Top German court strikes down Facebook rules on hate speech
euractiv.com
euractiv.com
> This, it added, is because Facebook does not undertake to inform the user about the removal of an offensive post at least retrospectively, to advise that it is blocking an account, to give a reason for doing so, or to offer the right of appeal.
Fair enough. Facebook is often criticized around here for handling policy violations in an opaque manner. The court simply says that principles of due process should apply when users are banned or censored.
'Es bedürfe "einer umfassenden Würdigung und Abwägung der wechselseitigen Interessen", insbesondere der "kollidierenden Grundrechte", betonen die Richter: "Auf Seiten der Nutzer die Meinungsäußerungsfreiheit, auf Seiten der Beklagten vor allem die Berufsausübungsfreiheit."' roughly: 'One needs "a comprehensive judgement and weighing of mutual interest", especially of the "colliding basic rights", as the judges emphasize: "on the users' side freedom of expression, on the side of the defendant [FB] freedom of trade and profession".
This is a high standard that needs quite some text and elaboration to fulfil, not at all doable by form letter.
'Im Sinne des Interessenausgleichs müsste sich Facebook aber verpflichten, den Nutzer "über die Entfernung eines Beitrags zumindest nachträglich und über eine beabsichtigte Sperrung seines Nutzerkontos vorab zu informieren, ihm den Grund dafür mitzuteilen und eine Möglichkeit zur Gegenäußerung einzuräumen, an die sich eine Neubescheidung anschließt".' roughly: 'However, in the way of balancing interests, Facebook has to pledge to "inform [the user] about removal of a post at least after the fact and about planned blocking of an account before the fact, to name the reason thereof and offer an opportunity to issue an opposing statement, which is followed by a subsequent further decision and information.".'
So they are relatively explicit in how Facebook must do things and that they cannot just file the opposing statement to the recycle bin. Facebook's lawyer called this "completely impractical" (but of course he would...) because of the hundreds of daily cases.
[0] https://www.heise.de/news/BGH-Facebook-muss-geloeschte-Hassr...
Oh, and btw., the court that decided this is the highest regular court in Germany, setting a binding precedent for all other German courts. There are many more cases than just those two, all the others you just don't read about because everyone knows that lower courts' decisions aren't that important and frequently overturned. So even if it was just about 2 posts, this decision is important and will shape all future cases.
Their power comes with responsibilities to keep it lawsful for all participants. That means removing unlawful speech while at the same time allowing lawful speech.
It's only logical that conflicts needs to be settled in a similar fashion as they are in other similar situations in the offline world.
For western democracies that usually means some sort of due process and unbiased weighing of facts with a decision that adheres to the existing standards in that society.
Facebook would like to do everything automatically of course but with great power comes great responsibility.
I predict that sooner or later the regular court system will be responsible for those cases and Facebook will be happy to make money by providing the tech platform.
Some new legislation in Germany requires Facebook to also proactively remove posts from users that have been reported and are "obviously" illegal, even without waiting for a court order.
But Facebook goes even beyond that and uses standards that are stricter than current laws, and processes that are simpler, harsher and stricter than the usual court proceedings. The court judgement in the article limited that practice a bit.
You may be right in that the legislation described in the second paragraph requiring Facebook to be proactive may be expanded. I do find this tendency unfortunate, because free speech is put in the hands of a private for-profit entity that is by law required to be very quick about its judgements.
I know some devs will say that if they told me what was the cause then I could work around that, my anwer is that the point is not to make their lazy life easier, the point devs exists is to create stuff for the customer.
> Sir, why am I in jail?
> if we told you the law, you could work around it.
You can publish rules and principles while keeping the precise details of the deliberation confidential.
Still while it is a losers pay country the costs are moderate (limited value assigned to access and therefore limited fees) and are in any case peanuts for FB. Also the industrialized cease-and-desist-letter law companies are unlikely to take these type of lawsuits.
