7 ms·

Don't frame this as a free speech issue. Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. Freedom of speech in Europe is not just

by flexie 8y ago

Don't frame this as a free speech issue. Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. Freedom of speech in Europe is not just an EU question, but also - and mainly - up to constitutions and legislation of the member states. So of course it varies. But there is less surveillance in Europe on what citizens say online, European media is less centralized than American, there are more parties with opposing views in parliaments, much less political correctness in both politics, business life, and social life. Most importantly, European courts is most member states uphold the protection of the individuals' freedom of speech. This is legislation aimed at Google and Facebook, and other large companies, yes. Go back 15-20 years, and nobody would have thought that Google would get away with using the creations of content providers without paying a fair share. I don't see anything wrong in Google or Facebook being forced to apply filters. We have gotten used to what is truly an disgusting situation where creators of music, journalism etc. don't get paid and their works are put out on Youtube, Facebook etc. I would have liked to see a higher threshold so that only truly large companies had to worry about filters, but again; these filters will likely be easy to find in 10 different versions for free on GitHub in a couple of years, and better ones you can license for a small fee. But I agree, Europe should finally start to tax Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.

anonymou2 8y ago
Try making jokes about Catholic church or Catholicism in Spain.
cabaalis 8y ago
> Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. As an American, this example tells me very differently. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wbxrs 8y ago
>Don't frame this as a free speech issue. Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. Yeah, no. This (blasphemy laws) would be unthinkable in the US: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-free-speech-criticize-muhammad-echr-ruled/574174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...
- flexie 8y ago
  Again, Europe is many different legal systems, and blasphemy laws are not everywhere. I don't like that limitation to freedom of speech anymore than you, but all countries, including the US have limitations such as libel, slander, pornography, obscenity, etc.
  - spaced-out 8y ago
    Libel and slander aren't illegal, they're civil matters.
    - flexie 8y ago
      As is copyright law.
      - anticensor 8y ago
        Compulsory licensing schemes are enforced according to criminal procedure.
  - ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
    >Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. The EU is a legal entity. Europe is the continent/area. The EU does not protect freedom of speech more than the U.S.
    - gmueckl 8y ago
      The EU is not a country and does not have its own laws. Things like this copyright directive will get turned into 28 distict member state level laws. Directives only set the common denominator for these laws. Also, the EHCR is an organization of the Council of Europe which is entirely unrelated to the EU. This is a weaker association of states including Turkey and Russia.
aikah 8y ago
> Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more It is absolutely not. That's a preposterous assumption. If it was the case then no European state could send people to prison or fine them for having an opinion, yet look at France, where insulting the president is a crime and denying "official" history has landed people in jail (I don't condone either of these, it's just about principle). There is absolutely no equivalent to the US first amendment anywhere else on the planet.
- tripzilch 8y ago
  The US has the "glorious" principle of explicitly allowing people to heckle a gay soldier's funeral. That was a while ago, but it just goes to show that the US 1st amendment leads to equally preposterous scenarios. > I don't condone either of these, it's just about principle But being respectful to people at funerals is also a principle. By which I mean "it's about principle" is not at all a clear signal on whether something should be allowed even when not condoned. Personally, over the years I've taken an interest in this, I've seen the US's extreme stance on freedom of speech hurt more often than I've seen the EU's more relaxed stance on freedom of speech hurt. But even then I suppose you could argue the principle of the thing, that the one time our "loose" freedom of speech does hurt in the EU, it's going to hurt disproportionally more. Except I'd argue against that, it's a risk that is always there and it's not strictly controlled by strict freedom of speech, that's just one symptom of things going south.
- craigsmansion 8y ago
  It absolutely is, depending on your p.o.v. I know the U.S. is big on their "freedom of speech" since it's one of the few things all citizens agree on, an All American Shibboleth, so to speak, but National Security trumps everything. There are plenty of things you can say at the border that will get you on the next plane back home. There may or may not be people being held in captivity without access to a lawyer for their speech. We don't know because the proceedings are secret. Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places. That's about treason, you might say, but with enough restrictions any speech can be classified as treason. Speech in the U.S. only seems to be free when it doesn't matter. If it matters there are a lot of restrictions and there can be dire consequences.
r_smart 8y ago
|Don't frame this as a free speech issue. Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. Short of making a call to violence, I will never hear from an authority about anything I say or post online. The same can't be said for much of Europe. In fact, didn't the EU courts just rule that criticism of Mohamed should be banned?
- ben_w 8y ago
  > In fact, didn't the EU courts just rule that criticism of Mohamed should be banned? No. https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2018/10/26/q-have-european-judges-just-banned-defamation-of-the-prophet-muhammad-a-no https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2018/10/26/q-have-e...
