out recently that you need to go through a lengthy process back in the church where you were baptised in order to renounce yourself from the Catholic church here in Poland. Just being an atheist, not attending church, not believing, not supporting the organisation is enough. You need to go to your place of baptism, have multiple talks with the priest there, then fill out some forms, wait some time, etc.

I wonder if people actually know this, and how many actually go through the pain of "de-registering" themselves from this organisation.

I also wonder how this affects things like "official statistics" of Catholics in the country.

Regarding Witcher 3 there is a very simple reason for nearly all the people being white. It's because the region is in turmoil and there's a war going on. So all the people (of different skin colour, different race) that can leave have already done so.

The process is why I don't bother. I was baptized when I was little and I don't consider that a proper contract. If they want to use bad input data, I'll let them deceive themselves. Going to the church and pleading is not only somewhat humiliating, it validates the contract between a little child and a very large organization.

"Colorful" people leaving because of a war implies a racist society where unusual people are merely tolerated at best of times. History is more complex than that. Duke Mieszko I, the first recorded ruler of Poland, gifted a camel (according to Thietmar) to Otto III, future emperor. That was in A.D. 986.

Not necessarily that colourful people leave, but that outsiders leave. For one because they can and have somewhere else to go to, but the other because if they stay they will be viewed with suspicion and bad things might happen to them.

The Witcher series has been full of fearful populaces wary and hostile to outsiders/other races (Dwarves and Elves in this case).

It's a bit of a mess. If you're given a task of running a camp from occupying forces, I can't imagine you have much real choice (or you end up in one yourself). Then again, "just following orders" is not a great defence either. I wish people didn't try to make that black&while.

Or to add a different story, a family member sent to a Soviet camp told everyone not to retaliate against neighbours who testified against him - because they were likely forced to do so.

Or think of Nazi-run weapon factories in occupied countries where locals were forced to work. (And sometimes managed to sabotage production quality)

I have never seen people seriously claiming that the Poles ran the concentration camps.

That's different from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration_in_German-occupi... which may be a controversial topic but one based on real history

Misspeaking and labeling the camps Polish due to geographical location is almost certainly an innocent mistake.

Mentioning true facts (mostly falsehoods, but also some true facts) about WW2 is already illegal in Germany.

Like what? Please don’t let it be Holocaust denial...

Spoiler alert: it's Holocaust denial.

Of course that is illegal in Germany, but it's also illegal to make certain true claims that are contrary to the official narrative imposed on Germany after their defeat.

Now you have me interested, which fact would that be?

Aren't facts true per definition?

Plenty of countries pass laws stating the the truth is propaganda - the US equivalent would be calling it Fake News, only they'd actually legally prohibit anything the gov says is fake news.

This is the true point of it. Anything they don't like is banned, anything they like is compelled.

Like they sing in Poland, Jebać PiS.

Note that PiS is actually pronounced piss, which must be some kind of divine providence.

Hahaha, a lot of people who are Slavs or of Slavic descent know exactly what you mean, universally. The first word is known well across Slavic languages, the second is an acronym for Poland’s far right ruling party.

> PiS is actually pronounced piss

no it isn't. It's pronounced peace

Actual protest from the end of 2020 when PIS decided to just break established multi party agreements and outlaw abortions:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ericprydz/comments/jkzj5a/antigover...

how it happened https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygAMU7HOM7I

> This is kind of insane.

It's especially insane because Polish law is not a superset of every other country's law. If a web site is forced to remove content because it violates a law specific to the country the site is based in -- boom, now they've broken the law in Poland.

You're right, there's no way this could reasonably enforced.

Enforced it could be. No way to reasonably comply, though.

Nitpicking: you would want it to be a subset of the laws of all other countries‘ for that as it needs to be the intersection of all to be compatible with all of them at once.

Social media is heavily balkanized along language borders.

Put another way: In the US at least, r/jailbait didn't actually break any laws (well, maybe some individual posts did, but the whole idea of that subreddit was essentially to ogle underage women/children but in a way that was not explicitly illegal). So with something like this law all social media sites would be forced to host the equivalent of r/jailbait.

Actually, r/jailbait was removed as a reaction to the FOSTA laws which explicitly carve out an exception to section 230 for content that could be considered related to sex trafficking, so in this sense it actually did create a new legal risk compared to other non-sex related subs.

I thought that subreddit was banned because of the negative media attention that it received. Wasn't that years before SESTA and FOSTA were passed?

Yes, the timing matched with the negative media attention, similar to the removals of a few Trump subreddits recently.

This has already been weaponized by subs like /r/AgainstHateSubs and other vigilante-like subs. Their tactics usually involve posting in those subreddits from sockpuppet accounts, using hateful or threatening messages. The few times the targeted subs mods aren't on the ball, they mass report the post for hate speech to try and get the sub banned, or the mods banned then later request the subreddit for themselves, something of a trophy I guess. On rare instances, they reach out to their freelance journalist friends to write a hite piece.

Is this not something that Reddit can show is happening? I guess you could avoid things like browser fingerprinting by using multiple machines as well as a VPN, however, if someone is going to that level of effort -- what's the end game?

If the site admins just want an excuse to get rid of a sub that doesn’t align with their political ideology, it’d be pretty easy to not bother investigating.

> Their tactics usually involve posting in those subreddits from sockpuppet accounts, using hateful or threatening messages.

Any evidence for this?

Do you need any evidence for this? Shouldn't this be handled in the same way you would patch a security hole even if you had no evidence it was being exploited?

I.e. shouldn't Reddit let a community exist, even if some users post content against the rules, as long as the moderators are putting a reasonable, good faith effort to ban such users?

(I don't know if what notadev said is true, or if Reddit bans communities just because users are posting bad content against the moderators will)

Don't those subs tend to produce enough hate on their own without having to have anyone fake it? I have a cousin who is down the QAnon rabbit hole, believes a race war is coming, and will happily make new accounts and post all day long to whatever subs he thinks are on the same page as him. He's been through several facebook accounts in just last year.

I can assure you he isn't an antifa plant.

These subs are one of the main drivers for people like your cousin.

They need each other like a married couple.

Wikipedia says 2011. So yes.

Yes, as afuchs said, FOSTA wasn't passed to 2018, and that forced things like craigslist personals to close. r/jailbait was closed many years earlier in response to an onslaught of negative media attention.

I don't see that as a good counter example. That sort of content should be illegal anyway.

It should, but until legislators act, it's legal. That's the issue will the law.

The Constitution would need to amended.

That's exactly what makes it a great example. If we accept the premise that /r/jailbait was not illegal (but "merely" reprehensible), then under this new law, Reddit would have been breaking the law when they decided to ban the subreddit.

A great example maybe to demonstrate inability of current criminal code and judicial systems,

but not a good example to convince someone that privatized censorship is akchally a good thing.

Its because real life is not black and white. Its shades of gray mostly.

And while its ease to spot and codify extreme cases on both sides, its impossible for a law to clearly codify a clear line where good turns to bad.

The 'original' argument for this type of conversation is: what makes a nude picture an art piece, what makes it porn. If we were given 100 photos we would probably agree in most cases whats art and whats porn, but try to write rules for distinguishing them.

Clothed pictures of minors should be illegal?

Why should it be illegal?

The second part is reminiscent of how “net neutrality” is pitched in the United States. I’ve never felt that definition was true net neutrality due to the reason you outlined.

But to determine if something is legal or illegal sometimes takes years, doesn't it?

I'm not a lawyer, and at the risk of sounding ignorant, but I don't understand how a Polish law can be enforced on a company/service/piece of hardware under US (presumably, but could be any other) jurisdiction.

At the end of the day, the data is sitting on a piece of hardware somewhere, isn't the "owning" place the one that dictates what laws can be enforced on it?

Who mentioned the US?

No one.

> (presumably, but could be any other)

If you want to do business in a country, then you have to follow the laws of that country. Polish courts would enter judgment against the company for violating Polish law, premising their jurisdiction on the activities of that company within their borders (e.g. accepting payment in polish currency, selling ads to polish businesses, charging for polish views/clicks). They can then seize the company's property in Poland to enforce that judgment. They can also introduce that judgment in foreign courts to do enforcement actions there. Those foreign courts would examine the validity of the Polish judgment (e.g. by reexamining jurisdiction) before issuing orders to enforce it.

There's nothing novel about this. This is how civil judgments are enforced across borders every day.

Makes sense, thanks.

It can be enforced in a lot of ways, including fines on the company's operations in the country, charges against local employees and banning the site from the country's ISPs.

IANAL but as I understand it, most governments will consider something to be in their jurisdiction if the user is within their jurisdiction, even if the server is not. See GDPR, which applies to all EU citizens globally- even one residing in the United States using US web services.

GDPR outside the European Union only applies to European Union based companies (headquartered in the EU).

Otherwise, it is limited to internet traffic from people within the European Union.

This rule was unclear in the beginning of the law implement, but there have been high court rulings clearing up the confusion.

See this, for example “Google wins landmark right to be forgotten case”: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49808208

Have the EU been able to impose GDPR penalties on an org with no staff or assets and no representation in the EU?

It is a bit more complicated: the EU considers the protection of personal data a basic human right (charta of fundamental rights article 8). As such there are cases where the EU considers itself to be the responsible authority, even if the company is not within the EU, as long as the data subject is.

There are limits to that due to contract law, but there are also limits how many rights one can sign away, especially when dealing with predatory corporations.

To give a less digital analogue: if you are robbed, your local police is the authority you talk to. They are not going to tell you that you need to find out who robbed you and talk to the police in their home town.

That’s a great point. Sorry I was not as inclusive as I should have been in my explanation.

I am a dual US|EU citizen, but I am culturally American. I was trying to explain it from the perspective of Americans.

Thank you again for the clarification.

Presumably social media companies want to sell ads there and then it's rather easy to pressure them to cooperate or fine them.

facebook can simply pull out of the nation

Oh, but Zbigniew Ziobro (the minister) IS kinda insane in other aspects. He's a hardcore conservative.

