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UK threatens to tax Facebook and Google if they dont do more to combat extremism
- blitmap 9y agoFor what definition of extremism? Anyone who encrypts?
- arkona 9y agoWe're talking about the UK, so probably "hate speech" aka wrongthink
- hardlianotion 9y agoI think they are concerned by lack of effective moderation, and by the inability of these companies to know their customer
- crdoconnor 9y agoKnowing Theresa May it's probably a lot to do with Facebook's refusal to hand over WhatsApp end-to-end encrypted chat logs. She hates encryption.
- blitmap 9y agoAt the scale of Google and Facebook, I'm not sure it's possible to individually "know" their customer.
- gaius 9y agoIt’s possible for retail banks with tens of millions of customers to KYC, I’m sure it’s not an insurmountable problem
- jstanley 9y agoIt's surely possible, but would it be a good thing? When I first starting posting things online, the general advice was "don't use your real name", "don't say anything that will reveal where you live", etc. Now we're not only using our real names but advocating for identity verification of all commenters? How did this go so wrong so fast?
- tcd 9y agoFacebook made the transition plausible; a formal social network, then slowly, the creep began, where it's now acceptable to use your real name online. I still heed the advice of the 90's: NEVER use your real name. We still have that choice thankfully.
- LV-426 9y ago> I still heed the advice of the 90's: NEVER use your real name. Where was this advice given? In my experience, people online in the 1990s routinely used their real names, and emails (in the late 90s obfuscated or removed due to spam), on the primary social-network at that time (Usenet), and people still do to this day.
- mindslight 9y agoI can't not respond to "KYC" being thrown around as if it's a legitimate concept. It's a whitewash term for fascist [0] surveillance. [0] The literal merging of the state and corporations to achieve a level of totalitarianism that would be hard for either to achieve on its own.
- duality 9y agoIf they did, people may not like that very much either.
- juicyfroot 9y agoAnd yet more money gets laundered toward terrorism by the banks themselves than just individuals. See HSBC. When 7B was laundered toward terrorist orgs, the US justice system did not do anything, despite finding them guilty. The reasoning was that it would shake confidence in banks. This has nothing to do with combating extremism or terrorism, for there have been numerous counts of the governments having the opportunity to shutdown a large portion of global terror and instead decided it would be bad to prevent it due to political and economic reasons. This is about governments and banks preparing for the inevitable collapse that is coming due to loose fiscal policy, inflating the currency to fund unjust wars. Western nations have become Marxist/Communist with "equality rights talk" for all and at the sametime importing millions of Muslim immigrants wholesale (who 80%+ vote Democrat)
- blitmap 9y agoI wanted to offer another reply: I think it's dangerous to engineer for moderating against terrorism/extremism. Surely there are things Google and Facebook could do but if it were me I would not want to. There are automated ways to look for extremism, but to do it ~well~ it would certainly require a human to rule out false-positives. At that point Facebook and Google become an extension of law enforcement, and if something is not caught it then becomes a liability to have involvement in the first place. No sane person wants to see anyone get hurt, but is the gov paying for assistance from Facebook/Google? They can't just put engineering hours toward something for the Greater Good (tm). Lets create a task force within Google to assist law enforcement for the 200+ countries "fighting extremism". The gov wants what it wants without considering the harm to civil liberties of its citizens or what risk it might be exposing corporations to. It all feels like manipulation.
- ben_w 9y agoI think this is probably the right approach, but only by accident given how poor the UK government understanding of all things digital. Westminster is, after all, being quite unreasonable in expecting foreign companies to serve as competent police forces for what is basically chit-chat rather than traditional publishing, and for a user-base roughly 30 times the UK’s entire population.
- Veen 9y agoThey aren't "foreign companies"; they're multi-national entities doing business in the UK. If, in the course of doing business here, they generate costs for the nation, they should be expected to help out. There's no reason the UK taxpayer should foot the bill for negative externalities generated by the business practices of multi-national entities. They can either invest in whatever it takes to solve the problem themselves, or they can be taxed so that state can take care of it for them.
- averagewall 9y agoWould anyone else honestly blame tech companies for generating the costs of deradicalizing UK people? Doesn't the blame lie more on the people themselves or the ones radicalizing them? The UK is free to block access to parts of the internet if it thinks is people aren't fit to safely access it.
- ben_w 9y ago> The UK is free to block access to parts of the internet if it thinks is people aren't fit to safely access it. Really? Wasn’t that the kind of thing us tech geeks have spent the last 20 years arguing against?
- LV-426 9y ago> foreign companies Companies that operate in the UK and make vast amounts of money from operating in the UK.
- midgetjones 9y agoIt would be nice if they were paying tax in the first place
- jimnotgym 9y agoI came here to say the same thing. If they want to enjoy the benefits of operating in a securely governed nation with mature infrastructure then they can damn well chip in to help pay for it
- devmunchies 9y ago"Operating in"? They are just online websites accessible by anyone with internet. If they have paying customers in Europe then it'd make sense to pay taxes on just that revenue. But saying that a company has to pay taxes just because it gets traffic is a little extreme.
- pimmen 9y agoI would say that they're "operating in the UK" when UK companies buy ad space from Facebook and Google which they later distribute to consumers in the UK. They do have offices in the UK and it's not like they're just playing ping pong there.
