8 ms·

France passes law forcing online platforms to delete hate-speech within 24 hours

63 points by raybb 6y ago

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
france is such a weird place. In some ways it's a very free society. In other ways it's not free at all. Don't most of the euro countries have weird laws about hate speech like this?
- trianglem 6y ago
  It’s simple. You’re not free to be intolerant. What is intolerant? Anything that involves biological differences that people are unable to change.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    Live and let live - if you follow that, it's ok to hate or be intolerant, just do it quietly, without involving anyone. Trying to block intolerance by force is wrong. Teach how to overcome it, or just teach to keep it to one's self.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    The kids movie Shrek was hate speech for making fun of the king being short? People were actually offended by that but you want the movie outlawed which is extreme.
  - dogma1138 6y ago
    So by that definition it’s ok to make fun of fat people because they can go on a diet and hit the gym?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - trianglem 6y ago
      Yes
  - jshevek 6y ago
    >What is intolerant? Anything that involves biological differences that people are unable to change. You haven't provided a meaningful answer to your question. For example, praising someone's eyes would be intolerant. Providing a factual description would be intolerance.
- Joeri 6y ago
  It can be argued the U.S. is the “weird” country for not restricting hate speech. It’s not just the EU, most countries regulate hate speech. This is not perceived as restricting freedom, because it protects the freedoms of the group the hate speech targets (one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins).
  - kansface 6y ago
    > it protects the freedoms of the group the hate speech targets Which freedoms would that be?
    - jshevek 6y ago
      I can think of no freedoms that I lose if I am simply mocked, insulted, or criticized. To lose freedom, we have to mix in something else, like for example a targeted harrassment campaign.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      for one their physical safety. Hate speech has real consequences. Hate speech against homosexuals in countries like Russia motivates violent crimes against gay people. The keywords here being stochastic violence and propaganda. Hate speech is used as an intimidation to restrict both the expression and physical safety of the groups it seeks to intimidate.
  - asdf21 6y ago
    How does abusive speech, assuming it isn't from a government official, restrict freedom?
  - spacephysics 6y ago
    I think the fundamental issue of hate speech is in it's inability to be clearly defined. From https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hate-speech https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hate-... "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence toward a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation" or from https://www.britannica.com/topic/hate-speech https://www.britannica.com/topic/hate-speech "speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group identified by attributes such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, physical or mental disability, and others." the definitions vary widely. Let's say we nail down a definition. Perhaps closer to Britannica. Then the issue is interpretation. "speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group": Even alluding to a matter would deem it poor. I support basketball, as it was a sport I grew up with, and is a part of my identity. If someone says "basketball is a stupid game,", well then that's technically hate speech. You can't have a free society with restricted speech.
- jakear 6y ago
  In which ways is it "very free"? (not necessarily doubting you, but it does seem like I often hear of multitude ways they don't even have freedom of speech)
- guggle 6y ago
  I don't know where you're from but I'm sure I could find weirdness there, just like everywhere. That said, this law is heavily criticized at the moment, for good reasons.
- lykr0n 6y ago
  They don't have a US style foundation of Freedom of Speech.
  - krapp 6y ago
    France provided part of that foundation. The philosophy of America's founding fathers regarding freedom of speech, and the First Amendment itself, were inspired by (among other sources) The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from revolutionary France.
- rmrfrmrf 6y ago
  Are you really free if Jack Dorsey gets to decide what you're allowed to tweet?
- smoe 6y ago
  I guess it is "weird" in a sense that in various places in Europe online platforms are (and have been for long time) liable for user generated content. E.g. if a Swiss news site has a comment section where users violate anti racism laws, the site owner can be sued since they published and didn't remove it. Regarding free society. I think each one has its own quirks and difference where they consider someone's freedom ends. E.g. the US's handling of nudity and swear words is absolutely bizarre to me as a European and as someone from the US you might think the restriction on speech and use of symbols many places in Europe have go too far.
  - filoleg 6y ago
    >the US's handling of nudity and swear words is absolutely bizarre to me as a European and as someone from the US you might think the restriction on speech and use of symbols many places in Europe have go too far. Does the law in the US actually regulate that? I was under the assumption that the nudity prohibition on TV and such was simply a voluntary measure. Facebook is welcome to allow it at any moment, they just choose not to, in order to prevent it from becoming a porn repository. I could be totally wrong on this one, but it makes sense, and it explains why it is still totally allowed elsewhere. Similar to how videogame ratings in the US issued by ESRB are not legally binding and are just a voluntary system that stores use, to decide which games to carry (e.g., most stores won't be carrying Adults Only rated games) and who to sell them to.
    - smoe 6y ago
