Digital Berlin wall: How the German prototype for online censorship went global
justitia-int.org
justitia-int.org
Just for reference, Germany has the same high HFI index as United States: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...
Try to defended those instead.
(Yes, no fine is levied if the content is not taken down, and turns out to not be illegal. What sane company will take such a risk?)
That is wrong. Merely, NetzDG imposes an obligation on specific social network providers to establish an "effective and transparent process" to deal with complaints about unlawful content. Without prescribing a specific process in itself, it specifies certain functional requirements. Among them, this process has to ensure that "blatantly illegal content" is being removed within 24 hours, unless the social network provider has agreed on a longer timespan with the law enforcement agency.
Any fines the NetzDG stipulates do only refer to failures to meet requirements of process design. In no case there are fines for social media providers in the case of wrongfully consider a piece of content lawful in a specific case.
It seems to me that this whole discussion is fundamentally unable to consider these legal nuances. Also, blaming NetzDG for actions of authoritarian governments is just plain silly.
I had a look once at the form in one of Meta services to report hate speech: it does require some effort to fill the form and it does require the issue to be reported to police. If you don’t want to report the case to authorities, the platform will not take down the content. I do not see how this could result in a real censorship in a state with the rule of law.
https://www.techdirt.com/2018/01/12/second-time-week-german-...
https://www.dw.com/en/facebook-slammed-for-censoring-german-...
Fortunately for the defenders of that law, the notoriously opaque censorship of social media companies helps hide what is going on, so few examples surface. I could not find anything as convenient as a list of (wrongfully or not) censored content by this law. Often the censored party is not even told that the NetzDG was involved.
Silence on this issue should not be confused with a lack of problems, however. For example, in Germany:
“it can be a criminal offense in Germany to call another person a ‘jerk,’ or even to use the informal du, or ‘thou,’” to communicate a lack of respect for the recipient. German courts have penalized other similar “derogatory epithets,” including “asshole,” “bastard,” “old goat, “fathead,” “dope,” and “whore.” [..] German courts heard 26,757 criminal insult cases that year, leading to 21,454 convictions and 20,390 fines. - https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/germanys-netzdg-and...
To me this looks like a severe overreach of speech restrictions, even if one doesn't idealize the US 1st amendment, and accepts the need for some government censorship. Yet I've only learned about it just now, from a very obscure post.
Unlabeled satire posted context-free to Twitter where it gets interpreted at true and repeated, is a different complicated problem (and why Twitter is a fundementally terrible design).
But you still have a point in so far as that you can't look at a law ignoring the legal conventions and processes of the environment where "the code is run", something that would be perfectly fine in one environment could be terrible in another.
In German constitution it is Article 5 and it is explicitly limited, considering the importance of the balance. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/German_Federa...
You're talking about laws, but free speech isn't about laws, it's a notion of moral philosophy.
The sense in which it is foundational is as follows: you cannot have democracy without freedom of speech, because without it there is no free formation of opinions. You can't freedom of association or freedom of assembly without freedom of speech. These latter are interconnected, because an aspect of freedom of assembly is to assemble to hold, for example, political meetings.
I don't know but laws that allow someone to be locked up indefinitely without conviction don't sound like freedom to me.
You might be ok with <your candidate> making speech restrictions.. but are you ok with a hardline opposition candidate doing the same?
2. Governments change
Even a government that starts using a power - say restricting access to bank accounts - for something good like stopping actual terrorism or money laundering can decide to start using it against political movements they don't care for.
3. Governments grow
Governments only grow in power. They get bigger. They use more powers. Even some of the hardcore censor states started with more narrow objectives. China started with objectives to stop false information and external propaganda - now they use that power to suppress victims talking about sexual assault by party members.
Fundamentally I do not trust any government to have that power. It will always be abused, and we must always resist it. Australia is an excellent example of a liberal democracy using safetyism to quickly run towards authoritarianism.
Yes, people can say things that mean. People can say things that are wrong and misleading - and you may even believe them. Everyone has the ability to protect themselves from others speech - stop listening to them. This works even for very small children.