That may not be true. Amazon dropped its arbitration clause because of the cost of filing fees after some attorneys mass filed disputes over a few issues (with the Echo, I believe).
If these are obviously losing cases for Facebook, they may stand to lose much more.
I suspect that European governments will continue to badger FB (and Twitter, and Google, and etc.) on this until they up their headcount to deal with it using humans-in-the-loop. The question is whether or not social networks are actually profitable if you have human moderation. I suspect they are not.
My expectation is that Facebook will increase efforts to automate more granular and broad surveillance on users and content in order to provide automated reasons for removing content. The crux, after all is not that the content was removed, but rather that no reason was given. Maybe the short term solution is simply an overwhelmingly broad legalese that covers broader reasons for censorship.
I don't see the Germany polity desiring the increase in humans doing such rote and banal work. We have seen the damage it does to people to essentially be enforcers of human rights violations. It is psychologically and emotionally damaging to abuse people. No, this will be a move towards more automation of the control, surveillance, and censorship that the ruling class demands. You may agree with it since it's the censorship of "racism", but don't be surprised when what you believe or say is all the sudden "racism" too or that your lèse-majesté will be included in the list of forbidden speech and thought next.
If allowed to manifest … and we are racing towards this end … things will soon look like right out of 1984 where you don't even have the chance to disseminate anything the regime dislikes. Instead, you will instead you will be whisked away or have your life ruined if you say anything the regime will intentionally arbitrarily deem "hate speech" or whatever other rationalization they come up with. It will be anyone's guess what it is that the regime may not like at any given time and therefore no one will dare say anything.
It is what others have called anarcho-tyranny, but I simply see as rather fundamental abusiveness 101 that any abused spouse can describe and you can read about the the most basic psychology textbooks.
> Facebook acted illegally in taking down racist posts and blocking the account of their author because the social network failed to inform the user or give a reason for shutting them down.
(my emphasis)
I know some people (even here) very much support removing and banning people for stuff they disagree with, and call all of that disinformation, but things change, you won't always be on the "right side", and then it'll be too late.
And even "sides" change... Covid is one such example, where not so long ago, you could be calling for people to wear masks to protect themselves, and with current facebook tools, your posts would be removed for misinformation and conspiracies/fearmongering about covid, because "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly" [0]
Then a few weeks/months later "whoops", let's ban "the other side".
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-mas...
Not only are they not qualified, as you state even the "experts" change minds, disagree etc.
Having so much power to decide or influence what people know should be a very disturbing and chilling concept of itself.
But some people still argue for FB (google, apple,...) to have that power (and more), because they believe they'll always be on the same side of "truth".
So it seems they have proven it’s possible to do with people in the loop.
E.g. I follow Professor Hu Fanzhu of East China Normal University's National Discourse Ecology Research Center on WeChat. A week ago, he published an article "Nine questions about Zhengzhou" that appeared in my feed, but displayed the message that it couldn't be sent because it might be inappropriately using the names of government institutions or employees. This was probably automated.
Then he republished it as "Nine questions about ZZ", which displays the message that it was taken down after being reported by users.
He's now switched to publishing a series of articles (five so far, here's the first: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Rf2t5cRoHJGh8Yb-3fFXSA ) of which the second was taken down, again mentioning user reports as the reason. But I actually managed to read that one before it disappeared.
To generalize a bit, any new event escapes censorship at first, because neither automated systems nor human reviewers have been instructed to censor it. Once the censors are aware, new keywords like "Zhengzhou" can be added to the filter lists. But those are easy to get around by using different words, so humans are still needed to clean up the rest. And it can take them a long time to do so, during which tens of thousands of people may have read something the government didn't want them to know about.
Imagine the post said that.
Nobody would have been blocked, and no lawsuit would need to be filed.
You know I am right, since about every other post on Twitter is like that, without any ban of course.
The question is, if censoring certain political views (albeit expressed a bit harshly of course) is the way our society should go.
