Germany has some of harshest anti free speech law, where you can go to prison for denying Holocaust
In the US to undue the 1st amendment it would take not only a super majority of both houses congress, but then it would take 3/4 of all state legislatures to ratify the change. This is far more stringent of a requirement than is simply majority.
Republican forms of government, ones with lots distributed power, are far far far better than democracies
Which is why GDPR exists isn't it? Every country can frame it's own rules. Private companies must abide by those rules. Neither should they be allowed to create rules for their platforms beyond what is defined in the Constitution of the countries they operate in. Restricting speech by private companies must be made illegal. If someone says or does something wrong on social media there is recourse for it already defined by the law. Any content removal should be in the hands of the users of the platform (similar to GDPR) or the elected Government. Private companies must only be allowed to remove content that has been explicitly defined as illegal in the constitution of the particular country.
For everything else they can enjoy immunity from being liable for whatever is posted on their platform. Liability is always with the end user of their services. That way, there won't be any extra burden on these private companies to moderate content.
The real problem here is not some private services chose what is or what is not available in their services. The core issue is their monopolistic position on information infrastructure. To some degree, people are responsible for not using decentralizing services, and for that, shame on people. On the other hand, when people are not educated to actively defend themselves against mass manipulation, it’s no wonder they end up trapped in that kind of "free" services. Of course, any form of political power that is not based on maximizing people auto-determination will precisely want easily manipulable people.
Neither these private companies nor political parties that now fake to be outraged by censure of opinion want auto-determined people able to share anything that might look like a menace to the centralized institutions they have in their hands.
In this case Germany has every damn right to frame such laws. They are a Sovereign Nation. The people of Germany have empowered their Government through their constitution.
Twitter/Facebook/Google et all are not Sovereign States. They haven't been elected by anyone. Their rules cannot override the laws of the State. They cannot frame rules that go against the laws of the State. They have to work within the ambit of the laws defined by the State. The power to frame such laws is in the hands of the legislature given by the people of the State. I never gave any powers to Facebook/Twitter/Google et all to regulate my speech as guaranteed by my Constitution (which is the Constitution of India). They cannot bring in First Amendment arguments of the United States to counter the Free Speech as defined in the Indian Constitution. It simply does not work that way.
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Rate limited so replying to qwytw as s/he raises a very important point:
> I don't see how this would be fundamentally different from, for example, requiring newspapers to publish every letter their receive irregardless of their editorial stance.
You are talking about curation not about banning/removal. Billions of tweets are sent to Twitter every day. But only few make it to the top of the trends. No one has a problem with curation. We have a problem with banning of our content just because Twitter feels it is problematic. Not because it is explicitly defined in the Constitution as being problematic.
Let us assume that you send a letter to a Newspaper to publish in editorial and you include swear words in it (Let us assume "orange haired buffoon" is a swear word. Because you are upset with Trump you call him an "orange haired buffoon" in your letter). The Newspaper won't publish it. That is perfectly fine. They won't punish you for it. Probably will make a paper rocket out of your letter and throw it around in the office. But if you send a violent threat in the letter (calling for assassination of Trump), they'll contact Police/FBI/CIA and hand them over your letter. Easy to grok?
Now let us compare that to Twitter. Twitter will read your tweet with swear words in it (Trump is a orange haired buffoon). It will immediately remove it and warn you of consequences of tweeting something like that again else face a 7 day suspension (with a subsequent warning of 30 day, 1 year and permanent suspension if you repeat it again and again). Already there is a big difference between how the Newspaper company handled your letter vs how Twitter handled your tweet.
Twitter is regulating speech here. It has decided that "orange haired buffoon" constitutes a violation of someone else's rights. You might have said "orange haired buffoon" in jest. The person receiving your tweet might also have gotten a good chuckle out of it. But Twitter decides nope. You do not have the right to use "orange haired buffoon" on our platform else you'll be kicked out. Even if you and your friend whom you are tweeting at swear at each other in real life, you can't do that on Twitter. Do you see how quickly this degenerates to suspending/banning for ridiculous things?
Which is why content removal/moderation must be only for those things that are clearly defined as illegal by the State. For everything else, the platform already has Section 230. They can enjoy not being liable for anything that is posted on their platforms. If I am a social media platform, why would I go out of my way to provide an imperfect implementation of speech regulation and waste my time on that aspect when I already have safeguards of Section 230? Wouldn't it be better if this is legally defined in the Constitution of the country where the user is from? That way there is consistency between platforms.
If I go to Parler, Facebook, Twitter, Google or any other platform I will be following the same rules (as defined by law) instead of reading the fine print of every service to see if I am in violation of any of their ridiculous rules/regulations.
In the cyberpunk future, megacorps are sovereign. If the next wave of demonstrations was aimed at the HQs of these corporations instead of US govt buildings, the corporations might feel a need to start building their own security forces, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacorporation
"Megacorps are so powerful that they can ignore the law, possess their own heavily armed (often military-sized) private armies, be the operator of a privatized police force, hold "sovereign" territory, and even act as outright governments."
The real problem is that the market is dominated by a couple of huge companies that have disproportionate power and can pretty much do whatever they want without the risk of losing significant numbers of users. I don't see how legally requiring them to be content neutral can fix that, even if Twitter can't just remove your posts or ban you I'm sure they'll manage to find legal ways to make your content virtually invisible if they want to without directly removing it.
"Which is why content removal/moderation must be only for those things that are clearly defined as illegal by the State"
Twitter can't decide what is illegal only a court can do that. Irregardless of how clear the law is, there will have to be an appeal process and anyone unhappy with Twitter's moderation decisions will be be able to sue them. So in practice content moderation will have to be handled by a government agency. IMHO that would be much worse than the current situation because (besides being huge waste of resources) now when you're unhappy with what Twitter is doing you can still (at least theoretically) move to a different platform.
