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This comment vastly understates the effects of this law. Social Media companies are scared af to be fined by the German government, so the filters are so strong

This comment vastly understates the effects of this law. Social Media companies are scared af to be fined by the German government, so the filters are so strong, that it targets the wrong people. A couple of comedians and satire magazines have been hit, left leaning people as well as right leaning people alike. In general, I don't think it's a good idea for the government to decide what I can post on social media or not. There are already laws against defamation and "volksverhetzung" (sry I don't no the translation, basically it means I can't say "kill all the jews/muslims, they are filthy swines"), so keep the internet free from more regulation on speech. The internet is one of the last places where people have some sort of freedom of opinion/listening to different opinions, and our lawmakers make it more and more unfree.

hh3k0 9y ago
> There are already laws against defamation and "volksverhetzung" Exactly. There was no need for this new internet censorship law at all, for they could've just started applying existing hate speech laws. Instead they introduced this new shady law, which essentially turns social network companies into a part of the judicial branch. The situation now is exactly as you have described it -- the companies fear the German fines and act overzealously. Perhaps an outsourced, overzealous judicial branch is exactly what the German government wanted? As they're free of the restraints that bind the official judicial branch.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  How big are the fines? When companies left and right write off fines as business expenses, what makes those different?
  - Tomte 9y ago
    Up to 50 million Euros for repeated offenses.
- yorwba 9y ago
  > There was no need for this new internet censorship law at all, for they could've just started applying existing hate speech laws. The new law (NetzDG, roughly "network enforcement act" [1]) was intended to facilitate applying existing laws against illegal content, by mandating that every site with > 2 million users needs to have a clear procedure for reporting illegal content. Unfortunately, there are only fines for failing to delete obviously illegal content and none for just deleting everything that is reported and not obviously legal. The law makes provisions for handing over tricky cases to an external agency, but expected the companies to jointly set it up themselves ("regulated self-regulation"), which they didn't do; likely because the people checking reports at such an agency are legally mandated to be competent. [1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/netzdg/BJNR335210017.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/netzdg/BJNR335210017.html
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    But there always was a very clear procedure for reporting illegal content: You visit your local police station and tell them.
    - hwh 9y ago
      This is for prosecution. The removal of such speech is a civil suit. Facebook/Twitter might have taken a post more serious when the police came and asked questions, but then, they might not. And prosecution might not what a victim was after, as this involved being part of a legal case where your stance is weaker than that of the claimed perpetrator (as it is a penal case then).
    - Tomte 9y ago
      And that never went anywhere, because Facebook disobeyed even court orders. They never replied to judges. They never took down posts a court had ordered them to. The NetzDG is bad law, and will probably be repealed before the Constitution Court rules it unconstitutional. But it was a reaction to social networks disobeying the law. An overreaction, yes, but a reaction. I wish it were more commonly known in libertarian and net freedom circles that the pendulum swings both ways. After excesses in one direction it will swing far into the other direction. Maybe keep that in mind when pursuing extreme goals at any cost, instead of find8ng a middle way that works for everyone. I think the NetzDG is crap and won‘t stay for long. But I also think that Facebook and Twitter deserve all this pain.
CaptainZapp 9y ago
It's my understanding that you can thank Facebook for that law. Unless it hits their bottom line (or shows naked female breasts) it was nearly impossible to get a post deleted, even if it was clearly illegal. While it's unfortunate that such a relatively crude law was implemented it's at the end a reaction to the general, ultralibertarian "we don't give a fuck, unless it really hurts" attitude coming out of Silicon Valley. Uber is an even worse example of that attitude.
- adventured 9y ago
  No, it's the fault of the German authorities and the German culture. They've been pushing toward increased speech controls online since the Web became popular. The point is to better match their speech restrictions offline. The imbalance between the two was guaranteed to end. This didn't just start with the popularization of Facebook the last ten years.
  - skrause 9y ago
    > No, it's the fault of the German authorities and the German culture. They've been pushing toward increased speech controls online since the Web became popular. Source? Because as a German I strongly disagree with that statement.
    - falsprofet 9y ago
      For one anecdote, webmasters are held liable for comments hosted on their discussion platforms, if there's no moderation.
  - hwh 9y ago
    Unless you give more facts, I'd say you are mostly repeating the argument the post you answered to, albeit from another viewpoint. Of course there is the notion that the law is applied to offline and online talk in the same way. The most important distinction in german law is whether the talk is made in public. And Facebook (and to a degree Twitter) surely brought the possibility to a lot of people to make their talk public who hadn't as easy access to an audience before. And surely, Facebook and Twitter did not give proper access to remedies for victims before. What they had was a broad, intransparent workflow that did not match the german law. Civil suits against them regarding such issues are, due to the nature of such suits against huge foreign corporations, mostly inaccessible if you are not equipped with enough funds to go to court for a few rounds. This is not to say that the law is fine. Its intentions, however, arguably are. To oppose this viewpoint, you would have to defend a world where hate speech and libel go (erratically, but mostly) without defense for the victims. From a very libertarian viewpoint, that may be an acceptable sacrifice, though.
sdrothrock 9y ago
> basically it means I can't say "kill all the jews/muslims, they are filthy swines" Do you know how strict those laws are? I mean, you just said that, albeit in a quotation, so I imagine that at least is out of the scope of the law? Or would it be something that got you in trouble if someone reported it?
- adrianN 9y ago
  The problem with the law is that it leaves the decision to whatever website's moderators.
  - usrusr 9y ago
