I would honestly love that. No more paid trolls on social media, the democratic process has a chance to adapt to technology, we can avoid the fate of the US.
Chickens are neither mammals nor worms, what are you talking about.
This is no longer just rhetoric. Meanwhile, the EU’s polite, tea-drinking cousin, the UK has quietly deployed a “social media surveillance unit.” Not to fight trolls or bots, of course - but to ensure His Majesty’s Subjects think correctly in public. Doubleplusgood, wouldn’t you say? [1]
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-socia...
Politicians who simultaneously increase immigration and stir up hatred against immigrants will inevitably cause a tragedy.
So they try the same tactics as they know from home, asserting their rights, conflating separate issues, slippery sloping etc. And they freak out when it doesn’t work.
It is sufficient to 'cause distress' - against whom, or in what form, or what qualifies as 'distress' is deliberately kept vague to maximise persecution rates. Some cases saw a squad car with six Bobbies take the very average, middle-class parents of a teenage daughter to the precinct to question them on why their daughter has had strong opinions on the way her school's new head was chosen [1]. While - as so often - no-one was later sent to a court for sentencing, the chilling effects are there, and I'd say half a platoon of police officers descending on someone's front lawn is definitely "getting in trouble with the law".
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/police-s...
Money quote:
> More often than not, the police record these episodes as “non-crime hate incidents”, with over 13,200 recorded last year. What’s so extraordinary about the police’s zealous pursuit of these non-criminals is that the rate at which they’re catching actual criminals is falling. Fewer than seven in 100 crimes now lead to a charge or summons, down from 17 in 100 in 2015. In the year to September 2023, the total number of burglaries left unsolved stood at 213,814, a rise of 4 per cent on the previous year.
So ... police gets their numbers up persecuting people for wrong thought while they avoid having to deal with actual, real criminals which might fight back violently. And Whitehall is clapping to it.
Then there is the case of David Wootton - who is currently fighting against a verdict that declared him having a tasteless halloween costume in a social media post (dressing up as the Manhattan Area bomber, with an arab headscarf, an 'I love Ariana Grande' t-shirt, and a backpack that read 'boom') to be a count of 'hate crime'. He faces up to two years in prison over that. Deeply tasteless? Sure. A 'hate crime' worth of spending two years in prison over? Seriously?
Let's move away from the UK - to Germany, an actual EU state. Which reintroduced a lèse-majesté law that makes it more prosecutable - and carries harder sentencing - if you post something against a politician that they do not like. That law is used most happily especially by the Green Party, but they all are complicit. It led to early-morning Special Forces raids against the former flat of someone who called a politician '1 dick', and standard raid against someone who called a former minister of economics 'a doofus' in what could easily be understood as satirical use of a common brand name. Sometimes, quoting them with wrong interpunctation is reason for a raid, and sometimes just quoting them is enough. And the state prosecutors? Laugh on American TV about how they know they never get most of the cases through a proper court case, but 'the raid in itself is the punishment already' [2].
And, fun fact: Courts have decided that even stating the truth about a politician can qualify as a prosecutable insult ("Schmähkritik") if it is 'sufficient to negatively impact their future political work'. So better thing twice, and have an exit plan before you point out that Patrick O. Litican is a compulsive liar, with a list of deliberate lies told by Patrick in the past, and casting shadow over a bold claim he has just used to shoehorn another policy in.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc
These aren't aberrations. They're stress-tests of the system’s tolerance for dissent. And it’s failing - gloriously, publicly, and with a press release. Europe is on a dark, dark trajectory, and it needs to be monitored very closely when they keep increasing policing powers.
Why are not the "journalists" in Europe investigating this? Je!
I mean, the Kremlin doesn't have such a wide area of influence over all the European borders; they only have influence over part of those borders, in a typical mob-like way (their way, their mob oligarchy). They could not be doing all what is happening alone without help from within Europe. It's all about public money and some politicians pockets within their respective countries - it is an inside job... , cut that money to those NGOs and related, process those corrupts, and see what will happen.
The problem is the instrument in itself, and the message it sends - not the officially intended use.
That’s not what’s happening, and not the kind of speech suppression that people are worried about.
Seems to me like you’re quibbling, because you can’t defend your claim by showing a single example.
Come on brother let’s not give up before doing anything.
If you didn't come up with a way to have paid trolls in such a system doesn't mean that there won't be any.
People already sell access to their Google accounts so buyers can run not-that-legal ad campaigns. Creating one extra step won't do much to solve problems as long as the incentive is big enough and budget is sufficient.
You present it as a possibility when it isn’t one as long as we can avoid autocracy which the existing trolls are working towards.
After the German occupation in 1940, the Nazis accessed and exploited the Dutch population registry, including religious affiliation.