> Wer die Freiheit der Meinungsäußerung, insbesondere die Pressefreiheit (Artikel 5 Abs. 1), die Lehrfreiheit (Artikel 5 Abs. 3), die Versammlungsfreiheit (Artikel 8), die Vereinigungsfreiheit (Artikel 9), das Brief-, Post- und Fernmeldegeheimnis (Artikel 10), das Eigentum (Artikel 14) oder das Asylrecht (Artikel 16a) zum Kampfe gegen die freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung mißbraucht, verwirkt diese Grundrechte. Die Verwirkung und ihr Ausmaß werden durch das Bundesverfassungsgericht ausgesprochen.
Try to use your rights to abolish the democratic order and you lose them. That's indeed pretty simple language.
That doesn't really fall under "certain kinds of political views", rather under "I'm going to stage a coup and turn Germany into a dictatorship".
"Certain kinds of political views" is typically understood to mean opinions like "we need higher/lower taxes for the rich" or "men and women should/shouldn't have equal rights". That's not forbidden by the Grundgesetz, at least not for individuals.
None of these parties were trying to stage a coup, they stood for elections like any other party. What they intended to do once they gained power is incompatible with "freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung".
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPD-Verbotsverfahren
Note that this is a disambiguation page because there were two years long processes, neither of which resulted in a ban even though the more recent one did at least rule the party anti-constitutional, which resulted in laws being passed to exempt anti-constitutional parties from public party financing and the forced neutrality of public institutions in their statements regarding political parties. Still not a ban.
I think the more relevant examples are:
* Germany's strict laws surrounding "insults", which mean that you can incur a €600 fine for intentionally addressing a police officer using the colloquial form ("du" instead of the more formal "Sie")
* the ban on "anti-constitutional" symbols, especially the swastika, various insignia, flags, songs and salutes associated with nazi movements (but also symbols associated with designated terrorist groups like ISIS), when used in a context that can be understood to express approval of the associated ideologies
* the denial of the Holocaust
But note that in practice these are punishable by law, not strictly prohibited/enforced by the constitution.
Do you have a reference on the "du" as insult ever being successfully prosecuted? I can't find anything.
https://www.prigge-recht.de/duzen-sie-niemals-einen-polizist...
https://www.helpster.de/polizei-duzen-das-sollten-sie-beacht...
(the first one seems to be written by a legal expert)
But it is indeed a bit more complicated as there may be circumstances where "du" could not be considered disrespectful (e.g. if the police officer does it first). There are a lot of Google results about German celebrity Dieter Bohlen winning a legal case by establishing that he uses the colloquial form with everyone and therefore using it on a police officer could not have been an expression of disrespect.
But when dealing with police officers, the burden of proof tends to be on the "offender" in practice, so for most people it's probably cheaper to pay a fine than go to court.
That said, unless you have the spare change to pay the fee or a legal insurance willing to cover you for this, I simply wouldn't risk it and since most Germans believe there's a crime called "Beamtenbeleidigung" (insulting a public official, which is not a separate crime from the more generic "insult" -- the misconception arises because it's not worth the effort for most people to sue over an ordinary insult) I don't think many people risk it unless they're already being considerably more offensive than merely being a bit disrespectful.
And the article 11 of the the charter [1] basically gives a 1st amendment type of freedom of speech. [2]
[1] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/11-freedom-expre...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_10_of_the_European_Con...
The position of white males and immigrants are not equal. When people make statements about whites or males, it is generally not about all males. And no one in society is advocating that we "send back all whites".
I imagine you are arguing sincerely, but I believe this type of situation is what is called 'whataboutism' or even false equivalency.
As an neighbor of the Germans, I hold them in high regard. They have a very robust democracy, and as a nation are more principled than most. It took three wars but they learned their lesson. Hate leads to suffering and all that.
> When people make statements about whites or males, it is generally not about all males.