His childhood/teenage hero was Janosik, a highlander bandit along the lines of Robin Hood. Being a fan of vigilante justice is not a good sign if you're a minister of justice.

He's bothered by independent courts and independent prosecutors. He puts pressure on judges ruling not along his will, he harasses them, stripped one of immunity for investigating a break of parliamentary statute. If you do something he doesn't like, he might relocate or harass you under a pretext. Make an example out of you. His actions are clearly aimed to produce a chilling effect. But priests accused of pedophilia get silent protection, including getting a peek into court documents. He also likes to micromanage court cases, especially in flashy cases where it's easy to get an emotional reaction from people, such as accusions of rape, pedophilia (except by priests), murder.

He gets in bed with Ordo Iuris, a para-legal branch of the Brazilian catholic sect TFP, condemned by bishops in Brazil in the 80's. They are absolutely against abortion and openly seek goals like forbidding divorce.

He's a mediocre lawyer.

He objects to the idea that European Union cares about law-abidingness and asked the consitutional court to check if the idea is compatible with constitution. Political goals and "good of the nation" are more important to him.

He's a paranoid, petty and vindictive person. Also, very power hungry.

> does not break Polish law

The ruling party intentionally creates ambiguous law that can be applied in an arbitrary manner. Be on the party's good side.

Current Polish government is a lite version of authoritarianism, and getting more so over time. It doesn't control all aspects of life like a totalitarian party would, yet. But it's trying, for example religion, against sexuality(including basic sexual education), edits history textbooks, paints new people as heroes and erases old ones. Doctors and experts don't have much to say in matters of the pandemic. One party official openly stated they have no use for experts because they refuse to implement the party policy.

Don't miss the fact no ruling party member congratulated Joe Bidden on winning the election. The closest they got was congratulating him on a "good campaign", echoing the statements of those like Vladimir Putin. They are very much fans of Donald Trump. NATO's new focus on "defense of democracy", EU's attention to law-abidingneness, Biden's ostensible emphasis on values and democracy are all dark clouds for the Polish ruling party.

The bottom line: for the pro-West, pro-EU Poles, Ziobro is an awful person.

This government is reminding me of a Communist state more and more each day.

Norman Davies, the British-Polish historian specializing in East Europe and fascinated by Poland in particular, agrees.

https://www.msn.com/pl-pl/wiadomosci/polska/norman-davies-%E...

He also said Polish priests hoped for theocracy in reward for their support against the communist state as it was falling apart.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Polska/comments/7c30dz/polski_probo...

He is overall very sympathetic towards Poland, speaks the language quite well, and thinks people should learn more about it. Timothy Snyder is another one. I like non-Polish historians because they have a different view.

This would be a nightmare for anyone trying to host a family-friendly forum.

“Hey, no pornography!” “What are you gonna do about it?”

Completely reactionary and fails to consider practicality.

Don't put it past Polish law and order to rule pornography illegal soon. (And contraception probably sooner) I wouldn't be surprised at attempts - they're quite conservative.

You already need to go see a doctor and get a prescription for anything contraception related, and they can decide not to give it to you. This includes "the pill" as well as "the morning after pill".

Also the recent rulings on Abortion almost caused a revolution. So they might be more careful in the coming months.

We can extend your point. A website used by kids may not want swear words, a website may not want sexists, racists, and another hate speech. In certain situations, disallowing content is the site owner's way of expressing their point of the view. This law bans this site owner from doing so. It limits site owner's ability to express their views on what their own property should be. By the way, we should also keep in mind that a site is the private property of an entity, just like an object or a piece of land. If this law is enacted, when a site owner sees speech on their own site that goes against their values, they can only condemn them with words, but the actual act will still happen on their property.

This status quo is US companies gets to decide wait is fair speech. Obviously this is untenable for all other nations as it should be in the US as well.

>So if I offer a free website- a private company operating as I like- I would be forbidden from removing content from my own website that I don't like

You will have to put more limits up front to control what content gets uploaded.

Well all this wouldn't have been possible if not for the precedent Big Tech set in handling opposing ideologies. Now why cry over balkanization of the internet when that is what was pushed for by the leftists in these Big Tech companies? What do you think would happen if Big Tech kept censoring something it did not like? You would obviously have a reaction to it. I view the Polish laws as a reaction to the ridiculous ideological censorship stance taken by the Big Tech. First polarize the population, then cry why opposing laws are being framed that shatters your idea of what internet should be. I won't be surprised if many other countries follow the same path. Those who experienced censorship know it first hand what it's like. Looking at you being shocked at this legislation just shows how wide the split is. That one bubble is completely oblivious to what the other bubble is experiencing.

Ah, Poland. The next 1930s Germany.

I say this to reinforce what OP points out. If the government disagrees with something, they can now simply rewrite a law to enable their censorship. That is scary, given they don't have a definitive law protecting people from government censorship.

I don't think all legal nuances are visible in one sentence resume probably hastily translated from Polish, but in any case there's nothing unusual about it. Many countries already have anti-discrimination laws which can seriously limit what you can do with your private property when it's open for public interaction. I'm sure they will use it as a blueprint.

It is equally insane to say forbid hate speech as is can be interpreted as anything. Likewise, I assume they want to keep social media from deleting anything not aligned to the current zeitgeist.

The real problem are still people that want content removed that mostly doesn't even concern them in the first place.

But you are correct, a literal usage of this law is insane.

As someone hiding behind a throwaway account in an effort to avoid doxing and harassment, and getting my more legitimate online presence removed due to hysterics:

I welcome the idea of this change. Though I think it is wrong the way it is implemented. I do not speak Polish, and maybe perhaps the Polish law is more nuanced than the article describes.

There should be a law that says you cannot produce a unilateral terms of service (you know, the shit everyone skips over when they sign up for a website to get their data harvested) that says your account can be terminated at any time for whatever reason. It should be a bilateral agreement:

-I agree to follow the rules of your service

-You agree to not arbitrarily remove me from your service

There are dozens of examples and minutia to digest that have lead us to where we are today. Voices are being silenced because feelings are too easily hurt. Misinformation too easily spread, and egos too easily bruised. People are specifically being targeted for hearsay, and because they lack a megaphone in the Court of Public Opinion, they lose catastrophically with real world consequences.

Hiding behind monopolistic corporations with snide remarks about "private platforms can do what they want" is genuine cowardice. For right now you are nothing more than a jester, and one bad joke away from your head rolling off, gleefully oblivious of your own downfall.

> I agree to follow the rules of your service

You have to be careful there, too, though: Amazon is claiming that Parler (to use the most currently relevant example) did violate their terms of service, because their terms of service are so vague and broad that they can be used to apply to almost anything.

I haven't used Parler, but from what I read there were loads of people actively calling for violence. Sure, there's no set line, but Amazon shouldn't have to support that if they don't want to.

They sort of broke due process of law, that’s the problem. They exercised the force in their possession that should not belong to them.

> You agree to not arbitrarily remove me from your service

Per basic contract law, this is only going to fly if money is changing hands. You and Facebook sign a contract with these stipulations and you pay them for the privilege of using their platform, and now if they remove you you have damages that can be enforced. Absent you paying them they have no obligation to host any of your content. Are you willing to pay Facebook to use it in exchange for these rights?

> Absent you paying them they have no obligation to host any of your content.

Except for a Polish law that would explicitly obligate them to host it..

I'm not sure that's true. Typically (and of course other jurisdictions vary anyway) there doesn't have to be money; there just has to be a consideration, which can be money. Something of value flowing both ways. A lot of contracts end up with a consideration on one party of something nominal like a dollar or a pound, but it doesn't have to be money.

"You get my details and my attention and can harvest my data and make money from it" certainly sounds like it could be argued as having value.

You're out on a bit of a shaky limb here. There's clear precedent in contract law for damages when money is changing hands. But non-compensated access to data? I'm doubtful. Do you have any established case law in this vein you can point to?

Regarding the majority party of the coalition which he is governing with.

The party has caused what constitutional law scholar Wojciech Sadurski termed a "constitutional breakdown"[58] by packing the Constitutional Court with its supporters, undermining parliamentary procedure, and reducing the president's and prime minister's offices in favor of power being wielded extra-constitutionally by party leader Jarosław Kaczyński.[46] After eliminating constitutional checks, the government then moved to curtail the activities of NGOs and independent media, restrict freedom of speech and assembly, and reduce the qualifications required for civil service jobs in order to fill these positions with party loyalists.[46][59] The media law was changed to give the governing party control of the state media, which was turned into a partisan outlet, with dissenting journalists fired from their jobs.[46][60] Due to these political changes, Poland has been termed an "illiberal democracy",[61][62] "plebiscitarian authoritarianism",[63] or "velvet dictatorship with a façade of democracy".[64]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_Justice#In_majority_go...

This comment misrepresents the situation by failing to indicate that the 'Constitutional Crisis' started before the current Law and Justice government took power by the previous governments anti-constitutional actions of trying to appoint Constitutional Court judges ahead of the end of their terms.

For a summary of events: [1]

Imagine if Barack Obama / George Bush decided to go ahead and punt some SCOTUS members ahead of the end of their terms, because they were afraid they were going to lose his upcoming elections? Imagine what what the consequences would be.

'Law and Justice' , after having won elections came in and did some nasty things (which you point out) and were sanctioned by the EU for it, however, it's hypocritical that the group that initially broke the law on a very fundamental issue were not also sanctioned.

I don't remotely support any of this, but it's important to consider that this didn't just happen out of thin air.

This 'free speech' bill is an interesting political issue, I wonder how much of this is pointed at the local population, or how much of it is trying to obtain some populist goodwill in other EU nations ... or if it's trying to gain some kind of 'moral high ground' leverage in their current 'issues' with the EU.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Polish_Constitutional_Cou...