  - hopler 8y ago
    Per the article, the EU court ruled that EU nations are individually permitted to ban criticism of Mohammed, as long as the criticism is ruled less valuable than the feelings of the people who dislike the criticism. It's legal to call Hitler a murderer in Austria, but not to call Mohammed child molester.
  - wbxrs 8y ago
    The truth of the matter is that this woman said Mohammed was a paedophile for fucking a 9 year old (which is even correct according to the Quran). She was convicted in Austria for blasphemy. The EU said the conviction was correct. This should be terrifying to anybody who supports free speech. The ECHR is supposed to be a human rights court but they are allowing member states to convict people for blasphemy.
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      As much as the Austrian conviction and this whole discussion about blasphemy and "religious freedom" makes me P.O., she was convicted of paying 500 Euros.
      - 8y ago
strictnein 8y ago
Nothing you've posted is accurate or true. Like, literally nothing. There won't be "10 different versions" of these filters on Github for free. How do you even imagine that will work? There will need to be a constantly updated and massive database of signatures for all copyrighted materials. That's not something that can be done for free and you can guarantee it will have a significant price tag attached Free speech in the EU is not as protected as in the US. Full stop. There is no surveillance of what citizens say online in the US. People in the EU are arrested for mean tweets. There are many uses of copyrighted material that are covered under free use in the US. You can, for instance, critique a movie while using segments of that movie. Journalists aren't not getting paid because Google has a small blurb underneath a link to their article. Google is driving traffic to their articles. Europe should tax Amazon? Huh?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Even though you are correct, this issue is still not a matter of free speech. We've had copyright protections for some time, they're now being enforced. I don't agree with it, but neither this is not about free speech or 'media spin' on the story.
  - DuskStar 8y ago
    If it restricts what you can say, how you can say it, or who you can say it to, it's a free speech issue. The restrictions being "copyright" doesn't change that fact.
Bartweiss 8y ago
> Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more... Most importantly, European courts in most member states uphold the protection of the individuals' freedom of speech. This is a really strong statement, and one that seems incredibly difficult to defend. It is a good point that free speech is a matter not only of what is legally permitted but what is possible to carry out; online privacy and varied, independent media are major factors in speech actually being heard. Both regulatory and economic factors have done real harm to the US media landscape, although the claim that online speech is less surveilled in Europe is depends on exactly what one checks - and is largely a matter of US companies rejecting foreign subpoenas, not a lack of effort on Europe's part. Beyond that, though... a strong context for speech isn't enough either, if speech isn't actually legal. Europe falls far behind the US on legal speech protections of all kinds. In the general case, libel and defamation rules are extremely narrow in the US, and far broader in most of Europe. In terms of specific speech, I pretty often see people suggest that EU countries haven't banned anything except hate speech, and more specifically that Germany banned Nazi iconography without restricting speech in general. Let's ignore those cases, and ignore the usual debates around when criticism of religion crosses into hate speech. Even so, the First Amendment is genuinely unique: - France can assess high fines and years in prison for the "positive presentation of drugs", and regularly uses this law against drug reform advocates, including politicians. Meanwhile, the US refused to implement Article 3 of the UN Narcotic Drugs Convention (banning promotion of drugs) on Constitutional grounds. - At least four countries (and until recently Germany) have general lese majeste laws protecting all heads of state from insult, which is about the clearest restriction of legitimate and valuable speech I can think of. Several other countries ban insult to their own heads of state. The Netherlands in particular actually enforce their law regularly, in excess of the protections accorded to any non-royalty. Meanwhile, heads of state are not only not specially protected in the US, but receive less libel protection than nonpublic figures. - Poland past a law against making factually-accurate statements about the history of the Holocaust in Poland, and only after international outcry did they remove criminal penalties for those statements. Enough said. - Germany convicts more than 20,000 people per year under its ban on 'insult' alone. §86a, its widely praised law against Nazi iconography, also bans not just Communist iconography but Kurdish military symbols. It was repeatedly used against anti-Nazi content containing broken or crossed-out symbols, a practice that ended only in 2007, after a lawmaker reported herself to the police for the offense as a protest. - German internet law is uniquely restrictive. It includes a list of several thousand banned websites, judged by an unelected agency to be harmful to minors, many of them mislabeled or improperly banned. The errors have gone unchallenged because there's no appeal process, and in fact the list itself is aggressively censored. Discounting national security letters, I believe that's the only standardized secret law censorship in any developed country. The 2017 ban on fake news, 'NetzDG', has been condemned as unconstitutional and unethical by virtually every academic or free speech organization to address the topic, with the UN singling it out as "endangering human rights". This is not a happy list, and those are only brief highlights. Privacy and free media are valuable for making speech visible, but so is permitting free speech. Intrinsic rights to speech aside, that list includes an awful lot of moral, pro-social things which can't be said.