That's neither here nor there. This is to be interpreted based on the actual statement. "immigrants blah blah" targets immigrants as a group in the same way as "white males blah blah" targets white males as a group. If the rest of the statement is the same in both cases and unacceptable then both statements are equally unacceptable.
axiosgunnar above has a point that the same statement targeting "white males" instead of immigrants would have been equally unacceptable, and would have fallen equally foul of the law.
That might be a nice ideal, but just not true in practice or history.
Like the law referenced in the article:
>hate speech, which is banned under German law if it threatens the peace or incites violence against minority groups.
“Minority group” =/= “Any group”
That's how it is in practice. Everyone's equal under the law. Specifically on these issues, all groups are equal (meaning all races, ethnicities, etc.)
In Germany, and European countries in general, targeting groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. is illegal. It does not matter whether a group is a "minority group", whatever that means (quite sensibly so, of course).
For example, I believe that this German law is generally applicable:
"Whosoever, in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace:
1. incites hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins, against segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population or calls for violent or arbitrary measures against them; or
2. assaults the human dignity of others by insulting, maliciously maligning an aforementioned group, segments of the population or individuals because of their belonging to one of the aforementioned groups or segments of the population, or defaming segments of the population,
shall be liable to imprisonment from three months to five years." [1]
> > hate speech, which is banned under German law if it threatens the peace or incites violence against minority groups.
Based on the above, I think that the article has it wrong.
If this were true in the US, for example, then the following would not be true:
> Black men and women are imprisoned at higher rates compared to all other age groups, with the highest rate being Black men aged 25 to 39. In 2001, almost 17% of Black men had previously been imprisoned in comparison to 2.6% of White men. By the end of 2002, of the two million inmates of the U.S. incarceration system, Black men surpassed the number of White men (586,700 to 436,800 respectively of inmates with sentences more than one year). In the same year, there were also more Black women behind bars than White women (36,000 to 35,400). African-Americans are about eight times more likely to be imprisoned than Whites. The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization, released in 1990 that almost one in four Black men in the U.S. between the ages of 20 and 29 were under some degree of control by the criminal justice system. In 1995, the organization announced that the rate had increased to one in three.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
> Black men and women are imprisoned at higher rates compared to all other age groups
According to [1], the rate for white men is far above the rate for black women. So this is probably a lie.
Also since when are black, men and/or women "age groups"?! If you can't tell race and sex from age, how can I trust your statistics?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/252871/imprisonment-rate...
For more data, we can also look at just the Federal Bureau of Prisons [2] and we see that 38.2% of inmates are black while 57.8% of inmates are white despite the fact that only 16.1% of the US population is black while 75.7% of the US population is white.
As far as your comment on age groups, you're just going to have to re-read it until you understand what it's saying.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/252871/imprisonment-rate...
2. https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race....
Womens issues and black issues are completely different, don't just mix them up randomly like this.
Aha, then they're just misreading that sentence then. It obviously means black men and black women as a whole are imprisoned at higher rates.
After reading that, it seems that yes the article may have casually redefined the concept of 'minority groups'.
That said, the Wikipedia entry (in English at least) begins:
>Volksverhetzung, in English "incitement to hatred" (used also in the official English translation of the German Criminal Code),[1][2] "incitement of popular hatred", "incitement of the masses", or "instigation of the people"
I know German-English translations can be tricky, but based on that, and more so the not-so-ancient history that brought the policy about, it would seem we'd be denying practical and historical precedent in claiming:
>The position of all people is equal before the law.
Perhaps the parent comment was specifically referencing modern German/EU law. If that's the case I wouldn't argue, as I believe in the ideal.
However presented as an axiom? It doesn't hold practically or historically.
Volksverhetzung was passed not 30 years after the Nuremberg laws were passed. Here in the US it took a constitutional amendment to recognize women's right to vote; and after that it took additional acts of congress to outlaw discrimination based on race/religion/origin/sex/origin/orientation.
I don't know... but based on Volksverhetzung, the 19th Amendment, and the Civil Rights Act, it would seem it might be a fairer statement to say that, lately, we're collectively trying to use the legal system as a means to ensure equal position of people before it.