Well Obama did ask Bader-Ginsburg to step down when democrats had control of the senate (I think she’d only had cancer once at the time), but I guess you’re referring to something stronger than just asking judges to step down.

I feel like the US Supreme Court nomination system only works through a combination of frequent changes of power and most judges believing in the system and following the unwritten part of the constitution, and that the US example isn’t really a good one to copy in other democracies.

What happened is roughly this: in Poland's Constitutional Tribunal (which is as close of an equivalent of US Supreme Court as you can get in a country with a civil law system), the judges are not elected for life, but only for fixed term. As the term of the elected government was coming to an end, so were the terms of 5 of the justices in the Tribunal. However, two of these terms ended within the elected government's term, and three after it ended. As a result, the ruling party (PO) had a clear right to nominate 2 justices, and hardly any right to nominate the other three. It decided to nominate all 5 nevertheless.

The party that won the subsequent election, PiS, refused to recognize any of the 5 justices nominated by PO, and nominated 5 of their own. What happened afterwards you can read in the Wikipedia article.

Did both of those things happen through some loophole? Or is the elected party just able to kind of do whatever they want unstopped?

As far as I can tell, neither of these actions was based on any “loophole”. However, the nature of the rule of law is that it only works as long as everyone plays by the rules. When the government decides it does no longer has to play by the rules, there isn’t much that can be done to oppose them, as they still hold all the power, and are presumed to hold political authority.

> Imagine if Barack Obama decided to go ahead and punt some SCOTUS members ahead of the end of their terms, because he was afraid he was going to lose his upcoming elections?

Imagine if Barack Obama had Supreme Court appointments blocked by Republicans on constitutionally flimsy grounds that were immediately ignored when the Trump administration was in identical situations.

Would any "nasty things" done by a future Democrat administration then be laid at the feet of this original malfeasance, forevermore, or would it be misrepresentation not to mention it?

> This comment misrepresents the situation by failing to indicate that the 'Constitutional Crisis' started before the current Law and Justice government took power by the previous governments flagrant anti-constitutional actions of trying to appoint Supreme Court Judges ahead of the end of their terms.

It was the Constitutional Court, not Supreme Court. Also, no, not really - that didn't start the crisis in any reasonable meaning of that word. In a correctly functioning democracy that would simply be blocked by Constitutional Court, and that's in fact exactly what happened. The problem started when currently ruling party replaced not only the extraneous judges, but also those judges who were lawfully supposed to be appointed by previous government. Of course the Constitutional Court deemed that unconstitutional, but that didn't stop the ruling party at all, and the rest is history.

"Also, no, not really - that didn't start the crisis in any reasonable meaning of that word."

The entire world disagrees with this.

The issue, in public, is very clear - actions by the the previous government in the summer of 2015 were declared anti-constitutional, and later actions highly undemocratic.

There is no doubt that this was the 'start of the crisis' by any objective measure.

It doesn't matter how much we may not like certain 'current authorities' - History is History - people should stop trying to rewrite it to suit their narrative. Suppressing these unfortunate events is not going to help anyone's cause in the long run.

> ruling party replaced not only the extraneous judges, but also those judges who were lawfully supposed to be appointed by previous government

The problem is that previous government broke the law in more than one way:

1. They appointed more judges that they were allowed to.

2. They did appoint all those judges by means of single parliamentary resolution, despite the fact that Polish Constitution clearly requires voting for each judge separately.

Given those two points NONE of the judges was appointed lawfully, and there was no other way forward than repeal the whole resolution, therefore removing all 5 unlawfully appointed judges.

Uh, whose interpretation is that? Constitutional tribunal ruled itself that three judges were correctly appointed by previous parliament. (case K34/15)

> and there was no other way forward than repeal the whole resolution

That's not what happened though. The Constitutional Court ruling[1] deemed the appointment of three judges constitutional, and two of them unconstitutional - and, according to the Constitution, those rulings are final, immutable and to be immediately published. However, president Duda didn't swear any of the new judges, despite of being legally obliged to (the president doesn't have the right to decide whether the judges were appointed legally or not, it's the Constitutional Court's job) and once PiS appointed five new judges (instead of two they were legally able to) the president swore them all.

[1] https://trybunal.gov.pl/postepowanie-i-orzeczenia/wyroki/art...

So in keeping with the law at the time (well the law they passed), they elected 5 justices to replace up coming vacancies. Later it was ruled that 2 of those nominations were unconstitutional (I think because they were for justices who's terms expired after the new legislature was seated), but the newly elected Law and Justice government refused to seat any of them and elected their own slate of 5 justices. When the constitutional tribunal refused to include those 5 justices until the dispute was resolved, rather than back down the new government raised the threshold to conduct business so that the new justices would have to be included and even worse chose to interpret a clause requiring a majority to mean a supper majority and gave themselves the power to remove justices.

The constitutional tribunal ruled this new law unconstitutional, but because that ruling was not made under the new rules introduced by the again according to them unconstitutional law the new government ignored it.

It's one thing to pass unconstitutional laws and quite another to pass unconstitutional laws and refuse to listen to listen when you're called out on them

This is all fine and good - but the previous governments 'changing of the law' governing Judicial appointments, and then controversially 'stacking the court' to 14 out of 15 appointments in their favour, is clearly the first salvo in a constitutional war.

There is no doubt.

It doesn't matter that 'we don't like the jerks in charge' or that 'they've done bad stuff' - the fact is the crisis was obviously initiated before they came to power.

Much like pretty much everyone here hates Trump (I certainly do), but he was unfairly castigated in the press with the 'Mueller investigations' which de-facto absolved him of any Russian shenanigans. It doesn't matter that he lies about election results - he was not colluding with Russians.

If either side in in the US tried to pull what the previous Polish government did - it would set off major events, possibly conflict, worse than what we're seeing today for sure.

> which de-facto absolved him of any Russian shenanigans. It doesn't matter that he lies about election results - he was not colluding with Russians.

This is quite literally the opposite of the stated conclusion of the Muller investigation. It's not clear to me how you get "absolved him from any Russia shenanigans". There were clear links between the campaign and Russia (up to and including Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian Lawyer for "dirt" on the Clinton campaign), likely in return for changes to the Magnitsky act. That's all plainly stated in the muller report.

He ultimately didn't charge them because while there may have been intent to collude, it didn't pan out.

The previous government action was unconstitutional, but it was hardly a crisis. We had all the tools needed to handle such case and those tools got used as they should. Only after later actions of the current government those tools became inadequate to handle the situation, causing the crisis.

We don't call every unconstitutional bill "a crisis" and I'm pretty sure of that as there were quite a lot of them already.

Also, I'm by no means a supporter of the previous government, so you can stop building your strawmans.

BTW:

> 'stacking the court' to 14 out of 15 appointments in their favour

Most of them were appointed with votes from both previous and current ruling parties. Just sayin'.

A similar stupid law was proposed by a Romanian minister some years ago but with the goal of stopping you calling people (basically ministers) idiots on website comments.

They eventually realized it's not enforceable and it just created some fuss.

The reason that died as it started is because there's no way how such a thing ever work or be enforced.

Does it not matter where I host my site?

What can Poland do about my website hosted in UK (or any other country)?

At worst this just destroys any hosting services that operate in that country.

Yep the government has for a while been dismantling any opposition by stacking the courts, replacing critical state media, attacking journalists and so on. The support for this kind of law is actually just consequent because social media is the platform that lends itself most to riling up a mob.

It's simple majoritarianism, rallying a hyper-loyal voter-base and disadvantaging scholars, intellectuals, scientists and so on.

This will continue happening around the world. Who knew - sovereign states don’t want American megacorporations deciding what ideas are appropriate?

Prepare for massive Balkanization of the Internet.

This is a dishonest line. The internet is federated, they don't have to use websites created by American megacorporations.

What is a lie? I think it’s highly unlikely that Facebook and Twitter will be used worldwide in say, 2040. They had first mover advantage, but as it becomes easier to create a social network and the law catches up, I’d expect to see a lot of local/regional alternatives.

If the EU said tomorrow, in 1 year we are banning Facebook and launching our own version, what can Facebook do about it?

Bring an appeal to the ECJ or pay a few senators some money to get the CIA (USA's defacto sly foreign army) to kill some people.

Whichever costs less for them.

I don't find this dishonest at all. Not everyone in USA agrees with the Great Suspensioning. Why would we expect everyone in Poland to agree with it?

If they don't agree they don't have to use it. It's dishonest because the characterization suggests that sovereign nations are beholden to tech companies, but they aren't.

Define beholden.

If Facebook/Twitter doesn't agree to the law, they don't have to operate in Poland. Nobody is forcing them.

Correct. So if anything Facebook/Twitter are beholden to these governments, not the other way around, they could simply block these megacorps if they were inclined to do so. I'm sure that would make many Polish tech founders very happy.

They also don't have to allow foreign tech companies to operate in their country without following local laws.

US tech companies hold almost as much power in these smaller countries as the government does. Facebook could easily sway an election if it tries.

> They also don't have to allow foreign tech companies to operate in their country without following local laws.

Exactly right. So it's wrong to say that these governments are beholden to the tech companies, they could simply block them if wanted to, and perhaps they should, but either way it's obviously wrong to say that these governments are beholden.

> Facebook could easily sway an election if it tries.

So could the people being banned by Facebook. What's your point here?

There is a step between banning and giving a free for all which is requiring that social media follow local laws with the threat of being banned for non compliance.

> websites created by American megacorporations

Where's the money for creating non-American websites?

Yes, I'm still bitter after 10 or so years that the local business directory website/start-up I was working on got part of its data copied by the up and coming Google Places. We folded, of course, Google Places "transferred" its data to the whole Google ecosystem. I was telling my boss at the time "they can't let Google do this, is theft", they let Google do that, and then some.

That's exactly the argument for GDPR is. If an American megacorp doesn't want to respect the rights of non Americans then it shouldn't be allowed to profit at all from them. You can't just ban some and profit from the rest.