by flexie 8y ago

anonymou2 8y ago

Try making jokes about Catholic church or Catholicism in Spain.

cabaalis 8y ago

> Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. As an American, this example tells me very differently. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

wbxrs 8y ago

>Don't frame this as a free speech issue. Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. Yeah, no. This (blasphemy laws) would be unthinkable in the US: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-free-speech-criticize-muhammad-echr-ruled/574174/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...

flexie 8y ago
Again, Europe is many different legal systems, and blasphemy laws are not everywhere. I don't like that limitation to freedom of speech anymore than you, but all countries, including the US have limitations such as libel, slander, pornography, obscenity, etc.
- spaced-out 8y ago
  Libel and slander aren't illegal, they're civil matters.
  - flexie 8y ago
    As is copyright law.
    - anticensor 8y ago
      Compulsory licensing schemes are enforced according to criminal procedure.
- ApolloFortyNine 8y ago
  >Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. The EU is a legal entity. Europe is the continent/area. The EU does not protect freedom of speech more than the U.S.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    The EU is not a country and does not have its own laws. Things like this copyright directive will get turned into 28 distict member state level laws. Directives only set the common denominator for these laws. Also, the EHCR is an organization of the Council of Europe which is entirely unrelated to the EU. This is a weaker association of states including Turkey and Russia.

aikah 8y ago

> Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more It is absolutely not. That's a preposterous assumption. If it was the case then no European state could send people to prison or fine them for having an opinion, yet look at France, where insulting the president is a crime and denying "official" history has landed people in jail (I don't condone either of these, it's just about principle). There is absolutely no equivalent to the US first amendment anywhere else on the planet.

tripzilch 8y ago
The US has the "glorious" principle of explicitly allowing people to heckle a gay soldier's funeral. That was a while ago, but it just goes to show that the US 1st amendment leads to equally preposterous scenarios. > I don't condone either of these, it's just about principle But being respectful to people at funerals is also a principle. By which I mean "it's about principle" is not at all a clear signal on whether something should be allowed even when not condoned. Personally, over the years I've taken an interest in this, I've seen the US's extreme stance on freedom of speech hurt more often than I've seen the EU's more relaxed stance on freedom of speech hurt. But even then I suppose you could argue the principle of the thing, that the one time our "loose" freedom of speech does hurt in the EU, it's going to hurt disproportionally more. Except I'd argue against that, it's a risk that is always there and it's not strictly controlled by strict freedom of speech, that's just one symptom of things going south.
craigsmansion 8y ago
It absolutely is, depending on your p.o.v. I know the U.S. is big on their "freedom of speech" since it's one of the few things all citizens agree on, an All American Shibboleth, so to speak, but National Security trumps everything. There are plenty of things you can say at the border that will get you on the next plane back home. There may or may not be people being held in captivity without access to a lawyer for their speech. We don't know because the proceedings are secret. Someone who practiced his freedom of speech is currently in hiding in liberty-loving Russia of all places. That's about treason, you might say, but with enough restrictions any speech can be classified as treason. Speech in the U.S. only seems to be free when it doesn't matter. If it matters there are a lot of restrictions and there can be dire consequences.

r_smart 8y ago

|Don't frame this as a free speech issue. Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more. Short of making a call to violence, I will never hear from an authority about anything I say or post online. The same can't be said for much of Europe. In fact, didn't the EU courts just rule that criticism of Mohamed should be banned?