      Yes I realized after posting, that most of it is probably self-censorship of Google, Facebook and co. But as I understand it public access television is quite heavily regulated in terms of profanity and nudity and you will get fined for violations https://www.fcc.gov/general/obscenity-indecency-and-profanity https://www.fcc.gov/general/obscenity-indecency-and-profanit... E.g. The 2004 Superbowl where Janet Jackson flashed her nipples. Viacom paid out US$3.5 million to settle indecency complaints and got fined 500k which got later overruled because it was only "fleeting" indecency. It sounds to me that ruling could have gone either way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_show_controversy#Legal_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_sh... But don't know how much of that extends to others forms of media than tv.
- trianglem 6y ago
  “Weird” I would use the word fantastic instead.
  - VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
    not really
aspenmayer 6y ago
'There are multiple levels of fines. It starts at hundreds of thousand of euros but it can reach up to 4% of the global annual revenue of the company with severe cases. The Superior Council of the Audiovisual (CSA) [0] is the regulator in charge of those cases. 'Germany has already passed similar regulation and there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level.' [0] https://www.csa.fr https://www.csa.fr
- qball 6y ago
  >there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level I suspect that if the EU really does implement this, the US will likely make it against US law to obey media censorship requests from other countries against speech that the First Amendment protects. They probably should have done that a little while ago (curating content under the request of a foreign government should be one of those things that revoke your Section 230 privileges), but better late than never. Other countries dictating what can and cannot be said on US services is already a big problem, and will only get worse, and the EU's bargaining position is much weaker than China's given that the vast majority of EU citizens use US services.
  - akersten 6y ago
    It is not constitutional for the US to make it illegal to remove content. Regardless of why you would remove it. The 1st Amendment cuts both ways there - you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard. That's your freedom as a US entity to decide what you express. The reasoning behind why you removed content (a violation of your website's terms, a request from a foreign government, contractual obligation with McDonalds to not host Pink Slime videos in exchange for $1MM a year) doesn't matter from a constitutional perspective. So the US government revoking a protection of an existing US law as punishment for an expression (removing content) would be an unconstitutional violation of free expression.
    - qball 6y ago
      They can certainly make it illegal to pay any fines, though. Also, >you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard. Sure you can, you can just be treated as a "curator" rather than a "publisher" and thus liable for your curated collection. That's the whole point of S. 230, after all.
trianglem 6y ago
Good. I would much rather have a good amount of censorship then let bigots hide behind the “free speech” argument.
- drenvuk 6y ago
  I hate bigots as well, but I hate your kind of thinking even more.
  - Causality1 6y ago
    "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
- opinion-is-bad 6y ago
  Who decides what needs to be censored? How do we ensure a fair process if we could be silenced for just questioning the censors? The hate speech slope is slippery and unscrupulous politicians will always want to interfere.
  - trianglem 6y ago
    Anything you cannot biologically change is hate speech. It’s not complicated and it’s objective.
    - bmaisonp 6y ago
      Great news for those who don't like certain religions.
    - koenigdavidmj 6y ago
      Modern racism probably is focused much more on cultural attributes, perceived to be universal or common among certain people, than melanin level. That makes your test useless for the most obvious thing a hate speech law would seek to protect.
    - 6y ago
toron123 6y ago
But what in case of the abuse of the system? Administrators will end up deleting whatever is reported. Not to mention it can be used in political fight.
- di4na 6y ago
  there are things in it to punish people abusing the system too
  - koenigdavidmj 6y ago
    To use a US example, I doubt there are many perjury charges prosecuted related to DMCA takedowns.
- ve55 6y ago
  These laws are often not thought through to that extent. And especially not thought through for the very-long term, e.g. what effect removing potentially-offending speech may have on societies across decades
  - II2II 6y ago
    It could also be argued the other way around: businesses put very little long term thought into how their systems would be used. One of the consequences is that their systems can be manipulated to propagate hate speech at a scale that would not be possible otherwise. Now I'm not pretending that this is a new problem. It existed in the days of BBSes. It existed in the days of print. The list could go on. This should be been seen as forewarning. Doubtlessly, newspapers always received letters to the editor containing hate speech. Very few of them would be published, borderline cases may be published with additional commentary. It would take a very special publication to publish hate speech because it would affect their reputation. Yet they moved to the online world and opened the floodgates with "comments" that received little if any review before publication. There is a strong incentive for people to misuse this privilege against the best interests of the publisher since they immediately gain wide exposure. That is for a service that has a strong incentive to pay heed to what they publish, even in the digital world. This short term mentality, coupled with the immediacy and global scope of the internet, resulted in certain parties using the Internet as a propaganda machine for speech that is detrimental to society and even the services that permit it. It is difficult to reign in short of shuttering the outlets for publication or giving them strong incentives to invest the resources into combating it.