This is untrue, people of diminished mental capacity for example are treated quite differently in every legal system I know of. In the US Gender (bathrooms), age (alcohol), religion (religious exceptions), and race (gerrymandering) all have many legal implications.
It's only by lumping those at the very top of society with those at the bottom that this mythical privileges white male strawman exists.
All the anti white male rhetoric and policies does is harm those at the bottom and margins of society, poor white males, for the benefit of those in the middle and top, middle class and upwardly mobile immigrants.
That this is championed and accepted so openly is just naked class hatred from the international middle and upper class in my opinion.
From looking at the maths results I came to a very different conclusion than you did.
> Facebook has been suspending women for “hate speech” against men after posting variations of the phrase “men are scum”.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/05/facebook-...
One person can say exactly the same thing as another and only one of them is banned. So judgement is not applied equally. It is the same issue across all social media.
We never elected them to be our moral arbiters.
Vincent Chin's murderers didn't get any jail time. The woman who falsely accused Emmett Till is still alive and well. It took months of rioting for them to begin convicting people like Chauvin instead of just giving them paid vacations. I don't know the situation in Germany but at least in the US that statement isn't far from the truth.
1. Al Sharpton, from the famous Tawana Vicenia Brawley rape hoax where she accused four white men of raping and other crimes, has a MSNBC contract and is living life.
2. Tony Timpa, rich white male, pleaded for help more than 30 times and died - prosecutors dismissed charges against the officers after they were indicted by a Grand Jury. Then the officers returned back to work last year.
https://heavy.com/news/2019/08/tony-timpa/
This is not a race problem. It's bad people getting hired to become cops and then unions and prosecutors protecting them problem.
That casea didn't even pass the grand jury. Compared to Ronnie Long who got 44 Years when the races were reversed.
> 2. Tony Timpa
"Random events" is a funny way to say a consistent pattern of Whites police killing mostly nonwhites and White murderers and lynch mobs getting away with no consequences. Vincent Chin's death was racially motivated and the all white jury punish to convict his murderers. That is a race problem.
> Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by police than are white men. [0]
[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/28/us/ronnie-long-nc-wrongful-co...
These are also sourced from WaPo - as left leaning as they come. WaPo has logged all fatal police shootings since 2015 in this database:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...
Despite their headline, the data tells you a different story. In 2019 there were a total of 999 killings. 858 shootings in which the race was noted. 405 killed were white, 249 were black. Blacks were significantly more likely to have a deadly weapon than a white suspect. Yet more white suspects were killed. There were ONLY 12 cases where the blacks were unarmed - 11 men and 1 women. 7 of these cases - the suspect attacked the cop with eyewitness or camera footage corroboration confirming it. Out of the rest - 1 was an apparent accident. 2 cases - the cop was charged. The others were ongoing investigation when I researched this last year. So simply saying "X race are more likely to be killed by police" doesn't mean anything when vast majority of them were armed or attacked the cop visible on camera and witnesses. These are hard facts which media, especially CNN, won't tell you.
Here's more.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...
For 2019:
12 unarmed blacks were shot and killed.
26 unarmed whites were shot and killed.
11 unarmed hispanics were shot and killed.
For 2020:
18 unarmed blacks were shot and killed.
26 unarmed whites were shot and killed.
10 unarmed hispanics were shot and killed.
For 2021:
4 unarmed blacks were shot and killed.
6 unarmed whites were shot and killed.
2 unarmed hispanics were shot and killed.
These numbers don't align with the narrative of "innocent blacks are significantly more likely to be killed than white".
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
So despite being 13% population, in 2016 blacks committed 53% of murders, 54% robberies, 43% weapons offences, 38% of all violent crimes. Should the demographic committing 53% of murders not get expected to get shot? Should cops simply not shoot and get shot instead when the other person is armed or attacks them? Should Jacob Blake or Ricardo Munoz have not been shot when both were about to attack the cops with a knife?