    GP was talking about the old, established laws, which were enough to sanction the worst cases of hate speech and which were surprisingly safe from overreach and unintended consequences. Those old ones would rather leave a case unforced than throw out the baby with the bathwater. What you seem to be taking about is the new one, which breaks many things in the hopeless attempt to maximise enforcement of the original laws. This is a recurring theme in lawmaking: everything has a certain maximum level of reasonable enforceability, and when laws are written to increase enforcement beyond that limit they universally turn out bad.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- yorwba 9y ago
  The law is this one: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1246 http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg... No, quoting an example of Volksverhetzung is not illegal, if you're not actually attempting to incite hatred.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  No, only if it's a danger to "public peace", and that is actually taken pretty seriously. Citing it as an example is no problem at all, you can even say something like that in first person if it is satire or provocative art. Unless you make it clear that you actually want people to seriously think that jews/muslims are subhuman and should be killed, chances are very slim that you would be convicted for that.
hwh 9y ago
A notion in the more calmed legal discussion (as opposed to lobby talk from the freedom movements, which I usually support but feel to be very narrow-sighted at the moment w/ regard to this law - see what is now carried into the comments here) is that this effect might be mitigated by a counterweight law - or rather addendum - that mitigates overreaction by the corporations. This is german legal culture: our law system is first, foremost and mostly codified. And regulation is used more heavily than in the US law system. Note that the stated goal of the law is most probably the exact point: making access to effective defense of your rights possible to anyone. The reality consisted of slow law enforcement (which has to act against people who made the speech in question, often anonymous or denying having done it), inaccessible data of the other party (for civil suits) and an intransparent mechanism that did not follow the german legal system on behalf of the corporations.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > Note that the stated goal of the law is most probably the exact point: making access to effective defense of your rights possible to anyone. Which is completely and utterly fails at in the obvious way, in that your right to free speech is limited by a strong incentive for corporations to silence you if in doubt? > The reality consisted of slow law enforcement (which has to act against people who made the speech in question, often anonymous or denying having done it) And the solution to insufficient law enforcement is to have some private corporation do the job instead? I don't think that many people disagree that there was a problem, but the solution is terrible and creates lots of problems itself.
  - hwh 9y ago
    It mostly mirrors classic consumer protection law. It's a civil law issue and regulation in such issues is always a try to remedy imbalances of power. As law enforcement goes, there is no public office assigned to deal in behalf of a party in civil law cases. There's the courts, which are slow and arguably understaffed and with a much higher bar to access them in the first place. And regulation. Regulation does not always get it right and I'm not arguing that it did here. My point is that there was a problem and regulation tried to solve it. I don't see that bad effects were intended, which is the point I was trying to make. I think that the legal discussion in Germany mostly prefers an addendum to, not a revokation of the law in question.
rqs 9y ago
I suggest people who believe censorship can stop hate speech take a little tour on China's social medias. We had very strong censorship systems built by the government, but does it stopped hate speeches? No. In fact, if you make people can only post & receives filtered info, then you are actually pushing them to an echo chamber. And an echo chamber is a very nice place for people to fermenting hate speeches (I'm not saying it will, but it could). So in my opinion, hate speech is bad, but censorship is worse. The problem must be solved in a different way, without introduce censorship.
- CalRobert 9y ago
  It is possible that the censors in China are more accepting of hate speech than, say, political dissidence.
blablabla123 9y ago
Yeah, obviously the law is not well designed and at least in some aspects redundant. I mean there was this popular Heise case (the German publisher) where it was clearly stated that Heise is responsible if people do violations against the Hate Speech law. On the other hand the law got there because sites like Facebook - and yes also Heise - do a questionable job at handling racist content. And there are tools beyond filters, e.g. user ratings, real names on social platforms etc etc I mean even Facebook themselves are stating that even Fakenews (which is not necessarily racist or so) poses a problem to our society. I mean...HN has such a simple solution for this, the rating button, why is Facebook not able to come up with something comparable? And yes... the article above states that such posts correlate with physical violence. The state kind of pulled the emergency brake. > "kill all .. they are ..."), ... The internet is one of the last places > where people have some sort of freedom of opinion/listening to > different opinions This is not an opinion. This is a request or a command. Sorry, writing this ethically a complete no go.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  > I mean...HN has such a simple solution for this, the rating button Simple indeed. This rating system must why it is so rare to see objectionable content on social media like Reddit.
  - blablabla123 9y ago
    I mean common instrumentation available is: yes rating button, real name, mandatory picture, verified picture, verified identity, friends feature, high visibility of friend feeds, public-only communication, admins... Social web services of any sort implement some combination of these. Reddit implements only a rating button as far as I know. (Sorry not a regular user, but I bet it has one or two other mechanism to prevent people from posting complete trash regularly.) Actually before Facebook become popular, almost all social media platforms were practically anonymous. In the middle of the 90s this worked IMHO quite well because only few people had access anyway. So you could see that Forums, chats etc became trashier. Facebook came up with real identity profiles (real name, picture etc etc), so the quality of content and contacts got exceptionally high for social media. I guess another leap in this direction might become necessary. Not sure what this would be, but if we don't want state to babysit our social networks, the site operators better come up with innovations in that area.
elgenie 9y ago
"Volksverhetzung" is a compound word with two roots: "Volks" (the people) + "Verhetzung" (manipulation) and the official translation of the criminal code is "Incitement to hatred" [1], rather than the "instigation of the people/masses" that a naive translation would imply. [1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1241 http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg...
- falsprofet 9y ago
  Which is a rather rough translation, as its missing the relation to Volk. Which is tricky to translate, but nevertheless detailed in the law and officially translated: "... hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins, against ...".