ben_w 8y ago
> In fact, didn't the EU courts just rule that criticism of Mohamed should be banned? No. https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2018/10/26/q-have-european-judges-just-banned-defamation-of-the-prophet-muhammad-a-no https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2018/10/26/q-have-e...
- hopler 8y ago
  Per the article, the EU court ruled that EU nations are individually permitted to ban criticism of Mohammed, as long as the criticism is ruled less valuable than the feelings of the people who dislike the criticism. It's legal to call Hitler a murderer in Austria, but not to call Mohammed child molester.
- wbxrs 8y ago
  The truth of the matter is that this woman said Mohammed was a paedophile for fucking a 9 year old (which is even correct according to the Quran). She was convicted in Austria for blasphemy. The EU said the conviction was correct. This should be terrifying to anybody who supports free speech. The ECHR is supposed to be a human rights court but they are allowing member states to convict people for blasphemy.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    As much as the Austrian conviction and this whole discussion about blasphemy and "religious freedom" makes me P.O., she was convicted of paying 500 Euros.
    - 8y ago

strictnein 8y ago

Nothing you've posted is accurate or true. Like, literally nothing. There won't be "10 different versions" of these filters on Github for free. How do you even imagine that will work? There will need to be a constantly updated and massive database of signatures for all copyrighted materials. That's not something that can be done for free and you can guarantee it will have a significant price tag attached Free speech in the EU is not as protected as in the US. Full stop. There is no surveillance of what citizens say online in the US. People in the EU are arrested for mean tweets. There are many uses of copyrighted material that are covered under free use in the US. You can, for instance, critique a movie while using segments of that movie. Journalists aren't not getting paid because Google has a small blurb underneath a link to their article. Google is driving traffic to their articles. Europe should tax Amazon? Huh?

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Even though you are correct, this issue is still not a matter of free speech. We've had copyright protections for some time, they're now being enforced. I don't agree with it, but neither this is not about free speech or 'media spin' on the story.
- DuskStar 8y ago
  If it restricts what you can say, how you can say it, or who you can say it to, it's a free speech issue. The restrictions being "copyright" doesn't change that fact.

Bartweiss 8y ago

> Freedom of speech is as protected in the EU as it is in the US, possibly more... Most importantly, European courts in most member states uphold the protection of the individuals' freedom of speech. This is a really strong statement, and one that seems incredibly difficult to defend. It is a good point that free speech is a matter not only of what is legally permitted but what is possible to carry out; online privacy and varied, independent media are major factors in speech actually being heard. Both regulatory and economic factors have done real harm to the US media landscape, although the claim that online speech is less surveilled in Europe is depends on exactly what one checks - and is largely a matter of US companies rejecting foreign subpoenas, not a lack of effort on Europe's part. Beyond that, though... a strong context for speech isn't enough either, if speech isn't actually legal. Europe falls far behind the US on legal speech protections of all kinds. In the general case, libel and defamation rules are extremely narrow in the US, and far broader in most of Europe. In terms of specific speech, I pretty often see people suggest that EU countries haven't banned anything except hate speech, and more specifically that Germany banned Nazi iconography without restricting speech in general. Let's ignore those cases, and ignore the usual debates around when criticism of religion crosses into hate speech. Even so, the First Amendment is genuinely unique: - France can assess high fines and years in prison for the "positive presentation of drugs", and regularly uses this law against drug reform advocates, including politicians. Meanwhile, the US refused to implement Article 3 of the UN Narcotic Drugs Convention (banning promotion of drugs) on Constitutional grounds. - At least four countries (and until recently Germany) have general lese majeste laws protecting all heads of state from insult, which is about the clearest restriction of legitimate and valuable speech I can think of. Several other countries ban insult to their own heads of state. The Netherlands in particular actually enforce their law regularly, in excess of the protections accorded to any non-royalty. Meanwhile, heads of state are not only not specially protected in the US, but receive less libel protection than nonpublic figures. - Poland past a law against making factually-accurate statements about the history of the Holocaust in Poland, and only after international outcry did they remove criminal penalties for those statements. Enough said. - Germany convicts more than 20,000 people per year under its ban on 'insult' alone. §86a, its widely praised law against Nazi iconography, also bans not just Communist iconography but Kurdish military symbols. It was repeatedly used against anti-Nazi content containing broken or crossed-out symbols, a practice that ended only in 2007, after a lawmaker reported herself to the police for the offense as a protest. - German internet law is uniquely restrictive. It includes a list of several thousand banned websites, judged by an unelected agency to be harmful to minors, many of them mislabeled or improperly banned. The errors have gone unchallenged because there's no appeal process, and in fact the list itself is aggressively censored. Discounting national security letters, I believe that's the only standardized secret law censorship in any developed country. The 2017 ban on fake news, 'NetzDG', has been condemned as unconstitutional and unethical by virtually every academic or free speech organization to address the topic, with the UN singling it out as "endangering human rights". This is not a happy list, and those are only brief highlights. Privacy and free media are valuable for making speech visible, but so is permitting free speech. Intrinsic rights to speech aside, that list includes an awful lot of moral, pro-social things which can't be said.