European content removal laws are scrubbing the internet of legal content | Hacker News Reader

European content removal laws are scrubbing the internet of legal content

techdirt.com

46 pointsrntn32 comments

The linked PDF source does not back up the article or title. Page 19-20, Who deleted the comment – Deletion or Moderation?:

> It is essential to emphasize that identifying the actor responsible for deleting a comment is not feasible. [...] Therefore, this report treats the three reasons for comment disappearance as a single phenomenon.

Or in other words, it counts all removals, and we know that moderation always removes based on more criteria than just legality, regardless of what those laws are.

> Of the deleted comments examined across platforms and countries, between 87.5% and 99.7%, depending on the sample, were legally permissible.

Even of the content that’s not “legally permissible,” it’s worth questioning what exactly is not permitted. It was mere months ago that the EU threatened YouTube for hosting “incitement to violence or propaganda for terrorist organizations”—a lot of which was actual real footage of massacres that is valuable and should not be suppressed in a free society, yet keeps getting taken down from platform after platform due to pressure from regulators. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37884292

This is a common practice in cultures that don’t believe in free speech according to the American standard. For example, videos of the Christchurch mosque shootings were banned by the New Zealand Chief Censor (yes, that’s a real title—https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/news/news-items/res...). Sharing the video can get you arrested. https://gizmodo.com/18-year-old-arrested-in-new-zealand-for-...

Surely it’s distasteful to keep these sordid videos available to and viewable by the general public, but when the government prohibits citizens from forming their opinions from stark video of real events, it drastically empowers inflammatory rhetoric on social media—more legally permissible according to their standards—to influence people’s opinions instead. That leaves society as a whole worse off.

On the topic of such videos, I do feel like more people need to view these things. Not casually, or as entertainment, but to get a glimpse of what these events are actually like. I watched the Christchurch shooting, and seeing the callousness of it all... I don't know, it changes you.

I agree. I've seen a lot, but that Christchurch video was a very hard watch.

But in a way I'm happy I did see it, just to know what some people are capable of.

I feel that I'd be quicker to react if I was ever unlucky enough to be in such a situation because of it. My brain wouldn't be in shock and trying to work out if it was real or not for so long.

The problem is that people understand things differently. What is a valuable lesson for you, can be an inspiration for others. This is actually quite well researched so you can't just keep such violent materials accessible to all and not know you are helping some radicalise.

Why not store such things in archives accessible to researchers with a articulated and plausible research questions?

Can you link to that research?

I would believe that this research is as sound as research for violence in movies or games.

This is different, these were events in real life. But the "studies" are certainly not conclusive. It is the "stochastic terrorism" argument, which is trivial and very likely wrong.

And it can serve as a (bad) argument to remove any and all content. There is not place for it in democracies.

The obligation on content platforms is not to allow any legally permissible message to be posted. It is to prevent any legally impermissible message from being posted.

Moreover, as a business, just because something’s theoretically legal, if it exposes you to a nonzero risk of being prosecuted - even if you are pretty sure you will prevail - you’re well within your rights to elect not to be the vehicle through which that bit of caselaw gets made.

The claim that 90% or so of these deleted messages were ‘legally permitted’ seems to rest on a somewhat untestable hypothesis that if these platforms had left this content up, it would not have resulted in legal consequences, or if it had, the hosting platforms and posters would have been exonerated.

Whether or not to make those gambles with facebook’s shareholders’ money is really facebook’s business.

If the government is passing laws that strongly incentivize censoring speech they don't like, then the government is engaging in unjust censorship, even if "officially" the speech in question remains legal. And it's our business as citizens when our governments act in a tyrannical manner.

You've just described a mechanism for the chilling effect, and why laws like this are to be avoided in free societies. The article is basically saying the same thing, the problem isn't the behaviors of the companies, it is the "unintended" yet totally forseeable consequence of these laws. The incentives set up by these laws lead to injustice for people.