centimeter 6y ago
How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this? If every country with an economy the size of 1 or 2 large US states start making up their own censorship laws and trying to force companies to enforce them, at some point this causes huge inefficiencies. I can see two end states to this: 1. If the censoring country has enough international legal influence, companies will probably have to block users from that country from using their services. 2. If the censoring country does not have enough international legal influence, the company ignores them and the government has to explicitly censor its citizens' internet connections. I kind of prefer the second because it's more visible and dramatic - I think a lot of people probably aren't even aware when their country has censorship laws. This also creates economic opportunities for two classes of alternative content distribution: 1. Content distribution based out of legally friendly countries, a la the Sultanate of Kinakuta. Expect to see the media start using terms styled after "tax haven", like "cybercrime haven", for countries that don't enforce US/EU censorship/copyright laws. 2. Content distribution based off of peer-to-peer networks that are harder to wage lawfare against. Bittorrent, IPFS, etc. fit the bill here.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this? We saw it happen with GDPR already. Though we also see many companies play ball with censors, e.g. in places like China. If suddenly a Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon is judged to be "hate speech", it's easy to just censor the cartoons. Most users won't exactly care, there's plenty of government-endorsed content that they're still allowed to access.
  - bad_user 6y ago
    What happened with GDPR exactly?
    - ggreer 6y ago
      Many sites hosted in the US aren't accessible from the EU due to GDPR. Also GDPR reduced VC investment in EU startups by 1/3rd.[1] 1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3278912 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3278912
sneak 6y ago
Who decides authoritatively what is or isn’t “hate speech” within the 24 hour period? The conclusion TFA makes seems likely: these services will just err on the side of “delete first, ask questions later” to protect themselves from liability, making all sorts of legal expression impossible. The current state of online publishing is really sad, and getting worse. Very few modern services used for hosting can be used to publish legal yet fringe or controversial opinions, which should terrify you even if you don’t agree with those things. We’re moving toward a world where a dozen large companies will be the final arbiters of what can or cannot be published, regardless of what the law says. If you can’t see why that’s a grave threat to society, I question your imagination. ...and that’s just in peacetime. Imagine the special wartime requirements that will apply to these services if their hosting nations ever feel legitimately threatened.
- trianglem 6y ago
  Being made fun of for anything that people biologically cannot change is hate speech. It’s not some complicated quagmire of laws you are trying to make it out to be.
  - sneak 6y ago
    If only content moderation and human expression were that simple. Alas, it is not to be. If you read it carefully, I just “made fun of” people who are unimaginative. Is that an innate trait? Should my content be censored? Should a comment on a video of a tall person that says “how’s the weather up there?” be censored using criminal liability? This criminalizes even hosting the discussion about what beliefs along these lines are or are not correct. Someone posts about their (mistaken) beliefs, in essence asking about a disproven theory correlating race and IQ. Other people correct them, educating them as well as any other lurkers. Should the sysadmins go to jail for not deleting the entire thread? Being wrong on the internet should not be illegal. There is absolutely not a bright line, and it is somewhat naive or perhaps even dishonest to claim otherwise.
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      > If you read it carefully, I just “made fun of” people who are unimaginative. Is that an innate trait? Should my content be censored? Given that reddit is banning the word "retard"... the answer may soon be "yes, it should".
Causality1 6y ago
It's easy to forget these days that we in the Western world are not all one big house with the same rules, and reality checks can be jarring. It behooves us to remember the differences, lest we be overly shocked when we see a diner in an American restaurant carrying a sidearm or a European getting arrested for teaching a dog the Nazi salute.
m0zg 6y ago
I wonder what'll happen to postings by gilets jaunes now. That's still ongoing BTW, coronavirus notwithstanding.
henearkr 6y ago
I bet this will induce deplatformization. You do not react the same way if you are a platform (in which case you just deactivate or delete the contents as soon as it is flagged by anyone), or if you are yourself responsible for your website (in which case you will fight to defend that you don't need to take down the contents). My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system, considered a platform under this law? Just asking because, even if I am ready to be 100% independent from platforms when they mean FB or Youtube, I certainly am not ready to get rid of cloud hosting...
- akersten 6y ago
  > My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system, considered a platform under this law? They'll probably go after the first point of contact they can find in the chain hosting the text they don't like. Facebook would clearly be hit with the demand before Level3 would. A peer-to-peer message board that is mostly decentralized, but has a homebase in AWS to coordinate the swarms? Yeah, probably AWS is going to be told to do what they can to take it down. To soapbox for a second - this kind of policing is ridiculous on its face from my perspective as a US citizen. (And that's coming from someone who has no issue with companies themselves moderating their websites, I think that's a natural solution to cultivate the online community that the site operators desire. But the government compelling them to do so is beyond the pale.)