I think it's perfectly reasonable for non-American countries to impose laws on the tech businesses if they want to do business in those regions, but it's a dishonest characterization to suggest that what happens on a handful of American websites "determines what is appropriate", they don't have any such power.

They have a worldwide monopoly. If countries can't enforce their law on these platforms they will likely ban them on their territory. No Nation want to forgo their sovereignty to US corporations and delegate to them what is fair speech. Expect their algorithms to be under scrutiny as well.

I think US megacorps have more malleable ethics than you are giving them credit for. these corps already have the ability to federated their services, and don't seem to have an issue with meeting the demands of less-than-savory governments like China's

That is sort of inevitable. Remember the cartoons mocking Muhammad?

It is not as if there is a worldwide consensus on whether mocking him is even legal. Some people consider it a crime worthy of death and others their natural right. You can't get much bigger polarization than that. Compared to the Cartoon Question, differences between R and D are not that big.

Cartoon: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Charliehebdo....

You say that like it's a bad thing. The web used to be much less centralized than it is today, and not to its detriment. If we're talking about breaking up the physical Internet, that's clearly bad, but having alternatives to the Facebook/Twitter/etc monolith would be a clear net-win.

even government of sovereign states are afraid of being cancelled too

the big techs have brought this upon themselves, their social media has become the battleground for narratives using propaganda and political correctness, these "fact check"(censorship) will only get uglier

Trolling and many other forms of online abuse may not be against any law but it is in the public interest to allow platforms to remove such content.

This initiative may turn out to be the opposite of what it claims to stand for.

What its claiming to stand for and what its intended use are not mutually exclusive.

the ruling party has very much in common with the GOP, so much so that the default assumption should be that the opposite is the intent.

> it is in the public interest to allow platforms to remove such content

This is not always true, and that is the issue. If the government is going to, for instance, tell us we can't gather on public property, there has to be some way to guarantee that a digital commons will remain.

Let Poland run news.polishcombinator.com where they decide to not moderate anything not against Polish law then

Are we going to have dang explain how any post he moderates violates Polish law? What about what he's moderating which isn't illegal in Poland?

Nobody seemed to care too much here about these issues when the gdpr was shoved into the faces of everybody.

Lots of people were wary of the GDPR. But "don't track our population" is streets ahead of "don't moderate content"

To be clear I'm not too worried about this. It seems like unenforceable policy

When the livelihood of those businesses depends entirely on their ability to track their users to deliver better ads, I would say that’s so much worse than letting conservative people express themselves freely.

If gathering in public space is gone we have bigger problems than wifi not working.

In what sense is a private commercial website public space?

Some judges have hinted that it effectively is:

https://harvardlawreview.org/2017/11/packingham-v-north-caro...

Ultimately, though, I think the jury is still out.

Yep. It would be illegal for dang to remove low-value or irrelevant posts.

It will be great for spammers.

This can, and IMHO should, be addressed the way HN does it (at least by default): content that's downvoted is not visible by default, but not actually removed.

> Trolling ... may not be against any law but it is in the public interest to allow platforms to remove such content.

Is that really true? When Slashdot was the popular "news for nerds" site, many site regulars intentionally set their threshold to -1 to read the troll posts, because they were often inventive and funny. Yes, a moderation system can filter them out for users who configure the site thusly, but plenty of people would resist banning them outright because they are occasionally enjoyable to read.

"Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law."

Sooo hop on a topic specific group. Get my off-topic posts removed. Being off-topic is not a crime in Poland. Get my shitposts reinstated.

The bill better be more specific than the article is.

I presume that depends on who removes these posts. If the posts are removed by group owners or moderators who are not affiliated with the social media service itself, I think that should be totally fine according to that law. It's the social media service itself that's not allowed to do that.

How big does a group have to be before it's a social network?

So dang wouldn't be allowed to boot any technically legal posts on hacker news, or ban people?

I'm guessing it would be more practical to make a method by which dang could easily reinstate a users' messages/account after receiving the required legal documentation. I also assume it only applies to Polish citizens, filing the complaints with their courts.

I think it would be better if internet went not in the direction of removing stuff but in the direction of providing users with tools to avoid the content they don't wish to engage with.

We shouldn't rely on security through obscurity when it comes to dangerously stupid ideas.

Cant work.

If you are in the super market buying food, and people are giving out free trials of crack cocaine -> addiction city.

You can very regularly see Nazi apologia which is so dressed up and benign sounding. "Teach the facts", "did this really happen" - the debunking of which requires access to people used to debunking it.

The same rule applies to a variety of topics.

Simply put, the average person is not prepared for lawyer level rhetorical devices in the wild.

So either we remove content like that, or we live through whatever disasters a world of reality distortion creates. Most likely the survivors of that world will simply lock down the news down hard.

>Simply put, the average person is not prepared for lawyer level rhetorical devices in the wild.

This boils down to "censorship is okay because people might believe the wrong thing", and down that path lay a well-greased and well-trodden slippery slope ending in the maws of dragons.

It's incredibly paternalistic. It is not your job, nor the government's, nor anyone else's to protect people from reading/thinking/etc. the wrong things.

It actually was my job, I saw exactly what letting things alone did. I know how many ways your ideas are incorrect, because I worked from that same starting point.

If you believe that ideals are going to do the job, please feel free! There's 100s of subs that need mods. Take the time to find the most gnarly politically active sub and apply your ideas. Find the places where people actively deal with propo and indoctrination.

If you can solve what everyone else has failed at, every firm, regulator and moderator under the sun will cheer you on.

Till then, this is what works. Not because I like it, or because it's "paternal" - but because it conforms to how humans actually behave and how content performs online today.

IT is what it is, and we can only improve by knowing reality first.

Do you think your views will never be wrongfully censored?

As I said, feel free to do it yourself. It's enlightening - it removes idealism and makes you formulate strategies that are practical.

If you get the practice right, maybe we can get to the ideals.

I've already been wrongfully censored, life goes on.

I'll keep my idealism, thanks. I've seen what censorship does, and I find it to be a far worse monster than any of those spawned by the free exchange of ideas.

Sure, however idealism doesn't mean your opinion is better than actual facts.

Its always interesting that I get into these discussion with some people who hold a position so strongly, yet unwilling to do any work to be reliable.

Do try though, if you crack it there's genuinely a market for the solution.

> Sure, however idealism doesn't mean your opinion is better than actual facts.

What are the facts you refer to? That some forums descend into chaos when left unmoderated?

I don't think that's in dispute. It sounds like you disagree on a value judgement: what to do in the face of that fact.

I think he IS wrongfully machined already.

Those attitudes and behaviors are merely engineered traits to make Reddit engaging and active, sad to see who seems to be an otherwise happy person being wasted like that.

> "Teach the facts", "did this really happen"

So... you're literally calling for censorship of political discourse.

> Simply put, the average person is not prepared for lawyer level rhetorical devices in the wild.

Maybe we should figure out how to educate people to prepare them?

Can we really build our safety on our ability to keep stupid people ignorant of stupid ideas?

I think that's the kind of security through obscurity that is currently failing us so hard. Stupid people are finding stupid ideas anyways, sharing them, building upon them. Trying to keep them away from stupid ideas is like trying to keep your body perfectly germ free. You can't really do that. Not in the long term. You are better of figuring how to boost your immunity.

People aren't code. Plus you dont see people exposing themselves to prions or the plague.

More pertinently, you could argue that we shouldn't worry about sociopaths, and that if they convince or charm someone - that's just bad luck, and it boosts people's immunity.

Why did we worry about lootboxes or attention manipulating algorithms?

Because when its not a fair fight, the outcome is not fair.

If I sent you up against professional Nazi denying content, and you knew jack about the Nazis - I guarantee you would think they had a point. There are supremely persuasive books saying the numbers are wrong, or that the data doesn't add up.

There are some ideas that are simply that toxic - handling them without training is a sure shot way to radicalize someone.

=------=

Sure, I would love to have classes like their are doing in some countries.

First - I doubt that flies in America, where Fox news is one of the largest networks.

Second - even if you did start classes for kids and teens - it still leaves your adults vulnerable.

I don't even know if it is possible to de-radicalize the already radicalized. If you don't stop the radicalization, you will simply have more of such people.

So sure, get those classes going, but its only one part of the solution.

Who should people be willing to use as a censor to protect them?

I assert the choice to decide for myself, and question the motives and capability of those that try to take that away.

>People aren't code. Plus you dont see people exposing themselves to prions or the plague.

Aren't vaccines kind of this: deliberately exposing people to something harmful so they'll have more immunity against a stronger version if they encounter it later?

> People aren't code.

And yet we program them to read, write, do calculations, know some narrations about history of their civilisation and some narrations completely made up by fellow humans. Even know some things we discovered about our physical reality and some things we constructes.

> Plus you dont see people exposing themselves to prions or the plague.

Because they are way more lethal on consumption than any idea is. We still eat cows though and talk to each other. Just made it bit harder to expose ouselves to plague and prions on daily basis.

> More pertinently, you could argue that we shouldn't worry about sociopaths, and that if they convince or charm someone - that's just bad luck, and it boosts people's immunity.

Oh. You should worry. And figure out how they are created and let everybody know what made them this way, and exactly how stupid it was. And about hownto recognized you are getting charmed and what are the limits of your knowledge and how to expand them. And this exposure will boost the immunity.

> Why did we worry about lootboxes or attention manipulating algorithms

Because we should worry why people out of their free will make stupid decissions.

Remember Farmville? It looked like a very dangerous stupid idea. Are we safe from it because we banned it or because we got bored with it? Because we learned to recognize the lie?

Before we ban loot boxes whole generation will learn how stupid they are, even without any concerted effort. Will the next generation know that? If the ban is successful then no. And they will be vulnerable to the nexy gambling scheme that comes along in their life.

Who will be better prepared to face gambling as an adult? Person who got bored with lootboxes? Or person who never seen them because they were perfectly protected?