The freedom of speech brings with it the ability to ask for a redress of wrongs. It is how people can talk about alternative candidates. It is the most vital of freedoms because it is the foundation of the others.
Yes, only those are dictators or wannabe dictators... In Democracy they are free to speak, also against Democracy, after they grab power no one are free anymore...
> today USA is deciding to violate right of property for Russian oligarchs because rights of Ukrainian citizen are violated.
Really? Did you look for something more tangible than mass-consumption Bernaysian propaganda? Start with this old governmental (EU) report: https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf go to the USA think tanks side like https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html and https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/R... and also far in the past https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/AERODYNAMIC%20%20%20VOL... who is actually violating what?
> Right for free movement was restricted during Covid pandemic
Witch is another scandal, actually one per WHO pandemic declaration... Again I suggest some official governmental sources one from the last pandemic for instance: https://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/20100126_Stateme...
Yes, Democratic Civil Rights are regularly violated and they are because that's mean profit for some until the people remember that in Democracy they rule and arise. Only they tend to remember that way too late, when arising it's not just a legal action or a protest but a civil war and they are so easy to influence that's they tend to be quickly steered/diverted.
That's the real issue: how can we have Democracies when we do not have Citizens but only subjects/people? How in the history Democracy happen?
Disagreement with that means you're a threat to democracy, period.
What makes it a democracy is that all members of society participate in that conversation. Freely.
Anything less is mere tyranny.
But if we need a way to manage spam, lies and the other poisonous forms of conversation, then empower the individual to handle that. Because we do not trust you.
I guess the keyword there is „that“, right? Freedom of speech should not be restricted if it helps to support the democracy, but OTHER conversations are different matter. As I said, freedom of speech is not absolute and is checked by other freedoms and rights.
Should we assume that there is an invisible man between us, transforming our words? That seems really bad to me.
Are bot accounts paid for by an external part (e.g. foreign government agency or multinational company), which 24/7 post inflammatory (not illegal) and bad-faith augments (not illegal) in a conversation part of that society?
I think you should rethink your criteria.
Except, the Australian law has limits on the applicability of the amendment for research purposes, journalism, good faith, and matters of public interest.
But it does fall into similar traps. Its not possible to know whether the violent content was published by someone other than the perpetrator, i.e. a victim, public bystander, or journalist. The social media company doesn't even need to know the content exists for them to be liable as intermediary (which is an interesting contrast to the safe-harbour provisions of the DMCA).
It is a particularly broad amendment which will probably just result in the wholesale banning of anything approaching violent media. I can see why such a thing might hinder free expression and the press within Australia.
(At the same time, if it were to prevent footage the Christchurch mass shooting from being shared, I can see the upside.)
This just sounds like the author was easily fooled by Erdogan's narrative. The nazis cited british laws to justify their genocide and I'm sure that Putin tells his people that every other nation has opressing laws similar to Russia.
Remember kids, don't believe a single word said by dictators and autocrats.
It seems that we've strongly overgeneralized any fake news to be anything that is antithetical to the idea du jour, whether there is any merit to the idea or not.
This harms society in 2 ways:
1. It could be that the idea du jour, or parts of it are wrong, maybe not the central idea, but maybe its ramifications, or edge cases.
2. People having been indoctrinated differently, with a different set of inputs, will naturally come to a different set of conclusions. Their conclusions might be wrong, but ostracizing folks and kicking them off of public discourse is guaranteed to make them hold fast to their wrong conclusions. Engagement and open discussions seem like the only way to get to the root of their (possibly) misguided ideas.
This will also lead to deep cynicism when when it comes to fact checkers and whether or not a particular narrative is "true."
Other platforms are much better for for long form communication and open discussion, e.g. Reddit, Zulip, etc.
> “Once democracies cede the high ground and renege on their commitment to free speech by privatizing and outsourcing regulation, authoritarians will rush in creating a regulatory race to the bottom.
There are a lot of problems with the NetzDG, the small timeframe, the huge fines, which could incentivize platforms to be overcautious etc.