hh3k0 9y ago

> There are already laws against defamation and "volksverhetzung" Exactly. There was no need for this new internet censorship law at all, for they could've just started applying existing hate speech laws. Instead they introduced this new shady law, which essentially turns social network companies into a part of the judicial branch. The situation now is exactly as you have described it -- the companies fear the German fines and act overzealously. Perhaps an outsourced, overzealous judicial branch is exactly what the German government wanted? As they're free of the restraints that bind the official judicial branch.

scrollaway 9y ago
How big are the fines? When companies left and right write off fines as business expenses, what makes those different?
- Tomte 9y ago
  Up to 50 million Euros for repeated offenses.
yorwba 9y ago
> There was no need for this new internet censorship law at all, for they could've just started applying existing hate speech laws. The new law (NetzDG, roughly "network enforcement act" [1]) was intended to facilitate applying existing laws against illegal content, by mandating that every site with > 2 million users needs to have a clear procedure for reporting illegal content. Unfortunately, there are only fines for failing to delete obviously illegal content and none for just deleting everything that is reported and not obviously legal. The law makes provisions for handing over tricky cases to an external agency, but expected the companies to jointly set it up themselves ("regulated self-regulation"), which they didn't do; likely because the people checking reports at such an agency are legally mandated to be competent. [1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/netzdg/BJNR335210017.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/netzdg/BJNR335210017.html
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  But there always was a very clear procedure for reporting illegal content: You visit your local police station and tell them.
  - hwh 9y ago
    This is for prosecution. The removal of such speech is a civil suit. Facebook/Twitter might have taken a post more serious when the police came and asked questions, but then, they might not. And prosecution might not what a victim was after, as this involved being part of a legal case where your stance is weaker than that of the claimed perpetrator (as it is a penal case then).
  - Tomte 9y ago
    And that never went anywhere, because Facebook disobeyed even court orders. They never replied to judges. They never took down posts a court had ordered them to. The NetzDG is bad law, and will probably be repealed before the Constitution Court rules it unconstitutional. But it was a reaction to social networks disobeying the law. An overreaction, yes, but a reaction. I wish it were more commonly known in libertarian and net freedom circles that the pendulum swings both ways. After excesses in one direction it will swing far into the other direction. Maybe keep that in mind when pursuing extreme goals at any cost, instead of find8ng a middle way that works for everyone. I think the NetzDG is crap and won‘t stay for long. But I also think that Facebook and Twitter deserve all this pain.