  - henearkr 6y ago
    Uh... okay, then, if you are truly self-hosted (meaning, there is a big whirring, heating server in your living room), then would your internet provider company be compelled by the law to cancel your subscription? Because, this is only the continuing of this logic...
    - akersten 6y ago
      Probably. Or they'd subpoena your ISP and send you a letter to take it down if they could identify you personally. But who knows. Dumb laws like these are rarely thought out to a meaningful degree of detail.
olivermarks 6y ago
Hate speech definition: 'abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation'. How can this possibly be enforced? This is Bowdlerization of online debate. (removing material that is considered improper or offensive from (a text or account), especially with the result that the text becomes weaker or less effective). Hate speech will just be pushed underground, it doesn't solve anything or make anything go away but it does reinforce 'the establishment view', something the French ENA currently have a tight control on.
- superflit 6y ago
  This is a very broad term on this law. "prejudice against a particular group." So if I call Trump supporters "ignorant red necks and backward people," Will it be considered Hate speech? Or when people say: "White people are <slurs> <negative adjective>" Will that be considered hate speech too? Disclaimer: I am a "protected" minority, but I am in favor of free speech. Even if what you say is ugly or garbage. PS. I consider downvotes here as offensive and "hate speech".
  - rstupek 6y ago
    seems easy to consider those all hate speech
  - henearkr 6y ago
    From what you can see in France or more broadly in Europe, the hate speech is only characterized when you really offend the minorities (or some persons belonging), and more specifically when you do so by yielding a kind of wanting-to-sound-objective argumentation to harm them. This is worse when you call to harm them. In your examples, which are clearly mere slurs, you do not try to sound objective in your bad depictions of them. In my experience of what can be seen in the news, your risk something more if you are telling, for example, "white people just damage all the books they touch in bookstores, because they never care how they handle them".
    - 6y ago
A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
I think it was a long time coming. Ever since Yahoo ruling ( also in France ), the internet was in a downward spiral. I am not arguing it is a good thing, but the trajectory was clear for a while.
axegon_ 6y ago
Poor admins and moderators... I genuinely never understood what the fuss is about. Hear me out here. I spent a good amount of time of my life living abroad. Almost 6 years to be exact. And this was during a time when commenting stuff online was relatively rare still. That said, an eastern European in a western European country is inevitably going to face racism/xenophobia. If you are a man it will hit you even sooner. And if you are in the late teen age group like I was, I'd say give it 2 weeks tops, regardless of your background. Sure, it was unpleasant but I felt far worse when someone from the crowds stood up for me. I've lived in eastern Europe in the late 80s and 90s, do you honestly think that some moron blabbering is making me feel insecure or threatened? I'm more than capable of standing up for myself if it comes to that, let them talk. If I'm not doing anything about it, chances are I've worked out that this is the best course of action. If anything, that helped me become who I am today and made me a lot more resilient. Fun fact, some of the people who gave me the hardest time coming in are the ones who have me a hand several years later when some dark moments hit me. And I can't thank them enough till this day and though we live on the opposite ends of the continent, we are now close friends. And till this day, whenever I hear some "hate speech" as they call it, I don't even bother registering it in my brain. "Yeah, cool story bro". My point is that censoring and forcing people to work like machines around the clock to hide comments is completely redundant. What this does is forcing people to fragment the internet into decentralized echo bubbles, where the two camps can ramble on about their own views and claim that that's how everyone thinks. And historically that has never worked and thinking that it will now is beyond absurd. Threatening someone personally in public is one thing and it should be dealt with accordingly. But the general "f {insert any nationality, race, religion, etc.}"... Meh... Ok, whatever...
- ScottFree 6y ago
  You're missing the point. "A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to." -Anthony Daniels
- filoleg 6y ago
  Fully agreed. Just "hate speech" on its own seems like a non-issue. If it gets to a point where it obstructs your way of life or people spewing that kind of language are following you and such, it sounds more like "harassment" or "threats", and we already have laws in effect that protect people against that. Same with calling for harm to certain groups of people, as that would fall under "inciting violence".
wiml 6y ago
Following some links back from that article reaches this: https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/actualites/remise-du-rapport-de-la-mission-de-regulation-des-reseaux-sociaux/ https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/actualites/remise-du-rapport-d... (there is both a French and an English PDF at the bottom). Interestingly to me, one of the main concerns of that writeup is the non-transparency of the editorial function of social networks, e.g., the secret algorithmic choice of what posts/tweets to show you and what order to present them in. This kind of suggests that a service can avoid some amount of censorship attention simply by acting more as a neutral carrier, instead of the current tendency of the large players to present a filtered and adjusted view.