What this article doesn't mention, however, is that this law only forces platforms to delete content which is already illegal by German law. It just makes it easier to enforce the law.
In that situation, platforms will - and do - just block by default.
We have independent courts for a reason. Privatizing legal decisions in international corporation hands is not a good idea.
Maybe, forcing platforms to hide the content for some period of time and establishing a new court which only handles these cases, so a quick judgement can be made. But it's a really hard problem to solve.
Especially with a state which has deliberately unclear and flexible (in the sense of 'rubber', not 'agile') laws, this is too big a risk. For example, right now it appears to be illegal to use the letter Z as a symbol in Germany, because some people think that this somehow glorifies/justifies the illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, which is illegal in itself. (No such provision seem to exist against glorifying/justifying the illegal wars of aggressions which "NATO partners" have staged).
So, if we think we need to ban free speech, the strictest controls need to be set up to prevent abuse, and that includes:
1. after a report, a judge ordering a post to be taken down (this could be done by an "Einstweilige Verfügung" until a final verdict can be made)
2. clear guidelines which speech is illegal enough to justify this strong response, defined in a way that does not allow for a slow and secret extension over time. Beware of rubber vocabularies like 'Hate Speech', which can be anything. While we are at it, get rid of 'illegal speech' laws that only make speech illegal when a sufficiently large number (how many?) of other people (that may then decide to become violent) may find offensive (looking at you, blasphemy)
3. Sensible instruments to punish people and/or organisations who abuse this process.
4. These blocking cases need to be publicly documented to avoid "things just disappearing".
Anything less than that, and we really cannot claim to be any better than the many autocratic regimes who ignore human rights.
Child pornography, calls to violence etc. I think anybody agrees that, to some degree, things have to be banned.
> (No such provision seem to exist against glorifying/justifying the illegal wars of aggressions which "NATO partners" have staged).
The main reason no such provision exists is that there simply is no widespread movement to glorify, for example the Iraq war.
> the strictest controls need to be set up to prevent abuse
Absolutely. I just hope some solution can be found, which actually works, because you can only through so many judges against bots, foreign actors etc.
Still, bringing up CP often is unhealthy for a discussion. Too often it is the way of the political scoundrel, the wannabe-strongman, to throw the "think of the children" card (and then abuse the powers grabbed with that argument against unrelated activities).
> The main reason no such provision exists is that there simply is no widespread movement to glorify, for example the Iraq war.
There has been actual attempts to prosecute the Schröder government for preparation of and participation in a war of aggression (against Serbia), which was then cancelled out because "t'was a righteous war". Note how the law does not distinguish between 'righteous' and 'criminal' wars of aggression.
> Absolutely. I just hope some solution can be found, which actually works, because you can only through so many judges against bots, foreign actors etc.
We are not that far away from each other. We just disagree who the real danger, the real enemy is: bots and foreign actors (by the way: Freedom of speech also protects their freedom of speech, even the watered-down "freedom of opinion" of the Grundgesetz is not limited to 'Germans only'), or a - in the future potentially tyrannic - federal government. Given our history, I tend to see the danger at home, not abroad.
Might also have something to do with the fact that German troops were and are still in Iraq no?
this presents a choice as to what to belive:
- that they are so incompetent that they do not know what they're doing.
- they are perfectly aware of what they're doing and the journalists are trying to be extremely diplomatic about how they call them out on it. as if they journalist are apologizing for this attack on individual freedoms.
The author probably exaggerated the total risk to people living under authoritarian regimes. I think his inspiration from the article can be seen in this statement:
"Erdogan’s Turkey – one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists – is citing NetzDG as inspiration for its new draconian law on “The Regulation of Publications made in the Internet Environment”
I removed his conclusion. I will give you mine: NetzDG is a bad law and a poor model for lawmakers to follow.
It has not solved any problem ( "ICYMI: New Report on Germany's NetzDG Online Hate Speech Law Shows No Threat of Over-Blocking". Counter Extremism Project. Retrieved 11 January 2022. Echikson, William; Knodt, Olivia (2018). Germany's NetzDG: A key test for combatting online hate (PDF). Centre for European Policy Studies)
And it is chilling for free speech which I consider the greatest of public goods.