This isn't even about racism/bias in the data as shown here that whites are arrested 71.0% for "Drug abuse violations" vs 26.7% for blacks, whites commit more rapes at 67.6% vs 29.1% for blacks:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
If this was about numbers lying because of some bias, why won't they also lie about whites commiting significantly more rapes and drugs? Obviously murder is a much worse crime than rape or drug and therefore more shootings for that demographic.
Also if we look at a diverse city like Philadelphia - residents are 44.1 percent black, 35.8 percent white, 13.6 percent Latino and 7.2 percent Asian.
Hispanics and then black officers are more likely to shoot an unarmed black suspect as compared to a white officer.
Stats for unarmed blacks shot by cops:
https://www.phillypolice.com/assets/directives/cops-w0753-pu...
Page 32
Definition of OIS (Officer involved shooting) is on page 17
Definition of TPFs (threat perception failures) is on page 30
TPF of white officer against black suspect is 6.8
TPF of black officer against black suspect is 11.4
TPF of hispanic officer against black suspect is 16.7
Aka Hispanics and then black officers are more likely to shoot an unarmed black suspect. The claim that white officers are more likely to kill black suspects because of racism is complete nonsense. White cops are the least likely to kill unarmed blacks. (Stats for asian cops isn't available as it's negligible.)
As I have stated before, this is not about race - I am simply stating them because that's usually what talking points care about. We can complain about police brutality all we want but until we fix the root cause of the problem, nothing will change.
Blacks realize this and that's why eighty-one percent (81%) of black Americans and eight-three percent (83%) of Hispanic Americans want either the police presence to remain the same (a majority) or to be increased (opposite of what their often white "liberal saviors" want):
https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...
One more thing - to get rid of bad cops - we should be doing exact opposite of what current policies encourage. Aka we should maybe look at removing police unions which are the reason bad cops stay protected. Same with teachers unions which let bad teachers stay around.
> Blacks were significantly more likely to have a deadly weapon than a white suspect. Yet more white suspects were killed.
More white suspects were killed because there's more than 4 times as many whites. Ang again the data is on all shootings and not just cases of unjustified shootings. The data on whether or not the people they shoot is self reported, and if you watch any of the bodycam footage you can clearly see that many of these "armed" suspects weren't armed at all and had dropped their guns and had their hands up when they were shot[0][1].
Even if you bring up that the predominantly white police also happen to kill white civilians it doesn't change the fact that they're still getting away with murder unless rioting happens. White police getting away with murdering whire civilians is still wrong.
> So despite being 13% population, in 2016 blacks committed 53% of murders, 54% robberies, 43% weapons offences, 38% of all violent crimes.
38% of all violent crimes that were caught. They're caught more because they're more heavily policed. I've worked in security before. 90% of the time if a guy pulls out a knife or gets violent he's white. And this was a city with a relatively low white population too. And no, showing that the data also shows whites committing more crimes in other areas does not mean it isn't biased. You're assuming that the data is biased because of intentional malice when it's sampling error. Whether or not violent crime is caught depends on how heavily a specific community is physically patrolled but crimes like sex assault and drug don't.
Citing self reported "threat perception failures" from the police of one specific city doesn't reliably say anything about who's shooting who. Are black police more likely to shoot unarmed blacks or are they just less likely to lie about the suspect being armed?
> white "liberal saviors"
I'm not white and I'm not a "liberal". Hispanic and Black people wanting more police is completely irrelevant to me. You also cherry-picked your data when in your own source it shows a higher percentage of Hispanic and Black people wanting fewer police than whites.
None of this tangent about police violence will change the fact that Vincent Chin's murderer is alive and was not given any jail time by a white jury. Two white men commited a hate based murder and are walking free to this day.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6BBA5EAqoxo
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. [1]
What would it take for people to be able to engage on topics like this civilly? Every single time something from the so-called culture war comes up, it immediately devolves into shit.
Core point: Terms and Conditions must be balanced against the rights of the user per the "good faith" principle, especially when there is a conflict with the basic right of free speech.