CaptainZapp 9y ago

It's my understanding that you can thank Facebook for that law. Unless it hits their bottom line (or shows naked female breasts) it was nearly impossible to get a post deleted, even if it was clearly illegal. While it's unfortunate that such a relatively crude law was implemented it's at the end a reaction to the general, ultralibertarian "we don't give a fuck, unless it really hurts" attitude coming out of Silicon Valley. Uber is an even worse example of that attitude.

adventured 9y ago
No, it's the fault of the German authorities and the German culture. They've been pushing toward increased speech controls online since the Web became popular. The point is to better match their speech restrictions offline. The imbalance between the two was guaranteed to end. This didn't just start with the popularization of Facebook the last ten years.
- skrause 9y ago
  > No, it's the fault of the German authorities and the German culture. They've been pushing toward increased speech controls online since the Web became popular. Source? Because as a German I strongly disagree with that statement.
  - falsprofet 9y ago
    For one anecdote, webmasters are held liable for comments hosted on their discussion platforms, if there's no moderation.
- hwh 9y ago
  Unless you give more facts, I'd say you are mostly repeating the argument the post you answered to, albeit from another viewpoint. Of course there is the notion that the law is applied to offline and online talk in the same way. The most important distinction in german law is whether the talk is made in public. And Facebook (and to a degree Twitter) surely brought the possibility to a lot of people to make their talk public who hadn't as easy access to an audience before. And surely, Facebook and Twitter did not give proper access to remedies for victims before. What they had was a broad, intransparent workflow that did not match the german law. Civil suits against them regarding such issues are, due to the nature of such suits against huge foreign corporations, mostly inaccessible if you are not equipped with enough funds to go to court for a few rounds. This is not to say that the law is fine. Its intentions, however, arguably are. To oppose this viewpoint, you would have to defend a world where hate speech and libel go (erratically, but mostly) without defense for the victims. From a very libertarian viewpoint, that may be an acceptable sacrifice, though.

sdrothrock 9y ago

> basically it means I can't say "kill all the jews/muslims, they are filthy swines" Do you know how strict those laws are? I mean, you just said that, albeit in a quotation, so I imagine that at least is out of the scope of the law? Or would it be something that got you in trouble if someone reported it?

adrianN 9y ago
The problem with the law is that it leaves the decision to whatever website's moderators.
- usrusr 9y ago
  GP was talking about the old, established laws, which were enough to sanction the worst cases of hate speech and which were surprisingly safe from overreach and unintended consequences. Those old ones would rather leave a case unforced than throw out the baby with the bathwater. What you seem to be taking about is the new one, which breaks many things in the hopeless attempt to maximise enforcement of the original laws. This is a recurring theme in lawmaking: everything has a certain maximum level of reasonable enforceability, and when laws are written to increase enforcement beyond that limit they universally turn out bad.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yorwba 9y ago
The law is this one: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1246 http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg... No, quoting an example of Volksverhetzung is not illegal, if you're not actually attempting to incite hatred.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
No, only if it's a danger to "public peace", and that is actually taken pretty seriously. Citing it as an example is no problem at all, you can even say something like that in first person if it is satire or provocative art. Unless you make it clear that you actually want people to seriously think that jews/muslims are subhuman and should be killed, chances are very slim that you would be convicted for that.