> If I sent you up against professional Nazi denying content, and you knew jack about the Nazis - I guarantee you would think they had a point.

You are making my point for me. You will encounter nazi denying content in your life no matter how hard you ban it. Better be prepared to recognize fake points. Same goes for antivaxxers, flat eathers and such. Those things being exposed and ridiculed for what they are done way more to harm attractiveness of those stupid ideas than any ban we imposed or might impose.

> There are some ideas that are simply that toxic - handling them without training is a sure shot way to radicalize someone.

Someone, sure. But they don't immediately die or kill from internalizing toxic idea. There's a window to act, and there are ways to boost resistance to stupidity.

> First - I doubt that flies in America, where Fox news is one of the largest networks

Isn't that the core of the problem? That advertisers are allowed to slap their ads on such stupid content and boost it with their money and make avoiding it extremely hard?

Instead of banning specific ideas we should regulate advertising.

How much harm could be done if youtube slapped ads on everything corona-related as it trended because of pandemic? Instead they demonetised anything that even mentioned corona. It had sobering effect on youtube creators.

If there was a law that could demonetise Fox, how long would they last and how much impact would they have? How long would Alex Jones last if he was not allowed to lie while advertising his supplements?

To combat problem of stupid ideas you have to incentivise things that make use better at recognizing them and disincentive things that shove them in our faces at high power.

> Second - even if you did start classes for kids and teens - it still leaves your adults vulnerable.

Yes. Adults are harder. Maybe antivaxxers and nazis should be something that only kids and qualified adults are allowed to talk about on adveritser financed content. ;-)

I don't know exact solutions but we won't figure them out if toxic ideas are made legally taboo. Same way that banning specific drugs left us very slow to understand and deal with addiction and completely opened for opioid abuse epidemic.

> I don't even know if it is possible to de-radicalize the already radicalized. If you don't stop the radicalization, you will simply have more of such people.

It is possible. I'm in the process of de-radicilizing my mom from antivaxxers propaganda and I'm doing in by educating myself on what are they saying and why exactly it's stupid (specifically and as an example of wider misinformation patterns) and relating it to her in ways she can understand. It's work, but it gives results.

Why do I have to do it? Because she was nearly 60 when she first found this level of advertiser supported promotion of something this dangerously stupid. And she lived through state mandated communist propaganda with way less personal and intelectual harm.

> So sure, get those classes going, but its only one part of the solution.

You can't get classes going if you make the subject forbidden knowledge. Just limit shoving propaganda in peoples faces till they properly learn to recognize it. Make possible to avoid it and make harder to encounter it without accompanying critique.

Best solutions imho appeared where Facebook couldn't ban Trump. They had to factcheck him and annotate his stupidity with truth.

Unfortunatle since they no longer fear him they swiftly shed the buden of educating people and reverted back to lazy solution of just banning him from the platform and happily promoting other dangerously stupid ideas (that are not under such strong public scrutiny as Trump). And people cheerfully allow them to avoid resposibility for the power of their platform just like that.

We are all acting as if ideas drivr this recent way of stupidity but what drives this is advertiser money.

Sorry mate, these are assertions - I too have held them.

I simply have tested them, at length.

Which is why I encourage you to go ahead and join the fight, go volunteer earnestly as a mod.

If you survive burnout, you will see the contours of the battlefield - our human neurological weaknesses, the resources strung out on either side, the fragility of the structures we need as a society.

I repeat - all of these are simply assertions, and as a forum of techies, we should be testing these ideas - people here created tech which allows us to do this like no generation before us.

In the spirit of science - go for it.

I’ve spent years studying this, even wrote a dissertation on the subject space. I’ve had these discussions many times, I’ve seen what happens when people decide I am wrong and set out to prove it.

I have always wished people who take that task on, the very best. If you reach a different conclusion, I will be the happiest person in the world.

Nah. That sounds like work. ;-)

Props to you for putting the work in and I don't deny your conclusions. Researching this must br very hard.

I just believe that there could be hope on epidemiological scale, even though we have to accept that many, many cases are irrecoverable.

I believe that average resilience of people to stupid ideas could be improved. And I believe so because social networks degraded it with very specific mechanisms (like mere exposure effect), not just by putting people in touch.

Freedom of speech is also freedom from compelled speech. This kind of law means the government can compel any private party to speak what they want and punish them for not doing so.

This is also demonstrably damaging to the effected party. It costs money to host content. Forcing a business to host content costs them - is poland going to fund this? No.

If the polish government has a problem with it then they should make their own government backed social media platform. Not violate people's rights.

I’m curious about freedom from compelled speech in the US.

"Freedom of speech is also freedom from compelled speech."

Uh, aren't for example nutritional labels a form of compelled speech?

Yes, exactly. It's a very restricted and strictly formatted form of compelled speech on specific products. Like other limitations on free speech, it exists because lawmakers have judged the benefits to be greater than the downsides of limiting manufacturers' free speech.

Now imagine a law that forces anyone with a website who ever had an unmoderated comment section to host and display those comments forever. That's the Polish law. Isn't that on a completely different level of compelled speech?

Yeah, I know, and yet someone downvoted me for saying so o_O.

...or for the "gotcha" tone.

Consumer protection laws are written in blood. You can't leave arsenic out of your ingredients list any more than I can call myself a doctor and tell you to start eating roofing tar.

Yes, I agree, I was only reacting to the OPs claim that the government cannot compel somebody to speak in a certain way.

Our constitution and bill of rights were also written in blood. Which is why we don't have to bow to a king.

All warning or informational labels are forced speech.

But, it's worth remembering that people used to do things like add morphine to products without labeling it. Most countries limit free speech when it can harm others directly.

Yes, definitely. If the impression from my comment is that I disagree with this kind of obligation, I expressed myself in an unclear way.

As all laws there are limits to its use. Nutritional labels are comprised of factual content to the product. The government can't force political or other government opinion onto it. Or at the least politically fueled labelling should not be allowed. For example forcing a company to host images on their cigarette packs. This should be unconstitutional.

General opinion especially political is protected, or at least is meant to be. People can make political products, but they have to be factual in their contents.

This isn't very related to the issue of social media - the posts are from other people including the government. You can't compel a company to host your opinions. You could compel them to list factual information about its content/origin though.

It would be compelled speech if I pretended my racist tweets are the official stance of Twitter. I don’t see how keeping them up is forcing Twitter to say something when they are just moving bytes around.

> It costs money to host content. Forcing a business to host content costs them

We force businesses to do a lot of things. The compliance costs here, for example, are a rounding error compared to GDPR compliance costs (especially around the ability to look up your own data), or right-to-be-forgotten compliance costs.

It's possible this is a bad law, but this is a sorta weak argument.

The freedom of individuals is more important than the freedom of corporations.

When the freedom of people to speak clashes with the freedom of corporations to not allow that speech, it's better to side with more speech (i.e. the side of the people).

There's a bizarre doublethink at work here, where people claim at the same time that social media companies should not be held responsible for speech on their platforms, hence section 230, but also that that speech is "their speech", hence forcing them to host speech is compelled speech. If it's their speech, they should be held responsible for it. If it's not, it's not compelled speech to force them to host it.

The entire rationale for section 230 was to allow online services to exercise editorial control over user-generated content — to not be a neutral host of all legal content — while also not holding them civilly liable as a publisher with certain narrow exceptions (but also leaving them criminally liable for anything that would carry criminal liability.)

So what you are suggesting is so e kind of doublethink blending support for 230 with something conflicting with 230 is, instead, exactly just support of 230.

But the choice to sell books (e.g., distributors) has, like the situation of online UGC service providers, always carried lesser liability than publication, but the choice to carry or not carry particular books is still a First Amendment activity. The idea that it's not your own free expression if it doesn't have exactly the set of legal liabilities traditionally associated with the publisher role is bizarre and indefensible.

> The entire rationale for section 230 was to allow online services to exercise editorial control over user-generated content — to not be a neutral host of all legal content — while also not holding them civilly liable as a publisher with certain narrow exceptions (but also leaving them criminally liable for anything that would carry criminal liability.)

I don't disagree with that and I don't see how it refutes my comment.

> But the choice to sell books (e.g., distributors) has, like the situation of online UGC service providers, always carried lesser liability than publication, but the choice to carry or not carry particular books is still a First Amendment activity.

Unlike online UGC service providers, bookstores can be forced to remove defamatory books[1] in the US. There's a reason there's a law specifically for UGC service providers, and you cannot defend this while at the same time demanding that they get treated like book stores when it comes to compelled speech.

[1]: https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2019/01/30/online-g...

> Unlike online UGC service providers, bookstores can be forced to remove defamatory books in the US. There's a reason there's a law specifically for UGC service providers, and you cannot defend this while at the same time demanding that they get treated like book stores when it comes to compelled speech.

Sure I can, since the plain text of the law in question only removes publisher (which are not notice-based), not the notice-based obligations and liability of a distributor. As the article you cite here argues, the extension of 230 beyond what it says on its face to also remove those distributor-style liabilities is a strained interpretation that some courts have adopted that lacks support in the text of the law and is explicitly at odds with it's legislative history and rationale.

So it's quite easy to support the law that exists for UGC service providers and demand they get treated like bookstores and other distributors as regards notice-based removal of defamatory content because that's exactly what application of the law as written does.

The debate over 230 is not, mainly, about this one area where some courts have applied it out of line with it's plain text.

Them not being legally responsible for other users content does not mean their speech isn't compelled when they want to remove content but cannot. You're telling a company they have to pay for someones speech on their own platform.

So they just don't have to operate in Poland if they don't like the laws. Block polish IPS, prohibit poles from using. If the removals are so important to them.

Oh that’s stupid. Companies will end up with some creative solutions - if it can not be removed it can be made hard to access. Honestly it looks like stupid people in power are sad that their antiLGBT posts are removed.

Companies will end up with some creative solutions - if it can not be removed it can be made hard to access.