Edit, don't want to give a judgement for this specific law just saying the article did not convinced me, gives me a feel of bad reddit,HH comment.
I would like to remind everyone that during the Nuremberg trials, leading Nazis cited then-current US policy as an inspiration for both their eugenics and race separation laws.
Bad actors will use your bad laws to justify their greatest atrocities. And your bad laws will look horrific once the storm has passed. Thus be careful what you consider 'good policy'.
Considering the impact lawmakers have, I am all for considerable punishments (as in: several years of jail time) for everyone who voted yes on a law that was later struck down by the respective country's Supreme Court equivalent.
It's a bit unfortunate and almost as if he has never read about the constant barrage of pro-smoking propaganda, or anti-climate change propaganda, or anti-rohingya propaganda in Myanmar ended. Propaganda succeeds because of the resources being poured into it. He also seems to not accept the slow and continued polarization these efforts of propaganda have on society which in turn hurt democracy and therefore threaten free speech even more in the long run.
Absolutist free-for-all no-holds-barred free speech could work fine where everyone can speak with their own voice without being drowned in a cacophony of a thousand bot accounts repeating arguments made in bad faith meant to poison the discourse.
1) We eventually found out the truth. Nobody guarantees that the wins will be fast.
2) You have to be kidding yourself if you think that the suppressed speech wouldn't be that of the people saying "Smoking is dangerous." The tobacco companies can and did hire experts, manufacture the results they wanted, and so forth. They, the establishment, the moneyed, would be deemed "correct" and all else disinformation. Look at these guys in white lab coats! They sure do look smart, meanwhile that other side looks like a bunch of cranks.
You pay for someone to fake some scientific paper - you pay , you Photoshop some images to mislead people you pay proportional with the damage caused plus some 10% of your wealth, you present yourself with fake identity or credentials you pay...
Companies continue to produce this fake ads, fake press releases, fake stats because they are never forced to pay a big fine.
And you have to consider the "chain of presenting false information." Is Facebook gonna take the hit? "No, we were just doing what we were told. It isn't like we replicate scientific studies ourselves." How about Cindy, who sent the press release about the study to Facebook? Step back, Desmond wrote the press release that Cindy sent, are you going to get him, too?
Just trying to legislate this calculus of culpability is going to be filled with loopholes.
Say Bob is an idiot, he publishes a video with a flawed experiment where he proves the Earth is flat. There are no damages and Bob really believes Earth is flat so a judge will not find this idiot guilty.
Other case, Bill is is greedy bastard, he wants to sell some pills that make penises grow, Bill uses Phtotoshop to make a false medical diploma, Bill also creates fake studies to show his pills contain some magic shit, Bill also has some partners that know this is bullshit (and there is evidence in emails on how they plan to sucker people). IMO this is a clear case where an ad, or FB post, or blog post that uses fake studies, fake credentials, fake documents intentionally to cause others harm is something a judge can act on and no free speech should allow intentional fake advertising/promotion . But say Jimmy is an idiot and he also shared this because he is stupid, he will not be found guilty.
Say a political group also uses Photoshop, or fakes documents or uses a third party and asks them to create this fake evidence then they should also pay.
So my point is that not FB or YT does the police, but if we have laws and make the guilty pay then there should be less intentional publishing of fake shit. We are still left with idiots that believe false shit and the foreign actorsm paid trolls, maybe you can think on ways to catch this paid foreign trolls.
What FB and YT can do is to update theyr algorithm to not amplify this garbage, your free speech right is not giving you the right to be amplified and promoted, you have the right to share to your friends the latest conspiracy but Fb has the right not to push it to others with their shit algorithm.
On top of it, you would need some kind of centralized registry, overseen by humans, of what is real and what is fake, for legal purposes. Once that Ministry of Truth exists, how do you get your MKUltra knowledge out? Remember, that was a nutty conspiracy theory for decades. The Ministry of Truth just crushes it because they are part of the government, and poof, you never find out.