hwh 9y ago

A notion in the more calmed legal discussion (as opposed to lobby talk from the freedom movements, which I usually support but feel to be very narrow-sighted at the moment w/ regard to this law - see what is now carried into the comments here) is that this effect might be mitigated by a counterweight law - or rather addendum - that mitigates overreaction by the corporations. This is german legal culture: our law system is first, foremost and mostly codified. And regulation is used more heavily than in the US law system. Note that the stated goal of the law is most probably the exact point: making access to effective defense of your rights possible to anyone. The reality consisted of slow law enforcement (which has to act against people who made the speech in question, often anonymous or denying having done it), inaccessible data of the other party (for civil suits) and an intransparent mechanism that did not follow the german legal system on behalf of the corporations.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> Note that the stated goal of the law is most probably the exact point: making access to effective defense of your rights possible to anyone. Which is completely and utterly fails at in the obvious way, in that your right to free speech is limited by a strong incentive for corporations to silence you if in doubt? > The reality consisted of slow law enforcement (which has to act against people who made the speech in question, often anonymous or denying having done it) And the solution to insufficient law enforcement is to have some private corporation do the job instead? I don't think that many people disagree that there was a problem, but the solution is terrible and creates lots of problems itself.
- hwh 9y ago
  It mostly mirrors classic consumer protection law. It's a civil law issue and regulation in such issues is always a try to remedy imbalances of power. As law enforcement goes, there is no public office assigned to deal in behalf of a party in civil law cases. There's the courts, which are slow and arguably understaffed and with a much higher bar to access them in the first place. And regulation. Regulation does not always get it right and I'm not arguing that it did here. My point is that there was a problem and regulation tried to solve it. I don't see that bad effects were intended, which is the point I was trying to make. I think that the legal discussion in Germany mostly prefers an addendum to, not a revokation of the law in question.

rqs 9y ago

I suggest people who believe censorship can stop hate speech take a little tour on China's social medias. We had very strong censorship systems built by the government, but does it stopped hate speeches? No. In fact, if you make people can only post & receives filtered info, then you are actually pushing them to an echo chamber. And an echo chamber is a very nice place for people to fermenting hate speeches (I'm not saying it will, but it could). So in my opinion, hate speech is bad, but censorship is worse. The problem must be solved in a different way, without introduce censorship.

CalRobert 9y ago
It is possible that the censors in China are more accepting of hate speech than, say, political dissidence.

blablabla123 9y ago

Yeah, obviously the law is not well designed and at least in some aspects redundant. I mean there was this popular Heise case (the German publisher) where it was clearly stated that Heise is responsible if people do violations against the Hate Speech law. On the other hand the law got there because sites like Facebook - and yes also Heise - do a questionable job at handling racist content. And there are tools beyond filters, e.g. user ratings, real names on social platforms etc etc I mean even Facebook themselves are stating that even Fakenews (which is not necessarily racist or so) poses a problem to our society. I mean...HN has such a simple solution for this, the rating button, why is Facebook not able to come up with something comparable? And yes... the article above states that such posts correlate with physical violence. The state kind of pulled the emergency brake. > "kill all .. they are ..."), ... The internet is one of the last places > where people have some sort of freedom of opinion/listening to > different opinions This is not an opinion. This is a request or a command. Sorry, writing this ethically a complete no go.

paulddraper 9y ago
> I mean...HN has such a simple solution for this, the rating button Simple indeed. This rating system must why it is so rare to see objectionable content on social media like Reddit.
- blablabla123 9y ago
  I mean common instrumentation available is: yes rating button, real name, mandatory picture, verified picture, verified identity, friends feature, high visibility of friend feeds, public-only communication, admins... Social web services of any sort implement some combination of these. Reddit implements only a rating button as far as I know. (Sorry not a regular user, but I bet it has one or two other mechanism to prevent people from posting complete trash regularly.) Actually before Facebook become popular, almost all social media platforms were practically anonymous. In the middle of the 90s this worked IMHO quite well because only few people had access anyway. So you could see that Forums, chats etc became trashier. Facebook came up with real identity profiles (real name, picture etc etc), so the quality of content and contacts got exceptionally high for social media. I guess another leap in this direction might become necessary. Not sure what this would be, but if we don't want state to babysit our social networks, the site operators better come up with innovations in that area.

elgenie 9y ago

"Volksverhetzung" is a compound word with two roots: "Volks" (the people) + "Verhetzung" (manipulation) and the official translation of the criminal code is "Incitement to hatred" [1], rather than the "instigation of the people/masses" that a naive translation would imply. [1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html#p1241 http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg...

falsprofet 9y ago
Which is a rather rough translation, as its missing the relation to Volk. Which is tricky to translate, but nevertheless detailed in the law and officially translated: "... hatred against a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origins, against ...".