Courts usually don't like to be jerked around like that. Sure, there are always loopholes, and it's difficult to tell whether authors will have the tenacity to keep patching the law but Ziobro's party (very surprisingly, I mean even their supporters barely believed this) managed to really clamp down on various VAT evasion schemes.

I don't think you'd have easy time arguing in the court if you did something like that

I think geoblocking Poland would be easy enough.

I wouldn't cry if fb, twitter, insta and so on were unavaliable in Poland

I think that would be step to the right direction

You mean geounblocking Poland.

Well, I don't but Facebook meanwhile... Honestly, let's see what will happen - it is going to be interesting at least.

This looks good at the surface, but given the current Polish government I would not be so sure that it is created with good intentions in mind. Let's wait for how it is applied before deciding if this is a good or a bad thing.

I don't think anybody thinks this has good intentions

I think this has good intentions

This has good intentions. Many laypeople view social media posting as free speech and don’t want it to be moderated. Social media just needs to be different than it is today.

The actual rationale behind this is to protect bigots from getting kicked off social media for hate speech against LGBT people.

Article 256 of the Polish criminal code makes it illegal to incite hatred based on religion, race or nationality but not sexual orientation.

Gab is made by a Polish Guy. Andrew Torba. Here is an article he wrote:

Social Credit Score Is In America: Visa Blacklisted My Business and My Family for Building Gab

https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in-am...

Him talking about the migration to Gab

https://tv.gab.com/media/5ff8989c87e3f385144ad67e?viewKey=70...

That might be the wrong way to go about it, but I sympathize with the sentiment. If you pretend to be a public square you must act like a public square.

As it happens the US Supreme Court is also sympathetic - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama

Now many here already raised an obvious objection - someone tending to a small blog should be able to police it. That is sensible. So I suppose we need to find a good way to draw a line between a private club and a public square.

Even bigger problem might be your own content hosted on public squares. I wonder if Instagram/Fb/TikTok are declared a public square, does it mean that I can't delete someone's comment under my own photo, status or video because it violates their free speech even though it is my profile or page?

I would think it should be covered by the same doctrine.

Just as an exercise. Suppose a private club is where all members are know to the owner and all associate members are know to a member. A public square is a place where people can stumble into without any direct affiliation (search, directory, discovery, recommendations, shares).

Under this definition it matters not who is hosting your pictures, it only matters if strangers are welcome. And if they are then all strangers are welcome.

Now my idea here does cover the hypothetical theater - you want people to discover it, but you don’t want them causing noise during the performance. So it’s not a great definition. But it serves to illustrate.

An far right government being authoritarian, quelle surprise.

If authoritarianism means that people can freely speak their mind on the internet, then let so be it.

Only free speech that doesn't violate polish law. Is that what you want?

That doesn't make any sense. What is that even supposed to mean? Yes, Polish people have only the free speech that doesn't violate the Polish law. Some people might think that the laws could be more strict or more relaxed, but this is just how the law works.

Calling it free speech when an authoritarian government heavily restricts what can legally be said feels a bit disingenuous

Do you know anything about poland's heavy restrictions on speech?? https://notesfrompoland.com/2018/08/21/polands-insult-laws-a...

Are we playing semantics here? You called it "free speech". I wish we all had the 1st Amendment in Europe, but unfortunately we don't. Every European country claims it has free speech, but at the same time puts limits on it, let that be anti-communism laws, hate speech laws, laws against offending religious people, or whatever really. That's just how things are in Europe, sorry. Whatever the Polish government might have done to that point, they have my applause for trying for once to actually expand the freedom of speech on the internet. And even Merkel seems to agree with them and I don't really like or trust her either.

Thanks, I was not on the same page as you, but I take your points.

I'm very skeptical of this approach, but I don't think I have anything else to add to this thread

Look, all I'm gonna say is that the social media are not a free speech refuge. You still can't say anything that your government made illegal. Just as the article you posted says, Jaś Kapela was put on trial for something he said on the internet. So I really can't see how this could backfire at people in any way, as it can only expand the freedom. Unless you believe that you can trust private corporations with censoring what they deem as harmful of course, and in that case I would just like to remind you that Google supplies the Chinese government with surveillance technology and companies like Apple and many others benefit from the slave labor.

I definitely think we need a better solution for moderating social media

I don't think the answer is "everything that's legal"

Laws aren't light enough weight to make some determinations. Eg I think it's reasonable to ban posts that incite violence after people literally storm a government building, and I don't expect most (non authoritarian) governments will react quickly enough to do anything meaningful.

However, we need better, more transparent systems (especially in the US) of deciding what should or shouldn't be allowed

(Note: I actually think that changing algorithms to make it so that people aren't encouraged to see conspiracy theories is much better than censoring them outright. And so I think there is interesting space for innovation there.)

I fully agree, though, that it's incredibly concerning to have 3 (or fewer) unelected people deciding what shouldn't be read or seen

As an individual, when your speech is banned, it's all the same whether it's by an authoritarian government or by private companies.

freedom of speech was hardly enjoyed in nazi Germany, soviet Russia, WW2's ultranationalist Japan.

Sometimes I wonder if certain people are using "free speech" as a stepping stone to authoritarianism to then destroy freedom of speech.

What is even your point? Just because you're saying something on Facebook doesn't mean that the law of the country you're in doesn't apply to you anymore. You still have to abide to your law. What this does is that it only removes the restrictions of the platform, so you can get only more free speech, not less.

> Sometimes I wonder if certain people are using "free speech" as a stepping stone to authoritarianism to then destroy freedom of speech.

Have you ever entertained the idea that a similar thing could apply to the side that you support?

So now Fetlife and Facebook need the same picture policy? Can't imagine that going well.

I am glad Poland is doing something, but I'm not sure I like this bill either. This is just censorship by another name.

I think we need to make a distinction -- as the US Supreme Court did -- between large, publicly held corporations and small closely held corporations. In Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court said that only closely held corporations (those held by a small, definable number of people) had freedom of religion and association. That is their justification for why Hobby Lobby did not need to provide BC coverage. Because it was owned only by one small family, forcing them to take the revenue (which they own) to pay would directly violate the religious beliefs of that small number of people.

On the other hand, Amazon does not have freedom of religion, because Amazon has thousands of shareholders with no universal religious inclination. A fundamentalist christian owner of Amazon stock cannot reasonably ask Amazon to stop paying for birth control.

But, I've only thought about this for a few hours. I'm interested in what other policies can be implemented to serve both the rights of hosts and the rights of content creators.

I found this Emily Bazelon article from the nytimes really thoughtful. It's about free speech laws and disinformation campaigns.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/13/magazine/free-speech.html

I made a giant 50 foot tall pile of doo-doo sculpture, and I insist the town square host it in perpetuity, because to not do so would infringe upon my "free speech".

Side-note, this compares dark-humorously against a year ago, when the in-power right-wing conservative nut-jobs of the Law & Justice party rewrote the law to be able to fire any judges that criticized the government, after chasing similar pushes in years previous. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/world/europe/poland-judge...

Almost every comment here is an attempt to distract from the real issue. One can only imagine the comments had HN existed when Marsh v. Alabama was decided. What if some racist wants to hold a meeting in my living room? So a company makes available a free space and then has to allow people to use that in a way they don't like? Kind of insane. Plus long lists of accusations against various US politicians, ways in which the US doesn't live up to the first amendment, etc.. And of course the utterly bizarre argument (but at least one that actually relates to the real issue) that forcing a company to allow speech on their property constitutes forced speech.

Sounds like a good way to get your service absolutely soaked by spam and off topic posts. Without proper moderation public social channels will just degrade into noise.

This was my first thought too. Does it make it illegal to remove spam content?

I guess this takes some knowledge of Polish politics. Polish Justice Minister is the leader of a small party which is in coalition with the ruling party. They are similar in beliefs, but more radical. So every now and then they throw some radical proposal, which never makes it into the law because it's too extreme or against EU laws/Polish consitutions. This law has been proposed every year and nothing really came out of it.

Go to your HN profile and turn on "showdead". This is how the entire internet would now look like.

[18.12.2020]

An important note. Recent events had nothing to do with that.

I almost jumped at the idea of Poles having having to "thank" Trump Donald for that.

Based on the article you would be prevented from removing such content. To use land as an example, if someone rents your land you cannot subsequently create restrictions or actively moderate unless they are violating the law. The nature of most social media has been “anything goes” and then we moderate... Given social media is often viewed as a form of free speech for laypeople it doesn’t seem unreasonable to have strict standards for removing content. I could see social media sites requiring much more personal information, real ID, bank/CC accounts to provide these services in the future similar to how rental contracts are governed. I can’t even use real candles in my apartment without violating my rental agreement.

Naive. Such law can only exist on paper, because the corporations still have the de-facto power and users don't.

Normal people can't host content themselves. In theory they may, but their home Internet connection does not have public IP because of cgNAT, and they need to bow down to DNS registrar to make their website work. Attacking web hosters (e.g. AWS) and DNS registrars is the primary way to silence free speech, yet this bill does nothing about that.

If Polish really need freedom speech on Internet, they have to mandate public IP addresses and disallow non-commerce clauses for all ISPs. And shield DNS registrars from responsibility for actions of their clients. Those things would be enforceable. This law isn't.

> In the event of removal or blockage, a complaint can be sent to the platform, which will have 24 hours to consider it. Within 48 hours of the decision, the user will be able to file a petition to the court for the return of access. The court will consider complaints within seven days of receipt and the entire process is to be electronic.

It seems like this is not a burden for Facebook but requires manual work from the court.

Imagine if Facebook gleefully takes down anything / everything & forwards the petitions to the polish court. It is zero cost to them after the initial engineering and now they are absolved of moderating Polish FB.

The court would start handing out 2.2 million USD per offence very quickly. Even at Facebook scale, that will hurt

I'm only seeing that they can be fined if they disobey the ruling

I do not propose they do that - rather they can have the courts do the moderation for them.