63 points by raybb 6y ago

france is such a weird place. In some ways it's a very free society. In other ways it's not free at all. Don't most of the euro countries have weird laws about hate speech like this?

trianglem 6y ago
It’s simple. You’re not free to be intolerant. What is intolerant? Anything that involves biological differences that people are unable to change.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  Live and let live - if you follow that, it's ok to hate or be intolerant, just do it quietly, without involving anyone. Trying to block intolerance by force is wrong. Teach how to overcome it, or just teach to keep it to one's self.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  The kids movie Shrek was hate speech for making fun of the king being short? People were actually offended by that but you want the movie outlawed which is extreme.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  So by that definition it’s ok to make fun of fat people because they can go on a diet and hit the gym?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - trianglem 6y ago
    Yes
- jshevek 6y ago
  >What is intolerant? Anything that involves biological differences that people are unable to change. You haven't provided a meaningful answer to your question. For example, praising someone's eyes would be intolerant. Providing a factual description would be intolerance.
Joeri 6y ago
It can be argued the U.S. is the “weird” country for not restricting hate speech. It’s not just the EU, most countries regulate hate speech. This is not perceived as restricting freedom, because it protects the freedoms of the group the hate speech targets (one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins).
- kansface 6y ago
  > it protects the freedoms of the group the hate speech targets Which freedoms would that be?
  - jshevek 6y ago
    I can think of no freedoms that I lose if I am simply mocked, insulted, or criticized. To lose freedom, we have to mix in something else, like for example a targeted harrassment campaign.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    for one their physical safety. Hate speech has real consequences. Hate speech against homosexuals in countries like Russia motivates violent crimes against gay people. The keywords here being stochastic violence and propaganda. Hate speech is used as an intimidation to restrict both the expression and physical safety of the groups it seeks to intimidate.
- asdf21 6y ago
  How does abusive speech, assuming it isn't from a government official, restrict freedom?
- spacephysics 6y ago
  I think the fundamental issue of hate speech is in it's inability to be clearly defined. From https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hate-speech https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hate-... "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence toward a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation" or from https://www.britannica.com/topic/hate-speech https://www.britannica.com/topic/hate-speech "speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group identified by attributes such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, physical or mental disability, and others." the definitions vary widely. Let's say we nail down a definition. Perhaps closer to Britannica. Then the issue is interpretation. "speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group": Even alluding to a matter would deem it poor. I support basketball, as it was a sport I grew up with, and is a part of my identity. If someone says "basketball is a stupid game,", well then that's technically hate speech. You can't have a free society with restricted speech.
jakear 6y ago
In which ways is it "very free"? (not necessarily doubting you, but it does seem like I often hear of multitude ways they don't even have freedom of speech)
guggle 6y ago
I don't know where you're from but I'm sure I could find weirdness there, just like everywhere. That said, this law is heavily criticized at the moment, for good reasons.
lykr0n 6y ago
They don't have a US style foundation of Freedom of Speech.
- krapp 6y ago
  France provided part of that foundation. The philosophy of America's founding fathers regarding freedom of speech, and the First Amendment itself, were inspired by (among other sources) The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from revolutionary France.
rmrfrmrf 6y ago
Are you really free if Jack Dorsey gets to decide what you're allowed to tweet?
smoe 6y ago
I guess it is "weird" in a sense that in various places in Europe online platforms are (and have been for long time) liable for user generated content. E.g. if a Swiss news site has a comment section where users violate anti racism laws, the site owner can be sued since they published and didn't remove it. Regarding free society. I think each one has its own quirks and difference where they consider someone's freedom ends. E.g. the US's handling of nudity and swear words is absolutely bizarre to me as a European and as someone from the US you might think the restriction on speech and use of symbols many places in Europe have go too far.
- filoleg 6y ago
  >the US's handling of nudity and swear words is absolutely bizarre to me as a European and as someone from the US you might think the restriction on speech and use of symbols many places in Europe have go too far. Does the law in the US actually regulate that? I was under the assumption that the nudity prohibition on TV and such was simply a voluntary measure. Facebook is welcome to allow it at any moment, they just choose not to, in order to prevent it from becoming a porn repository. I could be totally wrong on this one, but it makes sense, and it explains why it is still totally allowed elsewhere. Similar to how videogame ratings in the US issued by ESRB are not legally binding and are just a voluntary system that stores use, to decide which games to carry (e.g., most stores won't be carrying Adults Only rated games) and who to sell them to.
  - smoe 6y ago
    Yes I realized after posting, that most of it is probably self-censorship of Google, Facebook and co. But as I understand it public access television is quite heavily regulated in terms of profanity and nudity and you will get fined for violations https://www.fcc.gov/general/obscenity-indecency-and-profanity https://www.fcc.gov/general/obscenity-indecency-and-profanit... E.g. The 2004 Superbowl where Janet Jackson flashed her nipples. Viacom paid out US$3.5 million to settle indecency complaints and got fined 500k which got later overruled because it was only "fleeting" indecency. It sounds to me that ruling could have gone either way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_show_controversy#Legal_action https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XXXVIII_halftime_sh... But don't know how much of that extends to others forms of media than tv.
trianglem 6y ago
“Weird” I would use the word fantastic instead.
- VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
  not really