So we don't censor the papers, we force them to be even more transparent and make sure guilty people get punished, including maybe the individuals behind big companies( put Elon in prison if he signed of on some shity statistic that misleads people that his cars are 10x safer)
Yes. Narrowly. After decades of suffering and deaths, which I personally suffer from today. And we were helped by putting legal limits on the lies presented by bad-faith participants.
They can freely talk all they want, but it might have been a mistake to give them all frictionless broadcasting licenses. In those conditions, it seems like crowdsourced viral misinformation is quite competitive in the marketplace of ideas, perhaps even to the point of winning fair and square.
That anyone who even basically believes in the importance of free speech and individual freedom should jump on the same bandwagon of paranoia about members of the public holding and promoting ideas that aren't always "correct" or literally correct and calling this a threat to freedom is absurd. This is a complete turning of cause and effect upon its head. No, the danger is explicitly much more so in the idea that some supposedly proper consensus of ideas should be enforced so that nobody does something silly, like voting for the "wrong" candidate, or viewing certain medical mandates in the "incorrect" way.
At least you're being honest about what that freedom can actually mean in practice, rather than telling some fairy tale about the marketplace of ideas or something.
> Before, this privilege was only in the hands of the same major media giants that now rail about the supposed epidemic in misinformation of the type that they had no problem themselves creating however it suited their purposes or political alignments previously.
Even if there's truth to that, it has a big, big advantage: it maintains some consensus around something.
> No, the danger is explicitly much more so in the idea that some supposedly proper consensus of ideas should be enforced so that nobody does something silly, like voting for the "wrong" candidate, or viewing certain medical mandates in the "incorrect" way.
That's an over-the-top straw man. I don't think anyone serious wants something like that, certainly not me.
Yes, freedom of expression taken seriously does indeed mean that people, regular oridnary people in all their varieties then have the freedom to peacefully express ideas which might sometimes be abysmally stupid, ignorant or even malevolent. As long as they can't extend these ideas into coercive force against others, this should be fine. The fairytale idea is that by "fighting misinformation" large gatekeepers can somehow forcibly rid the world of bad ideas or make it a better place. These same gatekeepers of media are themselves some of the biggest misinformation culprits out there, and have been for a very long time.
That's also a fairy tale.
> The fairytale idea is that by "fighting misinformation" large gatekeepers can somehow forcibly rid the world of bad ideas or make it a better place.
I don't think anyone thinks they can actually "forcibly rid the world of bad ideas," the best case is that they don't spread as quickly or as widely.
> These same gatekeepers of media are themselves some of the biggest misinformation culprits out there, and have been for a very long time.
And QAnon/Pizzagate, "Stop the Steal," and Ivermectin are the answer? The only truth there is a view into the id, otherwise it's only as correct as stopped clock.
Enjoy the crack-up and decline, I guess?
Also, no, it's not a fairytale. Words and expressions of ideas are one thing, coercion and physical violence are another. It's very possible to generally legally stop people from the latter while respecting their right to the former. It's done all the time if imperfectly and the much more obvious danger for bad social traits is a system in which ideas are repressed coercively under the excuse that expressing bad ideas might somehow limit individual freedom.
>And QAnon/Pizzagate, "Stop the Steal," and Ivermectin are the answer?
What an absurd way to twist narrative. These ideas obviously aren't the answer. A system that lets people compete against their expression with their own freely expressed better founded ideas is the answer. Media-induced and politically convenient hysteria aside, it has worked well for a long time in some of the freest societies in human history, right to today. The repressions on supposedly socially damaging ideas we had before that were far more pernicious to thinking and action than any number of QAnon followers or pizzagate believers today. Where do you see the decline you mention? And decline from what? Compared to what previous superior state of social expression rules?
If you want gatekeepers against these ideas then who? The government, which regularly takes mendacity to extremes no private organization can match for level of harm? Or possibly major media outlets should be responsible for "slowing misinformation spread"? You know, media organizations like those that have happily sold multiple major policy lies during decades of their existence and which have cheered on wars, military campaigns and vested narratives time and time again.