- jimmywanger 9y agoWould you also be operating in the UK if you supplied parts/goods to a UK based retailer that sold your goods in the UK?
- pimmen 9y agoYep, if I had an office and employees in the UK hooking me up with these retailers. Facebook and Google do have offices in the UK selling ad spaces and even some developers in the UK. What's your definition of "operating in"?
- paulus_magnus2 9y agoSo all this time being "unable to" tax giants was a lie.
- Zaheer 9y agoRelevant article: https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments/ https://theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-says-it-is-dele... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16035721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16035721 It's quite alarming how central a role Facebook plays in global affairs and how it's shaping current events.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoCensorship is only part of the picture. Facebook has assumed the role of Kingmaker, at Global Scale: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down?utm_source=google&utm_medium=bd&utm_campaign=HP&cmpId=GP.HP https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-th...
- cloverich 9y agoRelated: "Project Jigsaw" from Google. [1]: https://jigsaw.google.com/ https://jigsaw.google.com/
- emiliobumachar 9y agoGoogle and Facebook are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the position of judge and jury of what is our isn't acceptable speech. That's over years and by several different governments. There's tremendous power in that position. I wonder if we'll rationalize after the fact that these corporations always seeked this power.
- llukas 9y agoThis is power that each newspaper wields everyday for tens of years. Same for TV and radio. Why being on internet automatically makes you not responsible for what you distribute again?
- ghaff 9y agoIt's different in that newspapers create the content that they publish themselves. So far, we've collectively been able to dance around the fact that different countries have different laws/attitudes/etc. over what sort of things are acceptable to publish. (And those countries that are far out of the mainstream are mostly small enough that they're not that important commercially.) But there are differences between the US and various European countries that probably can't be swept under the rug forever.
- pimmen 9y agoGo back 30 years, when your voice in print media was either starting your own newspaper or writing a letter to the editor and the comparison holds. Edit: I meant your way to communicate in the newspaper
- ben_w 9y agoWas it that? Or was it talking loudly in public places until you gathered a crowd, which probably automatically brought you to the attention of the police?
- yakitori 9y ago> It's different in that newspapers create the content that they publish themselves. This isn't true. A significant portion of newspaper content is derived from the wire services ( AP, Reuters, etc ). And of course the advertisements or "reviews-as-advertisements".
- grwthckrmstr 9y agoWhat I'm scratching my head over is... Why aren't they being TAXED already?
- SimonPStevens 9y agoSo is this effectively "combat extremism for us and we'll give you a free pass on all that tax you've been dodging". I'd rather they just paid the tax.
- ryanlol 9y agoDue to the nature of the tax dodging, it's not quite that.
- noarchy 9y agoIt seems like what the UK government is saying is: A. Either we outsource security-related tasks onto you, as companies (which I think has huge ramifications), or: B. We shake you down as a penalty (arguments about whether the tax should be paid already notwithstanding). The consequences of A, alone, are worth an entire discussion. It means compromising everyone's security to some extent, and having these companies as active participants in the security state (or perhaps, more than they already are...).
- featherverse 9y agoSo the United Kingdom thinks they can force free nations to follow their particular brand of tyranny? How can the UK levy a tax against American businesses that exist entirely on the internet?
- jimmywanger 9y agoFTA: "Ben Wallace, the UK's security minister, described tech companies as "ruthless profiteers" who were doing too little to help the government combat terrorists who often take advantage of their platforms." The most interesting thing are the lines ruthless profiteers and take advantage of their platforms. The British government subsidizes health care, public transit and municipal water. Also, they deliberately shape traffic to create hot spots of pedestrian concentration and increase tax revenue. Are they doing anything about terrorists using those platforms?
- Veen 9y ago> Are they doing anything about terrorists using those platforms? Yes, via several other publicly funded services: the police, the judiciary, and the prison service.
- jimmywanger 9y agoThose are rehabilitative services, and not preventive services. Huge qualitative difference.
- MollyR 9y agoI'd rather people not reward tax dodging, and enforce people paying their fair share. Combating extremism and taxes shouldn't be combined like this, It's morally repugnant.
- averagewall 9y agoStop radicalization by limiting free speech and spying on everyone's communications? That's similar to what America did with McCarthyism. Communism is arguably more deadly and harmful than Islamic extremism but we accept it as a tolerable non-thought-crime today. Why can't people accept Islamic extremism in the same way? What happened to the idea of freedom of political thought?
- Veen 9y ago> spying on everyone's communications Facebook and Google already do that — it's part of their business model. What makes you think it's better when unnacountable corporations do it than when accountable governments do it? The UK is not America. There is no absolute guarantee of free speech here. Inciting and glorifying terrorism is illegal. No one cares about thought crimes. They care about innocent people being mown down by lorries and children being blown up at pop concerts. You can argue that forcing social media to police itself won't be effective at reducing terrorism and the spread of islamic extremism, but if it is effective, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
- juicyfroot 9y agoIn other news the UK is threatening car makers with higher taxes if they don't stop bank robberies and quit profiteering off crime. I think this is called extortion.
- chrismcb 9y agoThis article didn't say what an "extremist" is... In general, they can go jump in a lake. It shouldn't be up to Facebook and Google to combat "extremists". I realize that the UK didn't have free speech. But I believe it is the cornerstone of civilisation.