aspenmayer 6y ago

'There are multiple levels of fines. It starts at hundreds of thousand of euros but it can reach up to 4% of the global annual revenue of the company with severe cases. The Superior Council of the Audiovisual (CSA) [0] is the regulator in charge of those cases. 'Germany has already passed similar regulation and there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level.' [0] https://www.csa.fr https://www.csa.fr

qball 6y ago
>there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level I suspect that if the EU really does implement this, the US will likely make it against US law to obey media censorship requests from other countries against speech that the First Amendment protects. They probably should have done that a little while ago (curating content under the request of a foreign government should be one of those things that revoke your Section 230 privileges), but better late than never. Other countries dictating what can and cannot be said on US services is already a big problem, and will only get worse, and the EU's bargaining position is much weaker than China's given that the vast majority of EU citizens use US services.
- akersten 6y ago
  It is not constitutional for the US to make it illegal to remove content. Regardless of why you would remove it. The 1st Amendment cuts both ways there - you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard. That's your freedom as a US entity to decide what you express. The reasoning behind why you removed content (a violation of your website's terms, a request from a foreign government, contractual obligation with McDonalds to not host Pink Slime videos in exchange for $1MM a year) doesn't matter from a constitutional perspective. So the US government revoking a protection of an existing US law as punishment for an expression (removing content) would be an unconstitutional violation of free expression.
  - qball 6y ago
    They can certainly make it illegal to pay any fines, though. Also, >you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard. Sure you can, you can just be treated as a "curator" rather than a "publisher" and thus liable for your curated collection. That's the whole point of S. 230, after all.

trianglem 6y ago

Good. I would much rather have a good amount of censorship then let bigots hide behind the “free speech” argument.

drenvuk 6y ago
I hate bigots as well, but I hate your kind of thinking even more.
- Causality1 6y ago
  "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
opinion-is-bad 6y ago
Who decides what needs to be censored? How do we ensure a fair process if we could be silenced for just questioning the censors? The hate speech slope is slippery and unscrupulous politicians will always want to interfere.
- trianglem 6y ago
  Anything you cannot biologically change is hate speech. It’s not complicated and it’s objective.
  - bmaisonp 6y ago
    Great news for those who don't like certain religions.
  - koenigdavidmj 6y ago
    Modern racism probably is focused much more on cultural attributes, perceived to be universal or common among certain people, than melanin level. That makes your test useless for the most obvious thing a hate speech law would seek to protect.
  - 6y ago

toron123 6y ago

But what in case of the abuse of the system? Administrators will end up deleting whatever is reported. Not to mention it can be used in political fight.

di4na 6y ago
there are things in it to punish people abusing the system too
- koenigdavidmj 6y ago
  To use a US example, I doubt there are many perjury charges prosecuted related to DMCA takedowns.
ve55 6y ago
These laws are often not thought through to that extent. And especially not thought through for the very-long term, e.g. what effect removing potentially-offending speech may have on societies across decades
- II2II 6y ago
  It could also be argued the other way around: businesses put very little long term thought into how their systems would be used. One of the consequences is that their systems can be manipulated to propagate hate speech at a scale that would not be possible otherwise. Now I'm not pretending that this is a new problem. It existed in the days of BBSes. It existed in the days of print. The list could go on. This should be been seen as forewarning. Doubtlessly, newspapers always received letters to the editor containing hate speech. Very few of them would be published, borderline cases may be published with additional commentary. It would take a very special publication to publish hate speech because it would affect their reputation. Yet they moved to the online world and opened the floodgates with "comments" that received little if any review before publication. There is a strong incentive for people to misuse this privilege against the best interests of the publisher since they immediately gain wide exposure. That is for a service that has a strong incentive to pay heed to what they publish, even in the digital world. This short term mentality, coupled with the immediacy and global scope of the internet, resulted in certain parties using the Internet as a propaganda machine for speech that is detrimental to society and even the services that permit it. It is difficult to reign in short of shuttering the outlets for publication or giving them strong incentives to invest the resources into combating it.