Isn't it obvious? I carefully referred to a very specific thing when I joined this thread. You seem to be very eager to force a tired kind of binary free speech vs. totalitarian censorship discussion that I believe you've consistently misread me.
The point is maybe the hoi polloi can't manage that in this environment, regardless of tools.
> We do not desire your kindly administration.
Administration happens when people aren't solving problems on their own. So if you don't desire administration, solve the problem without it. Don't do stuff like declaring it a non-issue or hiding behind some principle, because that doesn't actually work. The former is obviously unserious, and the latter just weakens and eventually destroys the principle.
Not just controlling the hegemonic narrative through media, etc.
But also the founder of SciHub is stalked by the fedz for liberating science, etc.
IP is censorship.
If I truly owned a computer, it would be my right to execute any pattern of bits that doesn't actively create a connection to the outside and cause chaos to other people's property, even if it goes against the wishes of the original person who defined that pattern of bits.
Likewise, if I built a factory with parts I have purchased, I could produce any widget I had the plans to, even if it happens to function similarly to plans specified in some public library of patents.
IP rights exist as a result of state force; copyright and patents can't really exist without it. They are fundamentally reliant upon the state using its force to censure those who use intellectual property without authorization. And yes, before someone states as much: digitally enforced proof of ownership is just an automated, digital state.
But capitalism doesn't require intellectual property to operate, and so I wouldn't call censorship a crucial foundation of capitalism.
The US patent office was created in 1832, the UK's, in 1850s, and the modern form of patent laws appeared in 1880s.
Copyright goes all the way to 1660s, but until relatively recently, the terms of copyright were much shorter, and extent, narrower.
No, nothing to do with capitalism, but elitism, that happens in capitalism communism and even tribalism.
>fedz for liberating science
Again no, liberating the free (as in free beer) access to papers. If you want to liberate science you need to pay the scientist for what they want to study (and not you)
X Is a crucial foundation to Y is a transitive relationship.
And Communism, but it's not the foundation....that is totally wrong.
But the core of the argument seems to be this
> vaguely defined categories of hate speech and fake news by placing responsibility on the social media platforms for user content. (this) creates big incentives for social media companies to over-regulate online speech and risk pushing extremists towards platforms that are even harder to survey.
If you take the liability out of the platform, you're pushing for deanonimization of content (which should be worrying as well)
When we talk about "free speech" we think mostly about our least-liked politician talking crap but there's a whole layer of stalking/threats/gaslighting (to most underserved users) that needs to be taken care of
If you have been unfairly targeted, you can counter-notify, but that requires doxing yourself. There's also a subpoena process to explicitly request the unmasking of anonymous users[1]. YouTube is chock full of DMCA extortion scams that specifically target smaller channels and demand payment to avoid getting one's channel deleted. Those scams work precisely because Google has an active and ongoing[2] policy of summarily executing rule breakers without explanation or recourse.
Laws like DMCA 512 and NetzDG only have these kinds of censorious effects[3] specifically because social media is itself a kind of scam. Regular publishers actually spend money to fund the creation of creative works that they expect to make a profit off of; platforms create a container and incentives for other people to fill it with amorphous "content". Publishers take on the risk of publication, including defamation and copyright liability; while platforms are set up specifically to shift that liability onto people who cannot bear that burden. The end result is that most people on social media choose to self-censor; even if they have no intention to defame, misinform, hate upon someone, or infringe a copyright.
[0] We are assuming for the sake of example that the targeted content is novel speech and not infringing. America does not consider copyright infringement to be speech.
[1] The Darkspilver / Jehovah's Witness case is a prime example of how to abuse a DMCA 512 subpoena request; we're lucky the courts came to their senses and decided not to unmask them.
[2] As far as I can tell, since the company's founding
[3] For the purpose of discussion I'm not going to argue whether or not hate speech or misinformation should be censored, we're just going to assume that it should.