About 75–80% of the ~140,000 Jews in the Netherlands were killed.
This is the highest percentage in Western Europe.
Compare that to France, which had a more fragmented administrative system, and less complete central records and 25% of Jews in France were deported and killed — a much lower percentage than the Netherlands.
As usual, when reaching the Godwin point, the idea is not for you to take it at face value, but to extrapolate to your situation.
The concentration of power and centralized people tracking are eventually always abused, and once your system becomes less free (which has historically eventually happened on a long enough timescale), you will pay the price for it.
In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse.
The more you concentrate power and feed data about people, the greater the potential damage.
And of course, it doesn't need to be a full-on dictatorship to get problems with those.
It's a spectrum of increasing problems you will get, the more you lean into it.
Sorry, but why would the Dutch government need to know all those details in the first place? Did Dutch citizens never ask that question back then? Nazis or no Nazis, that was an issue waiting to happen. I guess it wouldn't have mattered if they did, since the Netherlands was a kingdom and people didn't have much say into how the monarchy ran things.
Maybe the Dutch citizens did ask these questions you think they did not ask, but the Government won.
And the current legal setup mean you would have to own a google account, a terrible private life setup.
So that is why the government needed to know how many Catholics or Jews there were.
Well, not really. Age verification doesn't have to, and IMO should not, lead to a linked identity. Just a blind check "are you a real human older than X years old? Yes! OK". That way you get the benefits of age restrictions and real human validation, without any of the potential privacy ramifications.
But to be clear, most real people's online presence is under their own names (or linked trivially to their own names, like a cutesy turn on their name for an instagram handle that is linked to their Facebook account which has their full name). It's already possible, and done, to track your public social media presence and interactions. Places like HN and even Reddit are much more niche than that.
It should not.
That's not required though. Your friends have already given your name to them by allowing the app access to their contacts.
Not to detract from the rest of your message, but it wasn't centralized; the data was collected and stored in each municipality separately. The only part that is centralized is the historical archive: after death, each person's info card is moved to the National Archives.
This system has never been centralized, even after digitization: birth records are still kept only in the town of birth, and when moving house your active records must be officially requested and the transfer manually authorized between municipal systems.
And this is only the beginning. It will be more and more difficult to speak against the actions of your government the more unpopular the politicians become and the more people hate the results of their policies. And instead of changing course and following the wishes of the voters, politicians instead will clamp down on free speech.
Is Le Pen governing in France and I'm not aware of? Because I've never seen Macron do that.
And people are the ones blaming open borders, then some parties choose to capitalize on that (even if they ultimately do nothing), while some other parties choose to suppress that viewpoint as being right wing propaganda and that in reality there are no issue with open borders, that all the crime is imaginary, which is why they push for online censorship and anti-encryption laws, to make sure only their viewpoint becomes the only legally allowed one.
To start with, there is no such thing as open borders (unless you mean Schengen?).
Second, saying someone is spouting nonsense isn't "suppression". Especially when the "suppressed" viewpoint is being proudly repeated almost daily on TV, radio and online on media sponsored by billionaires investing heavily into passing this message (like Bolloré).
Third, Le Pen isn't governing in France, but her party (reminder, she was banned from standing for office for corruption and stealing public money to enrich herself and her family, so it's no longer her), which has around 1/3 of the votes is crucial in maintaining the current ruling government. Without their support, the government has ~1/3 and fails a vote of no confidence immediately (the other 1/3 hates them both and would happily bring it all down in the hopes of new elections). So they are de facto exercising a lot of control.
You're moving the goalposts to hate speech. When saying uncomfortable negative facts about government's actions are considered "hate speech" then you're no longer living in a free country. You must realize that.
The whole hate speech can of worms is such a dangerous slippery slope since the government can just sweep all criticism of itself and its actions as "hate speech" whenever it feels like it, and just ban it, problem solved, no more criticism, all citizens are happy, just like in USSR.
"Hate speech" is too broad of an umbrella to ensure it will never be used in bad faith because it 100% will be and it is. Whichever political party will come to power next will 100% gonna weaponize the existing speech censorship rules implemented by previous regimes, in its own favor to further entrench their own power. History proves this yet people are oblivious an think the solution is even more speech censorship.
It's the classic subversion and propaganda stages of denial, the deeper you dive:
Stage 1: It's not happening, you're just imagining it
Stage 2: OK, it's happening but only a little bit no need to exaggerate
Stage 3: OK it's happening a lot but here's why it's a good thing that it's happeningIn the UK that happened when a woman phrased her criticism of open border policies as a call for migrant hotels to be burned down.