centimeter 6y ago

How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this? If every country with an economy the size of 1 or 2 large US states start making up their own censorship laws and trying to force companies to enforce them, at some point this causes huge inefficiencies. I can see two end states to this: 1. If the censoring country has enough international legal influence, companies will probably have to block users from that country from using their services. 2. If the censoring country does not have enough international legal influence, the company ignores them and the government has to explicitly censor its citizens' internet connections. I kind of prefer the second because it's more visible and dramatic - I think a lot of people probably aren't even aware when their country has censorship laws. This also creates economic opportunities for two classes of alternative content distribution: 1. Content distribution based out of legally friendly countries, a la the Sultanate of Kinakuta. Expect to see the media start using terms styled after "tax haven", like "cybercrime haven", for countries that don't enforce US/EU censorship/copyright laws. 2. Content distribution based off of peer-to-peer networks that are harder to wage lawfare against. Bittorrent, IPFS, etc. fit the bill here.

zozbot234 6y ago
> How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this? We saw it happen with GDPR already. Though we also see many companies play ball with censors, e.g. in places like China. If suddenly a Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon is judged to be "hate speech", it's easy to just censor the cartoons. Most users won't exactly care, there's plenty of government-endorsed content that they're still allowed to access.
- bad_user 6y ago
  What happened with GDPR exactly?
  - ggreer 6y ago
    Many sites hosted in the US aren't accessible from the EU due to GDPR. Also GDPR reduced VC investment in EU startups by 1/3rd.[1] 1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3278912 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3278912

sneak 6y ago

Who decides authoritatively what is or isn’t “hate speech” within the 24 hour period? The conclusion TFA makes seems likely: these services will just err on the side of “delete first, ask questions later” to protect themselves from liability, making all sorts of legal expression impossible. The current state of online publishing is really sad, and getting worse. Very few modern services used for hosting can be used to publish legal yet fringe or controversial opinions, which should terrify you even if you don’t agree with those things. We’re moving toward a world where a dozen large companies will be the final arbiters of what can or cannot be published, regardless of what the law says. If you can’t see why that’s a grave threat to society, I question your imagination. ...and that’s just in peacetime. Imagine the special wartime requirements that will apply to these services if their hosting nations ever feel legitimately threatened.

trianglem 6y ago
Being made fun of for anything that people biologically cannot change is hate speech. It’s not some complicated quagmire of laws you are trying to make it out to be.
- sneak 6y ago
  If only content moderation and human expression were that simple. Alas, it is not to be. If you read it carefully, I just “made fun of” people who are unimaginative. Is that an innate trait? Should my content be censored? Should a comment on a video of a tall person that says “how’s the weather up there?” be censored using criminal liability? This criminalizes even hosting the discussion about what beliefs along these lines are or are not correct. Someone posts about their (mistaken) beliefs, in essence asking about a disproven theory correlating race and IQ. Other people correct them, educating them as well as any other lurkers. Should the sysadmins go to jail for not deleting the entire thread? Being wrong on the internet should not be illegal. There is absolutely not a bright line, and it is somewhat naive or perhaps even dishonest to claim otherwise.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    > If you read it carefully, I just “made fun of” people who are unimaginative. Is that an innate trait? Should my content be censored? Given that reddit is banning the word "retard"... the answer may soon be "yes, it should".

Causality1 6y ago

It's easy to forget these days that we in the Western world are not all one big house with the same rules, and reality checks can be jarring. It behooves us to remember the differences, lest we be overly shocked when we see a diner in an American restaurant carrying a sidearm or a European getting arrested for teaching a dog the Nazi salute.

m0zg 6y ago

I wonder what'll happen to postings by gilets jaunes now. That's still ongoing BTW, coronavirus notwithstanding.

henearkr 6y ago

I bet this will induce deplatformization. You do not react the same way if you are a platform (in which case you just deactivate or delete the contents as soon as it is flagged by anyone), or if you are yourself responsible for your website (in which case you will fight to defend that you don't need to take down the contents). My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system, considered a platform under this law? Just asking because, even if I am ready to be 100% independent from platforms when they mean FB or Youtube, I certainly am not ready to get rid of cloud hosting...

akersten 6y ago
> My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system, considered a platform under this law? They'll probably go after the first point of contact they can find in the chain hosting the text they don't like. Facebook would clearly be hit with the demand before Level3 would. A peer-to-peer message board that is mostly decentralized, but has a homebase in AWS to coordinate the swarms? Yeah, probably AWS is going to be told to do what they can to take it down. To soapbox for a second - this kind of policing is ridiculous on its face from my perspective as a US citizen. (And that's coming from someone who has no issue with companies themselves moderating their websites, I think that's a natural solution to cultivate the online community that the site operators desire. But the government compelling them to do so is beyond the pale.)
- henearkr 6y ago
  Uh... okay, then, if you are truly self-hosted (meaning, there is a big whirring, heating server in your living room), then would your internet provider company be compelled by the law to cancel your subscription? Because, this is only the continuing of this logic...
  - akersten 6y ago
    Probably. Or they'd subpoena your ISP and send you a letter to take it down if they could identify you personally. But who knows. Dumb laws like these are rarely thought out to a meaningful degree of detail.