Very easy.

> If a special court rules in favour of the plaintiff and the internet service does not obey the ruling

I am wondering how will this version of the e-court function in practice.

The existing e-court is an amazing tool for removing the most obvious cases from the system, and the way it works is that any party can at any time raise objection, which can literally be two words - "I object" signed mr. X and the case falls back to regular proceedings. Then of course most cases finish without such an objection and voila - the system gets extra magical throughput. The power of defaults.

Looks like they want to not have the fallback here? Otherwise it is certainly impossible to resolve a case in 7 days.

Might not matter in the end as corpos will likely just comply.

Zbigniew Ziobro is one of the worst polish politician

I believe more is coming, but on a European level:

- unsolicited ads = spam

- what you post on the Internet will be copyrighted (owned by you). So Facebook/Twitter will require a license to use your data. Whether they will share profits is up to the license agreement.

- procedure to sue when aforementioned data is used without a license.

- global rules regarding deletion of accounts (suspend period, downloadable user owned data)

If you are looking for 1984 levels of double speak, then this is it.

This does not compel social media to follow Polish law throughout the world. It only means that social media should be able to filter content per country as they should anyway because what's legal and what's illegal varies from country to country.

An example, which often pops up: Denying the Holocaust falls within free speech protected by the 1st Amendment in the US. On the other hand, it is a criminal offence in many European countries.

It may not matter if you have no legal presence in countries outside your own but the FAANG have legal presence in most in not all Western countries at the very least and must follow the laws of these countries.

But in this case, the country isn't demanding FAANG censor stuff illegal in Poland for Polish audiences (which I'm sure already happens to a degree), they're arguing they should be punished for removing anything which isn't illegal in Poland (if a Pole objects). And I doubt Poland has laws against trolling or spam...

That's the same thing isn't it? Filtering per country.

We'd need to see the actual drafting, which may not even exist yet, to discuss what they actually have in mind, at the moment many people make conjectures based on one line in an article.

(An I'm sure that Poland has laws against harassment and spam... if only because spam is covered by EU Directives).

Poland sadly doesn’t even have an independent judiciary so seeing these fundamental rights experiments in Poland of all places is worrying.

It would be great if things like this could be spearheaded by countries that aren’t in that unfortunate state. I fully expect Hungary to follow if they haven’t already.

This will be used to silence dissent.

This is all done so political trolls can spam freely before elections.

Imagine this site -> trolls come and promote a certain party (guess which) - and mods cannot delete it. It doesnt matter that this site is about hackernews, or some other website is about cat pictures -> you still cannot delete the political spam.

That kind of "law" is idiotic at its core, you'd move it to archive section under a layer of 10 links to access it as compressed zip with aggregate of 10k other comments created around that time?

And the court would say that this is the same as removing it Courts are not programs, they are used to people trying to get by on technicalities. That rarely works

Wow, so increasingly illiberal Poland is now importing American notions of free speech in an act of right-wing solidarity or something?

To be clear, I am basically a Free speech abolitionist, but I am very suspicious of the motivation here. I can't see a clean philosophy in corrupting the judiciary but claiming to support this.

There’s no good intention here: they’re protecting their own political party who uses the same deception and outright manipulation (read up on state propaganda TV) as Trump administration. They need the reach to continue to brain wash their constituents and so to avoid getting fact-checked and eventually banned by the social media like Trump was.

Unless you're a group that the gov't doesn't like?

Right wing, nationalist leader decides to create law that would prevent his posts getting removed by the platform owner for violating their ToS, unless actually illegal under national law..

Can't help but wonder what recent deletions he could possibly be thinking of..

This article is from December

Then I'll raise my beer in admiration, to this slightly smarter and more forward thinking right-wing, populist, nationalist :)

I'm betting on internet balkanization long term. Even in the West, people can't agree on what you can and can't say on social media.

Agreed. A twist on Conway's Law wherein communication mediums will come to mirror political fractures.

It's already happened. China is about 1/4 of the internet.

But even without legal barriers, the internet has most always been that way, due to language. Most people don't fire up a translator to visit sites on the other side of the planet; they just use the same sites that the rest of their community does.

I hope this will be taken up by the EU. Poland on its own is too small fry for the social Media conglomerate.

Not if they have any sense, it’s completely impractical to implement.

Note that polandin.com is site managed by TVP, Poland state propaganda TV station.

Recently, they compared aggressive mob invading Capitol to legally elected opposition in Polish parliament. https://twitter.com/tvp_info/status/1346927489902211073

The web has walked a tightrope for the past two decades. Like a car that's accelerated to 300 miles per hour, there's an alternate reality where the road keeps going straight and doesn't crash. But, its unlikely, and I'm afraid we've driven off the road, irrevocably.

The idea that the internet is just a "town square" except "everyone on the planet" simply does not work. Period. Human behavior was never designed to scale like that; we can't handle the discourse, we can't handle using that power responsibly, or internalizing what we read responsibly.

Many are afraid of a rogue AI taking over the world. The internet, and social media specifically, is that AI. Every human is a neuron, programmable by exploiting flaws in human evolution, or even self-programmable by living in feedback bubbles where their own fears and doubts are amplified. Every human is an actor; capable of traumatic harm by executing on that programming and, say, storming the capital.

Even my fears about this reality we live in are a byproduct of the programming I've received via the sites I visit, and the feedback bubbles I decide to live in online.

I cannot believe that my programming, and the programming many of the people in this Hacker News bubble receive every day, is any more or less dangerous to the fabric of society than the programming the people on Parler received. I'm angry at what transpired in the Capital and on Parler. I'm angry at AWS, Google, and Apple for reacting the way they did. I'm scared that something like that could happen to the products I'm working on, even though that's crazy because I work on dumb data entry and not social media for revolutionists. My fear and anger comes from reactions to actions taken by other people who were scared and mad; their fear and anger came from reactions to actions taken by the left, from the right, from the left, from the right, this is the feedback bubble; not between revolutionists on Parler, but between Us and Them. Because, it is Us and Them; it shouldn't be, but it always has been. The comments I've seen here over the past few days just confirm this; Parler gets shut down then hacked, by-and-large we applaud it.

I think about the idea of the Great Filter, and I wonder if what we're seeing here is the most likely filter for civilization. What happens when you give a billion products of survival-focused evolution the ability to talk to each other, with no limits, filters, or self-control? What happens to society? I want to believe that, if a Filter exists, its at least something outside our control like a virus, or its something we did to ourselves like global warming. But, maybe its actually just Us. Maybe products of evolution can never work together well enough to reach any stage of science-fiction like enlightenment.

I no longer believe there's any course a company or government could take to stop this. Its happening too fast, and by the time anyone in power realizes how much damage this has done, and is doing, to our society, it will be too late. At the very least, we need to shut down Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, and every other platform which allows peer-to-peer broadcast-like communication between everyone on the planet. Even the act of me posting this and you reading it is part of the problem. But, that won't happen in the west.

I suppose the only course of action I can take is to remove myself from the equation. If everyone did that, then the world would be a better place. Not everyone will, but its the only step I'm capable of. I guess, to some degree, it was fun while it lasted.

Unnecessary. If Facebook and Twitter wish to donate their monopoly market share to Alt-Tech, let them. They've already promoted the Trump effect via conservative info virality for years; the logical next step is to make conservatives completely stop listening to the center and left.

This "justice" minister is responsible for essentially removing independent courts from the Polish legal system. The judges in Poland are forced to rule as requested by the government. This is by far THE worst shit show since the fall of communism in Poland (1989).

If you are wondering where all of this is headed, read “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson.

It’s a good book, but really, I don’t see even the slightest connection between this and any of the plot points.

Nooo, not the plot! The setting. Really fun story though, yes.

I expect this type of regulation to be quickly put into place in every jurisdiction that actually believes in the principles of freedom of speech. The most salient part of this article:

> Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law. In the event of removal or blockage, a complaint can be sent to the platform, which will have 24 hours to consider it. Within 48 hours of the decision, the user will be able to file a petition to the court for the return of access. The court will consider complaints within seven days of receipt and the entire process is to be electronic.

As an aside: the excuse that private companies are not the government and "can do whatever they want" is the flimsiest of excuses. If businesses can do whatever they want, then surely all of them can ignore pandemic restrictions and open up if they so choose. And all the regulations already imposed on other privately-held utilities must not matter. And so on.

Clearly big tech companies are the new digital public town square and speech that is not permitted on their platforms might as well not exist. For people to have a useful right to the freedom of speech, these massive platforms do need to be regulated. Perhaps niche networks can go their own route but Twitter and Facebook are bigger than most nations and cannot be allowed to operate without due process.

As a country that has suffered the turmoil of both Nazism and Communism, it would be wise to heed their direction. They know the smell of tyranny all too well. The proverbial canary.

The same Justice Minister wants to take away the right to refuse a ticket from the police, so don't be so quick in your judgment.

What does that even mean, refusing a ticket?

If I refuse a ticket in NL, I will still get the fine-notice in the mail.

you can take the issue to court instead. if you're win, you pay nothing, if you're wrong, you pay the fine and court expenses - or whatever the court finds wrong at the same time. accepting the ticket means basically confessing that you're guilty. the idea is that policemen are wrong sometimes and refusing the ticket gives you an out; it keeps the police honest. with the new law you could in theory get a speeding ticket for walking and it'd be up to you to prove that you haven't done it.

If I take the issue to court, I can either prove I didn't do the 'crime', or argue there is insufficient evidence. But police officers testimonies carry a lot of weight, so that is not a fruitful path.

It is still unclear to me what you are exactly saying.

Currently when you don't accept ticket, no penalty is yet applied, and police needs to file court case against you. Proposed changes make it that ticket can't be refused and penalty is always applied, but it can be afterwards appealed to the court. This is less favorable as it shifts court process burden from police (they need to prove you are guilty in the first place) to you (you are appealing already applied penalty).