"Wouldn't it be better if this is legally defined in the Constitution of the country where the user is from"
So if someone in (for example) Thailand posts something negative about Thailand's king Twitter would be required to remove that post, while if someone in the US does that they would take no action. Do you really think this is a good idea?
It already is happening that way. What is GDPR then? As a European citizen you can ask for removal of content about you while a US Citizen or an Indian Citizen doesn't have that right (not yet atleast). Another example: I am from India. Jammu and Kashmir is an integral part of India. Now in Google Maps you'll see it as part of India if you are in India. But the moment you travel out of India, Jammu and Kashmir is shown as disputed territory between India, Pakistan and China. If you land in China a portion of Ladakh is shown as part of China (Aksai Chin). If you land in Pakistan a portion of Kashmir is shown as part of Pakistan. This is because all 3 countries claim the territory to be theirs. So if you display the territory as disputed in India you are in violation of our Constitution and will attract huge fines and can even be barred from setting up a company in India ever again.
These peculiarities always existed from many years. It is not new for social media platforms to regulate such things. They have already been doing it. It is far easier to regulate these small issues than regulate the entire social network. When you do the latter scope for getting it wrong is way higher than scope for getting it right.
> Twitter can't decide what is illegal only a court can do that. Irregardless of how clear the law is, there will have to be an appeal process and anyone unhappy with Twitter's moderation...
Why can't Twitter decide? They can decide. They already do it for illegal content. If you upload child porn or threaten someone with murder it becomes illegal and Twitter will remove it either automatically or when reported. That won't change. You can drag Twitter to court but you will lose in the first hearing itself when evidence is presented. In fact you'll be setting yourself up for prison time by voluntarily implicating yourself. That is why having it codified as a Law is so much more effective. There is no scope for ambiguity. And it's not easy to file a court case. You have to pay lawyer fees, you'll have to pay court fees at the very minimum. No one in the right frame of mind will needlessly move court over a tweet they put out which even they know is illegal. In fact, Twitter can be dragged to court if what they banned wasn't illegal. That gives more power to users and counter balances the Section 230 power that social media companies enjoy.
I'm not even sure how this could work in countries where "hate speech" is illegal either. If the content is not explicit and open to interpretation can Twitter just declare that it's illegal and remove it? If so, then how is this any different from what they are doing currently? Or would they have to wait until the user is convicted by a court before removing it?
Yes. If hate speech or holocaust denial is not illegal then Twitter is legally required to host such content. If you strongly feel this should not be the case then take the help of your representatives and codify it into law. Then Twitter will be forced to take it down.
Let me ask a counter question. There are countries where blasphemy is illegal and attracts a death sentence. In America you can get away with criticizing a religion. You can't do that in say Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Now, what should Twitter/Facebook do? Should it ban such content or keep such content? If you are a US citizen and indulge in blasphemy of a religion, will your post be shown to a Pakistani or should it not be shown?
> Would it be illegal for Twitter to show any posts made by users in the United States to users who are in the UK or Germany (if the content is ambiguous I don't see how they could determine whether it's illegal in the target court without requesting it's courts to review it)?
Yes it would be illegal for Twitter to show posts by users in US to users in UK and Germany if content is illegal. If content is ambiguous they can always decide to keep the content up and get a court review on the content. It isn't that hard to determine if content is illegal or not. They already have tools that flag such content. The only difference would be that they would first check if the content is actually violating any policies before removing it rather than just blanket removing it and making the user go through an appeals process. The worst part of the automated system that they have as of now removes a lot of false positive posts for hate speech while refusing to remove actual offending accounts. They are heavily reliant on algorithms that have a 40-50% success rate.
> If the content is not explicit and open to interpretation can Twitter just declare that it's illegal and remove it?
If content is not explicit and open to interpretation Twitter can decide not to do anything with it until a court order is produced to take it down. Section 230 and similar regulations give Twitter that protection from being liable. Twitter is not a judge. It can always ask you to get a court order for removal of that offending content and Twitter will happily remove it.
In fact this is not something alien to Big Tech. Do you know that you can request removal of content from Google SERPs indexed by other websites? Google asks for a court order for the same. If it is your content Google will happily remove it. For removing another user's content a court order is required if the content is open to interpretation and Google cannot decide if it is illegal or not.
Google form to legally remove content from Google Search Index that you don't own: https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905#ts=9...
Let me ask you another question:
Can we have a court system which only looks at issues related to social media and fast track such cases (like in Poland where you get a verdict in 7 days time)? Every country can have one. Just like we have international laws that every country ratifies, we can have countries ratify a court system that only fast tracks cases pertaining to online abuse/hate speech/violations etc. The court in each country is setup according to the Constitution of that country.
All social media companies forward complaints to that court through an API. The court is the final arbiter. If it is a criminal case the court forwards it to a criminal court. If it is a civil case the court forwards it to a civil court. If it feels it can resolve the case on their own they'll resolve it. Any verdict is passed back to the social media companies through an API call as well. That way all social media companies don't have to rely on creating their own rules and regulations and setting up support teams to handle such cases and instead offload that job to this special court system. Users are happy too as they won't be confused about conflicting rules and regulations. A user will know his own country's laws better than rules and regulations of a tech site online. It makes matters worse if he is signed up with dozens of services (which is the norm today) and has to remember rules in all services. It is too much to ask for from a user. Every citizen of every country has sworn allegiance to his/her own Constitution. Following the rules/regulations laid down in that Constitution is more than sufficient. Why should citizens be expected to learn rules set by private companies that are by themselves ephemeral?