I think reasonable people can disagree about whether having your message fail to be amplified by a corporate algorithmic megaphone is an ‘injustice’.

If you believe that free people have a right to speak their opinions, which I do, any government action that hinders that is as a matter of fact an injustice.

All this language about "amplification" and "platforming" is a way to get people to forget that I think.

European content removal laws don't apply outside of Europe which means they don't apply to the internet, only a 'version' of the internet.

If you live in a country that doesn't let you access the 'true' internet, you don't live in a free country.

If you live in a country that doesn’t protect you. It’s not a country, it’s just a government sized HOA.

Censorship is rarely protection.

I am not protected by content removals, on the contrary, I become a prisoner of a fake information channel.

I guarantee you that if I started filling every HackerNews thread with My Little Pony memes, every “Free Speech Absolutist” would manage to grasp the point that sometimes you want to remove legal content.

But this is missing the issue entirely. Your spammy posts would be removed because nobody here wants to see them if they even could after the deluge of downvotes. What is happening in Europe is that people are posting things that users do want to see, but the government doesn't want people to see it.

Given that 99% of the removed comments were legal, it doesn't seem like it's the governments that are restricting what people are seeing.

Something doesn't have to be "officially" illegal for laws to suppress it. If the law gives no penalty for a false-positive block, but very high penalties for any false-negative failure to censor, then companies will be incentivized to err on the side of censoring legal speech.

I don't disagree about the risk of chilling effects, but the methodology of this report is so embarrassingly, deceptively bad that I don't think any conclusion can be drawn from it. They basically snapshot a comment section, then return repeatedly, and enumerate the comments that disappeared. Without any insight into who (ie the platform, the poster, or the channel/page owner) removed the comment and why, this is like performing a legal analysis of the leaves that disappeared from lawns in autumn.

It has the same quality of any research or report that suggest there to be negative effects if people do see such content.

And if in doubt, content removal should be done defensively.

Yes, that's the primary complaint of the article, but the actual report just doesn't back that up. There's no mention of false positives or negatives. Probably because, as the report notes, it doesn't know who removed the comment, let alone what the rationale was. So it could be that they are attempting to comply with broad and vague laws, or they could just be against hosting MLP memes.

This isn't the argument of "free speech absolutists" at all. I gladly take up that derogative term for that matter.

If the comments were removed due to being presumably being illegal (rather than due to company determining they simply don't want that kind of speech, e.g. spam) wouldn't it be prudent for the platforms to report all instances to the local police after removing the comment? If the police determines to not continue with the investigation then the speech must be legal and thus could be restored and they can adjust their moderation accordingly.

This analysis found that legal online speech made up most of the removed content from posts on Facebook and YouTube in France, Germany, and Sweden.

Of the deleted comments examined across platforms and countries, between 87.5% and 99.7%, depending on the sample, were legally permissible.

I assume this means “legally permissible in said country”?

The article or the report don't give a single example of what they think was wrongly removed when it was just "general expression of opinion".

So I'm quite critical of this kind of platform enforced censorship, but I'm not really convinced on this case that it's not just a different interpretation of what free speech means and what hate speech is between US Americans and Europeans, as is common in these discussions.

Just to note some speech that has been considered illegal in Europe:

- calling Muhammad a pedophile - convicted of blasphemy (JFC!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.S._v._Austria_(2018)

- posting the government's own crime statistics - convicted of inciting hate https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/afd-politicia...

- a video of a dog doing a Hitler salute - hate crime https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925

So if that's illegal you can imagine how tame the legal content that was removed is. There is no freedom of speech in Europe.

Why are you so worried about freedom of speech when you haven’t even separated state and religion?

Also, Freedom of speech doesn’t mean acceptance of hate. Im glad that content and people who encourage racism are removed.

> Also, Freedom of speech doesn’t mean acceptance of hate.

Yes it does. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

You are the ones that have blasphemy laws, so I find it hilarious that you are complaining that we haven't separated church and state.

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