Has been like this for 'overtredingen' ( minor offences like jaywalking, speeding, running red lights ) in NL for decades.

Wet Mulder for those interested.

Yes, this proposal taken alone might seem benign, but people are riled up about this because context matter: many of the pandemic restrictions are unlawful, because they are either introduced in decrees issued by prime minister instead of laws passed in parliament, or infringe on freedoms guaranteed in constitution without introducing state of emergency. As such, many courts are throwing out cases brought by police about violating pandemic restrictions. Proceeding law changes about refusing tickets now, just feels like blatantly like: "Oh, they are not accepting tickets based on unlawful regulations? Let's make it harder to refuse ticket!"

I understand the change is unwelcome.

For us an appeal is just a letter to the public attorney(?), which will either result in them dropping it, or a case, all of which you can do yourself.

Do people in Holland protest when their government tries to shift some bureaucratic burden to the citizens, when it was previously on the professionals paid by the citizens' money? Well, Polish people seemingly do mind.

I got a ticket, I'm sure I'm innocent:

  - old way: police "organizes" the court appointment, I wait
  - new way: I "organize" the court appointment, police waits

The taxes don't change.

No, this was not protested IIRC, as it seems appropriate for speeding-tickets, running red lights, biking without light etc. Or Corona-measures for that matter ( which went through parliament ).

edit: Demeanors? is the word I was looking for.

misdemeanors :)

The new process seems equivalent to Canada and the United States. I agree its less favourable though.

This government is heading into a tyranny. And most of voters are happy with it, sadly.

This is a valuable and reasonable opinion, and does not deserve the downvotes.

This government has learned from that time, but looking at the state of TVP and these "tematy zastępcze" they seem rather fond of Goebbels' methods. Paint "the west" as the enemy to your "great traditions" and use the wedges like this law to distract people from creeping towards authoritarianism.

> ... creeping towards authoritarianism

Because all the shit going on in the US isn't ?

I don't see how it's relevant. Would you be fine being a kulak in Soviet Russia being scheduled for execution because at least the Japanese are currently organizing mass murder in China as well?

> I don't see how it's relevant.

Instead of looking at the neighbor's mess, clean up your own mess first.

Fact is most of the former "free" (as in Liberty) world has been setting up the perfect legal building blocks for a long sitting reign of terror / dictatorship / authoritarianism, and big-tech is 100% complicit (because they will make money out of it).

Not everybody on hn is american, I thought speaking Polish would give it away.

They know the smell of tyranny all too well.

Yeah, because they’ve been the ones cooking it up.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/world/europe/eu-poland-la...

It's miraculous to see someone fight this hard for our human rights.

No man or woman has the right to take away your freedom of expression.

Have you ever been in a restaurant? Yes, they do.

You're wrong. Try take away my rights be assured I will fight back.

You don't have a right to stay in a private business if they ask you to leave. Fight back and you get arrested (and rightly so.)

Leaving and inviting other people to do the same is what I meant by fight back.

I'm usually don't have a strong opinion but in this case. Consider the following hypothetical:

Suppose the Big Tech companies are far-right instead of left. Instead of banning racism and insurrection, they are banning people calling for higher taxes on the wealthy and UBI. Twitter censors posts by supporters and politicians like Bernie Sanders. In response, Sanders supporters create an alternate social network like a liberal Parler, but it gets removed from the App Store and deactivated by AWS.

In this scenario people wouldn't be saying "freedom of speech is freedom from compelled speech; you can say what you want but you just need to create your own platform / internet; etc." There would be legislation drafted aimed at breaking up or regulating these near-monopolistic private companies. The argument that private companies can censor what they want works with small businesses and competitive environments, but not when private companies essentially control the #1 means of communication.

To be clear, I don't believe that violent insurrectionists should get a platform. I don't believe that racists and bigots should get a platform. I don't even support this bill because it's way too broad. But the amount of people supporting this argument - that private companies with near-monopolies on a means of communication, can control and censor said communication however they want - is crazy.

> Suppose the Big Tech companies are far-right instead of left.

Wait, when did corporate capitalism become a left-wing position?

What you really mean is "supposed the Big Tech companies became far-right instead of centrist neoliberal capitalists".

> In this scenario people wouldn’t be saying “freedom of speech is freedom from compelled speech; you can say what you want but you just need to create your own platform / internet; etc.” T

Yeah, just projecting a story of how people would act in a counterfactual in order to base an argument on it is problematic because its obviously quite easy to just assert whatever behavior would best suit the conclusion you want to draw.

One could equally easily assume that left-wing opponents of the action you suggest would, instead of focussing on state regulation (presumably, if industry was that much more tilted against the left than it is now, through the influence of industrial money the government would be even more tilted against the left than it is now, which would make the government unhelpful in any case), the left would instead organize outside corporate communication channels (as it has in the past) for boycotts, demonstrations, and mobilization for both the interests that were being targeted and against the firms that were trying to block them. Of course, in that case, the argument you are trying to build on top of your story about how the left would behave falls apart.

> What you really mean is "supposed the Big Tech companies became far-right instead of centrist neoliberal capitalists".

This is right. I should've said something like "what if they censored progressive reform instead of violence and hatred".

> One could equally easily assume ... the left would instead organize outside corporate communication channels (as it has in the past) for boycotts, demonstrations, and mobilization

Yes, but one could also assume the extremists are going to do the same thing to stage another insurrection. And, under the argument that they still have freedom of speech, there is nothing we could do.

The point is that people are supporting the current, reasonable policy (censoring hate speech and calls for violence) with the wrong justification (private companies that control communication can do whatever they want). This particularly becomes a problem when the companies decide to use their censorship for profit at the expense of indie studios (which has happened), and said studios don't have good alternatives.

Legitimacy aside - purely from a political perspective - this is pretty smart.

Poland is at odds with the EU bureaucracy over a bunch of things, and 'Freedom of Expression' is definitely a populist issue a lot of people can feasibly rally behind.

Whatever the reality is, the optics are good.

It puts the EU in a position of having to 'defend censorship' (or at least detractors could say as much).

> a lot of people can feasibly rally behind.

I do not think that is the case. 'Free speech' is not new topic in EU, but most people who are talking about it are neo-nazis.

This proposal is obviously dictature of free speech.

True free speech is correct speech?

So I think you just proved my point:

"This proposal is obviously dictature of free speech. "

? That seems pretty 'newspeak' to me.

They are making it so that anyone can post anything unless it's literally against the laws.

And somehow this is 'authoritarian' or 'dicature'?

Because it seems just the opposite.

My point was, they're going to put the EU in an awkward position with this - just as you've put yourself in a little bit of an awkward position by trying to imply that 'freedom of expression' is 'dictature'.

Now - I don't really like these guys one bit - but - the law seems at least superficially very reasonable.

We're all super suspicious because this came from 'the bad guys' - fair enough, but it is what it is.

"Newspeak" is calling compelled speech free speech. This law would, for example, force HN to host spam and unrelated content since it does not break polish law. And forcing an entity like HN to host and disseminate content it does not want, is simply compelled speech and doing it under the guise of "free speech" does not change the nature of the law.

Having to host comments on a board one may disagree with is absolutely not 'compelled speech' any more than AT&T's requirement to carry 'all websites' is 'compelled speech'.

There's grey area there for sure, but it's not authoritarian.

As previously several people commented, big tech shot itself in the foot by banning everyone they don’t agree with and suspiciously acting in the same time (Twitter and Facebook).

I don’t know what they expected, other politicians saw how much power platforms hold and they are not going to sit still and wait for it to happen to them.

Jack Dorsey is not an elected leader, and he has no right to act as the jury, judge and executioner.

I for one welcome this kind of bill, I am sad that this brings the balkanization of the internet, but it is inevitable.

Jack had every right, it’s his website. He pays for it, so he gets to decide what appears on it. The same would apply to anyone else running a website. This is not a new idea.

Jack only owns 2% of twitter, further Twitter is a public company. We subject public companies to higher standards than closely held ones because ownership is broad and diluted.

But he doesn't own Twitter. He's a representative of the shareholders. And TWTR is down 6.5% today on the news. So clearly this decision wasn't in the interest of Twitter's actual owners.

We don’t get to see the world where he didn’t do that. For example, let’s pretend his lawyers warned him that TWTR as a company and himself as an individual could be held liable for any future riot organised on Twitter. That would be worse than 6.5%, surely?

Between 8 PM Friday and 4 AM Monday morning, nothing about potential legal liability changed. The decline over the weekend TWTR banned Trump was larger than the decline following the riot itself.

1. We don’t know what advice they were getting and when, and it’s the advice not the liability that matters.

2. This is just an example of things which could be going on, not intended as a factual statement of what did and why Twitter chose to do what it chose to do — if I actually knew something not in the public domain, I’d probably be under NDA to not say.

You think a $40 billion stock moved 6% in a day based on non-public internal discussions among executives and lawyers? If so, that would constitute one of the most blatant cases of insider trading in modern history.

That’s not what I was saying.

I’m suggesting the beliefs of the Twitter board of directors may have changed due to non-public discussions, causing them to ban Trump despite the foreseeable negative impact on their bottom line, as that would be a less-bad alternative to the consequences of not doing so.

I don’t see why this is a controversial claim for me to make given that (1) they did, in fact, ban Trump’s account, and (2) people have been pointing at Trump’s violations the TOS for years already, so Twitter probably previously had non-public grounds for not banning him, grounds which are no longer sufficient.

(Point 2 is weaker than point 1, point 1 is basically incontrovertible).

Twitter is still up significantly from just one year ago. Investors expect the odd blip, and this isn't the only one in the last 6 months. Long term they've done well, so they're happy. They're not going to start asking questions unless this turns into a long-term downward trend.

>Jack Dorsey is not an elected leader, and he has no right to act as the jury, judge and executioner.

This type of rhetoric has gotten absurd. Jack Dorsey is not executing anyone.

Jack Dorsey doesn't control Twitter now.

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