olivermarks 6y ago

Hate speech definition: 'abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation'. How can this possibly be enforced? This is Bowdlerization of online debate. (removing material that is considered improper or offensive from (a text or account), especially with the result that the text becomes weaker or less effective). Hate speech will just be pushed underground, it doesn't solve anything or make anything go away but it does reinforce 'the establishment view', something the French ENA currently have a tight control on.

superflit 6y ago
This is a very broad term on this law. "prejudice against a particular group." So if I call Trump supporters "ignorant red necks and backward people," Will it be considered Hate speech? Or when people say: "White people are <slurs> <negative adjective>" Will that be considered hate speech too? Disclaimer: I am a "protected" minority, but I am in favor of free speech. Even if what you say is ugly or garbage. PS. I consider downvotes here as offensive and "hate speech".
- rstupek 6y ago
  seems easy to consider those all hate speech
- henearkr 6y ago
  From what you can see in France or more broadly in Europe, the hate speech is only characterized when you really offend the minorities (or some persons belonging), and more specifically when you do so by yielding a kind of wanting-to-sound-objective argumentation to harm them. This is worse when you call to harm them. In your examples, which are clearly mere slurs, you do not try to sound objective in your bad depictions of them. In my experience of what can be seen in the news, your risk something more if you are telling, for example, "white people just damage all the books they touch in bookstores, because they never care how they handle them".
  - 6y ago

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago

I think it was a long time coming. Ever since Yahoo ruling ( also in France ), the internet was in a downward spiral. I am not arguing it is a good thing, but the trajectory was clear for a while.

axegon_ 6y ago

Poor admins and moderators... I genuinely never understood what the fuss is about. Hear me out here. I spent a good amount of time of my life living abroad. Almost 6 years to be exact. And this was during a time when commenting stuff online was relatively rare still. That said, an eastern European in a western European country is inevitably going to face racism/xenophobia. If you are a man it will hit you even sooner. And if you are in the late teen age group like I was, I'd say give it 2 weeks tops, regardless of your background. Sure, it was unpleasant but I felt far worse when someone from the crowds stood up for me. I've lived in eastern Europe in the late 80s and 90s, do you honestly think that some moron blabbering is making me feel insecure or threatened? I'm more than capable of standing up for myself if it comes to that, let them talk. If I'm not doing anything about it, chances are I've worked out that this is the best course of action. If anything, that helped me become who I am today and made me a lot more resilient. Fun fact, some of the people who gave me the hardest time coming in are the ones who have me a hand several years later when some dark moments hit me. And I can't thank them enough till this day and though we live on the opposite ends of the continent, we are now close friends. And till this day, whenever I hear some "hate speech" as they call it, I don't even bother registering it in my brain. "Yeah, cool story bro". My point is that censoring and forcing people to work like machines around the clock to hide comments is completely redundant. What this does is forcing people to fragment the internet into decentralized echo bubbles, where the two camps can ramble on about their own views and claim that that's how everyone thinks. And historically that has never worked and thinking that it will now is beyond absurd. Threatening someone personally in public is one thing and it should be dealt with accordingly. But the general "f {insert any nationality, race, religion, etc.}"... Meh... Ok, whatever...

ScottFree 6y ago
You're missing the point. "A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to." -Anthony Daniels
filoleg 6y ago
Fully agreed. Just "hate speech" on its own seems like a non-issue. If it gets to a point where it obstructs your way of life or people spewing that kind of language are following you and such, it sounds more like "harassment" or "threats", and we already have laws in effect that protect people against that. Same with calling for harm to certain groups of people, as that would fall under "inciting violence".

wiml 6y ago

Following some links back from that article reaches this: https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/actualites/remise-du-rapport-de-la-mission-de-regulation-des-reseaux-sociaux/ https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/actualites/remise-du-rapport-d... (there is both a French and an English PDF at the bottom). Interestingly to me, one of the main concerns of that writeup is the non-transparency of the editorial function of social networks, e.g., the secret algorithmic choice of what posts/tweets to show you and what order to present them in. This kind of suggests that a service can avoid some amount of censorship attention simply by acting more as a neutral carrier, instead of the current tendency of the large players to present a filtered and adjusted view.