I think the specific way in which the court has tried to enforce this is maybe a bit toothless, but to me the important aspect isn't the judgment itself but what its reasoning implies: that the terms of agreement with Facebook do conflict with freedom of speech meaningfully, at least in Germany, and while the terms do win out, they don't do so unconditionally but have to remain proportional and account for the interests of the user in good faith.
The headline is kind of exaggerating here.
If they cannot manage unmoderated posting without hurting a lot of people, why should they be allowed to run a business based on unmoderated posting?
Would you say it is a catch-22 for a factory if a government ordered them to stop production or stop polluting nearby waterways with their toxic runoff? Perhaps for the factory, but the nearby communities would say it's a clear-cut case.
Your telecom also uses tax money to fund its infrastructure deployments, and it is regulated as more than an ordinary private company.
This is nonsense. They are trying to moderate content and they're being told that it's not permitted. It's qualitatively akin to requiring the New York Times to publish all letters to the editor. Or more specific to the posted article, require that the NYT write a personalized response for each letter that they don't publish and give the letter's author an opportunity to edit it for content.
However. I see people arguing frequently that Facebook is the new de-facto public square. I disagree with this position, but assuming for a moment it's true, this is the thing that shouldn't be allowed. In my mind it is akin to a shopping mall that has grown so large that it has taken over the entire country, and if you're a citizen of the country you have to follow the rules of the shopping mall which include not being allowed to wear T-shirts with political slogans (or worse, only certain political slogans). If I lived in that shopping mall nation, I wouldn't be dithering about what t-shirts were allowed or disallowed; I'd be arguing for the destruction of the entire shopping mall.
The published terms of service were invalid because they unreasonably disadvantage the users of the network contrary to the requirements of good faith.
The more accurate answer is: because the state holds the monopoly of violence and will use it against you if you don't follow its laws. Resistance will result in punishment.
The reason courts have the power to make you do as they say is that if you don't, eventually armed people will come to your home and incarcerate you. Short of an armed insurrection there's really no way to avoid this unless you're Jeff Bezos (and even then you won't get away with everything but the consequences will likely be less unpleasant).
"publish" being the key word.
If you are publishing on your own website, then you are held responsible for your own content.
But big tech claims to be platforms while acting as publishers. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc hide behind the disguise of "algorithms" to push content they like and throttle content they don't like. The "trending" or "for you" or "promoted" etc are all decisions made by the platforms. It's well known that the "trending" videos on YouTube or posts on Twitter are not actually organic.
When they use "algorithms", they are equivalent to publishing. Similar to how newspapers can't just publish everything. They make editorial decisions on what to publish and what not to. The "algorithms" are the editorial decisions. That makes them a publisher.
Right now, even when big tech allows something libelous to spread on their platform, lets it trend, refuse to take it down and when they get sued, they claim they are immune because they are just a platform. That's not a "platform". They acted as publishers when their fake trending algorithms let it trend.
> Hm we live in structured societies in which laws are used to restrict individual liberties to protect collective ones. It's not that hard to grasp
Sure, there may be restrictions on certain things you can put on a website generally (illegal content), but I think the GP's question is about this specific case. No laws were broken, and the website is not a government venue. It is a business, which also has rights/liberties regarding what they choose to allow. For instance, if I goto a a subreddit and start talking about something completely off topic and it gets removed and I'm banned, who cares? That should be allowed.
> Because you live in a society
This might be a relevant response if you take the GP's question in the most general way possible, but applying it to this specific case it is not really adequate.
> Why do courts have the power to tell me who I must serve in my restaurant?
I don't think this really applies to the situation here. It's more like if you went into a restaurant and started acting rude (but not doing anything technically illegal) and the restaurant decided to throw you out, which is totally fine and normal to do. Also, at a restaurant you are a paying customer doing 'business' (trading money for food), whereas at Facebook it's more like you are the product. You aren't really trying to make a business transaction with Facebook.