This was controversial as many who wanted closed border policies (like Nigel Farage and supporters) thought that rallying crys to re-enact some kind of version of kristallnacht should count as protected political speech.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bradford/6135060....
Now it would be naive to assume the political establishment only stopped at one cover up and there's not more under the rug that haven't been yet uncovered.
Just like with the post office workers scandal, you realize the political establishment doesn't exist to protect you the taxpayer, it only exists to protect itself from the accountability of its citizens and will go to great length in censorship, suppression and legal battles to defend itself, since there's nothing for them to loose if they loose, as none of them are ever going to jail for their mistakes, but if they win, then their image stays clean and can stay in power for longer.
I see, he was really helping his case here, sounds like a cultured and educated gentleman.
Could you give any examples of this happening? I assume you aren't referring to the one who called for migrant hotels to be burned down with brown people inside in the middle of race riots?
Things like calling politicians idiots, giving the middle finger to someone, and insinuating government policy is ineffective.
https://thedispatch.com/article/europe-germany-britain-free-...
Until then, it’s made up.
Not to mention that it’s irrelevant to the the original point about hate speech and migration but whatever, you managed to change the goalposts now defend the new ones :)
I can't find any backing for their assertion that people have gone to jail for obscene gestures toward government entities in either Germany or the UK, but obviously we have already slipped a long way down that particular slope. Apathy doesn't seem like the smart option. It's hard to put it any better than you did yourself: "Here the wolf is clearly visible."
1: https://driving.ca/auto-news/entertainment/middle-finger-to-...
2: https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/driver-gives...
Yes but not the politicians but the police. Yes but not hate speech but criticism of policy. Yes but not criticism of policy but the middle finger. Yes but not to jail but a fine. Yes but…
Meanwhile in the US flipping the man off costs 175000 dollars: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna159185
It’s hilarious.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-pros...
https://extremism.gwu.edu/fighting-hate-speech-germany
https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/06/german-fined-e6000-for-vio...
https://www.dw.com/en/german-man-receives-fine-after-insulti...
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/german-woman-fined-faceboo...
All of these are cases of targeting groups of people or individuals.
I guess some people just can’t grasp that distinction?
Freedom for me is the ability to live a good life, and be happy, not harass people.
You know like the Nazis and the Jews.
>>public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence toward a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation (= the fact of being gay, etc.)
So hating on someone publicly for being an immigrant is hate speech but criticizing policy isn’t.
By this logic we are no longer allowed to reform banking no matter how flawed it is, even if the flaws of the banking system give rise to actual antisemitism due to unaddressed economic dysfunction. Dysfunction that the banking critics point out and which they claim has more to do with how those institutions are structured and what policies they have enacted than the people inhabiting or benefiting from them.
Dumber yet. There are even more extreme offshoots of communism where simply criticizing capitalism without being a communist means you are a fascist or nazi. It's pretty clear to me that those communists believe they have a monopoly on criticizing capitalism and if you gave them enough power, they'd enforce that monopoly on everyone.
Even dumber. The moment their communist utopia fails, they will start looking for "capitalist" scapegoats rather than fix their institutions according to the non-communist criticism and commit exactly the crimes they projected onto you, which you never had the intention of ever doing, because you actually are somewhat of a pacifist and genuinely believe that your policies and institutions are inclusive to all and work without the need for scapegoats or enforcement through violence.
Don't dare say anything with the remotest chance of being controversial or that could have a hint of upsetting someone, don't even think about expressing an opinion that someone might not agree with.
The problem in your ideal digital world isn't that the bad abuse the freedom they have now, it's that the bad will also abuse the lack of freedom everyone else will have then, and suddenly everyone with no ill intent is on the wrong side of the enforcement.
The comment you just replied to would probably find itself on the receiving end of it because of the wording and tone.
With that exact sentence, you could be labeled a racist because I know the code you're using. What YOU really mean is that New Zealanders are better than South Asians.
See the problem?
That makes no sense...at all.
Proudly made up by Anonymous aka 4chan ;)
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764728163/the-ok-hand-gesture...
We have laws that have been carefully written and refined to counteract that.
Simplified: Hate speech = attacking or demeaning a group for who they are (e.g. race, religion, gender).
Right now in Europe there are people arguing that it's fundamental to the nature of Islam that adherents hate anyone who is not Islamic. They can cite Quran saying some pretty horrendous stuff about non-believers, that they need to be killed in a holy war and things like that. Is it within the bounds of society to decide that being Islamic is ipso facto a hate crime?
Define "freedom". Freedom to or freedom from?
See Timothy Snyder's recent book On Freedom:
> Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
* https://timothysnyder.org/on-freedom
Snyder is an historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, who previously wrote an award-wining book on that area during the 1930/40s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands
Some other recent books of his: