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> The case started with an April 2016 Facebook post, in which a user shared an article featuring a photo of Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, then-chair of Austria’s Gr

> The case started with an April 2016 Facebook post, in which a user shared an article featuring a photo of Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, then-chair of Austria’s Green Party, along with commentary labeling her a “lousy traitor,” “corrupt oaf,” and member of a “fascist party,” apparently in response to her immigration policies. This is core, protected speech in the United States. But it was deemed defamation under Austrian law. This reminds me of the reporting done regarding Larry Pozner[0], a father of a Sandy Hook shooting victim that was subjected to constant accusations, doxxing attempts and death threats from conspiracy theorists for years and decided to take legal action. Fundamentally, I believe that everyone has the right to not be subjected to death threats and systemic harassment from hate and conspiracy groups, especially those who've lost children to such senseless and brutal killing. American individualism so often deflects the responsibility of dealing with such trauma on those who are subjected to this kind of harassment because it's not impacting the vast majority of the population ("not my problem"). It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech. In fact, has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US? I don't know what the exact solution to these problems is, but I truly people need to be responsible for what they post online. We as a society also have a responsibility to demand that of our peers because big tech has already shown us that they're not up to this challenge. The worse that harassment gets online, I believe the more segmented and walled off and commercialized the internet will become. 0: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/670/beware-the-jabberwock/act-one-4 https://www.thisamericanlife.org/670/beware-the-jabberwock/a...

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I just don't see the equivalence here. I agree that platforms have a responsibility not to enable harassment and death threats, but calling a politician "traitor", "corrupt", "fascist" is neither of those things. What are you supposed to do when a politician is corrupt or fascist, if you aren't allowed to talk about it?
- damnencryption 6y ago
  Politicians can only be good or neutral.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > What are you supposed to do when a politician is corrupt or fascist, if you aren't allowed to talk about it? In the same country (Austria) a court actually ruled that a certain right-wing politician can be said to be close to nazi ideology due to the existing evidence. So, you are allowed to talk about it, but you might get problems if you don't have a basis for your claims.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    So in Austria you're not allowed to insult a politician unless a court agrees with your insult? That's incredibly fascist.
    - alpaca128 6y ago
      This isn't specific to politicians. Calling someone a fascist in public(meaning 10+ witnesses I think) is considered defamation and, yes, if you cannot prove such claims it can have consequences. Note that this does not apply to just any kind of insult as you say. It's for cases when it's considered harmful for one's public image, as usual with defamation. I've never heard of a simple "Idiot!" leading to any consequences. I don't know why it's "incredibly fascist" to win a defamation case when someone called you a fascist in the open. Though I do admit that it's hard to draw a clear line with these things, and there are arguments for both sides as long as it doesn't steer towards censorship.
      - bxk1 6y ago
        These things could easily end up in ECHR, because a "fascist", just like an "idiot", could be considered an opinion, judgement, not a fact and so it cannot be false, unless it means something very specific in Austria.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US? None of those people are in jail. And that regime, despite its best efforts, is being peacefully removed from power. America is the world’s oldest [EDIT: large, old] extant democracy. I wouldn’t lightly consider toying with something so basic as free speech. Several European and Asian democracies are already teetering towards authoritarianism, the first step of which is curtailing public debate.
- bitwize 6y ago
  > America is the world’s oldest extant democracy. That would be San Marino. The U.S. Constitution is the oldest constitution still in force. But we're still pretty young as democracies go. Hell, we haven't even been around as long as one of the first libertarian states, the Icelandic Commonwealth, was.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    San Marino has only been a democracy since, what, after the Italian revolution? It is a uniquely old microstate, though. (Another line of counter-argument is that the US wasn't a democracy until the civil rights act...)
- save_ferris 6y ago
  > America is the world’s oldest [EDIT: large, old] extant democracy. Nothing about our history guarantees our future as a democracy, this is hot hand fallacy at its finest. If there's one thing that's consistent across human history, civilizations always fail at some point. > I wouldn’t lightly consider toying with something so basic as free speech. Several European and Asian democracies are already teetering towards authoritarianism, the first step of which is curtailing public debate. Free speech existed prior to the internet, it's not like Tim Berners-Lee changes the world and all of a sudden free speech exists. Canada has much stricter free speech laws than the US and their political discourse seems to be just fine. Plus there are already plenty of restrictions baked into "free speech" online. You can't threaten to shoot up a school on social media without consequences, why can't the same principles be applied to people who make death threats towards individuals? Companies already have the ability to lock you out of your account for no reason whatsoever without any defined arbitration system. What about the internet is so truly sacrosanct that we permit such inconsistency from corporate governance while railing against legal protections mandated by governments? Free speech is already being messed with; it's being used to automate the virality of hate speech with ruthless efficiency.
michaelscott 6y ago
> has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US? There have been probing tests of the nature of free speech laws in a number of countries outside the US in recent years, notably the potential transgender pronoun compulsion laws that landed Jordan Peterson in trouble in Canada, as well as a number of tried or in trial cases in places like the UK[0] and Australia[1]. It's a difficult line to draw, as threats of violence and general harassment clearly shouldn't be allowed or tolerated. I'm not sure the trend that these other Western nations are attempting to follow is necessarily good either though, as some veer dangerously close to thought policing. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/dec/27/battle-lines-drawn-as-a-crop-of-free-speech-cases-come-before-high-court https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/dec/27/battle-lines-dra...
- alpaca128 6y ago
  > notably the potential transgender pronoun compulsion laws Which, in my opinion, go clearly a step farther than just censoring offensive language. I can understand the latter to some degree, but forcing people to replace certain words in their communication only differs from Orwell's dystopia in the size of the dictionary. It's a dilemma: huge communities like Facebook cannot really be moderated effectively and are a fertile ground for disinformation, conspiracy theories and spreading hate. At the same time we don't want to limit speech more than absolutely necessary. To me it's clear we simply are not (yet?) mentally prepared for information exchange and communities in this global magnitude. It can be positive when followers of a niche hobby can get together, but the same mechanism is dangerous in contact with targeted disinformation campaigns and cults.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    > but forcing people to replace certain words in their communication only differs from Orwell's dystopia in the size of the dictionary. It's dystopian that people can't hurl the N-word at each other?
    - 6y ago
beervirus 6y ago
> It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech. Funny to see this comment in a thread about a European regulator attempting to censor, worldwide, criticism of some politician.
- notahacker 6y ago
  I mean, I'm sure there are many things about Austrian politics which are less than ideal, but I'm not convinced a lawsuit and series of appeals taking three years to decide that a claim that a Green Party member was a fascist and a traitor was defamatory was quite the dystopia Orwell had in mind. (And Orwell lived in a country with strong libel laws, which his publisher was constantly worried about his own writings falling foul of and he was very happy to encourage his publisher to worry about more when the libellous comments were made abut him)
emn13 6y ago
The arguments that the kind of speech referred to in the article is worth defending are really weak. Sure: there is no question that free speech in general is a useful tool in increasing transparency and thus public enlightenment - thus protections in general aren't in question. Yet the defenders of absolute or unconditional protection repeatedly - as in this article - make remarkably poorly supported claims. The first poorly supported claim is that because it's supported in the US, it's worth supporting. This is just weird; frankly. If US laws were perfect, society would be a lot more stable, and you might as well abolish congress. Clearly, laws are not perfect; and where there are regional legal differences, you should not assume the US protections make sense - nor in fact that either approach makes sense. It's frankly irrelevant what US law is on the topic of what protected speech should be. The second, and more fundamental error in reasoning is that somehow a slippery slope applies, or by extension that you can't expect a court (or other control mechanism) to be able to tell harmful speech from constructive speech. Obviously, there will be some corner-cases where decisions will be essentially arbitrary - but that applies in any system, including the US. But what's not at all obvious is that those close calls actually happen very often, nor that they matter much when they do. There's usually wide, clear distinction between what's essentially malicious deception (as in this case) and possible truths that deserve protection. In practice it just doesn't happen all that often that something is possibly both. Here too: you could argue whether or not the posts in question are harmful enough to deserve a ban; but there's no argument that they were truthful and worth protecting; they clearly were not. To summarize: the idea that legal controls on deception or defamation will to a meaningful extent do collateral damage to free speech which increases transparency simply does not appear to be true. Sure, a despot could do both, but a normal society can choose not to do that just fine too. The third (implicit) reasoning flaw is that what we have today is actually free speech. This misunderstanding rests on several pillars. Firstly we should not ignore harms caused by libel laws, especially in a country like the US, where legal costs can be punishment alone, regardless of legal victory, and where legal standards differ by state allowing jurisdiction shopping. Secondly, we should realize that speech needs protection from power in general, not specifically government alone. Much later modern-style free speech developed into a roughly modern form, corporations evolved. Corporations may deserve some protection from the government, but they themselves wield enormous power too, and speech needs protection from their interference too. Finally, the protections we do have are quite... abstract. They're not sufficient to protect speech in practice, not by a long shot - just witness how abominably whistle-blowers are treated. Rather than the essence of communication and transparency being protected, we protect technicalities. We may not technically live under a massive censorship regime, but that's just because we've interpreted self-censorship and corporate control as being something fundamentally different - and that's dangerous, because we're not protecting speech as some kind of academic exercise to create aesthetically pleasing laws; we're doing it to protect public discourse and transparency. And we're not doing that as is. We really need to move towards a healthy debate on free speech itself. The principle is clearly sound, but our implementation of it is equally clearly not sound. And that holds true just as much in other countries; this isn't some US-specific problem - because pretty much anywhere in the west it's OK to lie about (say) vaccine dangers without any repercussions even though evidence-free conspiracies of that kind do real harm to everyone in society. Yet if you defame someone - just one person! Well, that's apparently not OK, we need to protect individuals from libel? Even if there's any sense in that (I doubt it), it sure doesn't appear to do us much good regardless. There's a reason why e.g. plutocrats such as Putin thought it was worth interfering in foreign public opinion: precisely because he thought freedom of speech does not work well in the countries he tried to manipulate; freedom of speech would not prevent malicious lies from spreading through the public. And you know what? Putin's right. As such, while it's fair contrast the US approach to that of others, I think doing so is akin to worrying about really marginal issues (e.g. exactly where to draw the line between defamation of a politician vs. protected opinions about that politician just doesn't matter much: there are lots of possible lines, and most are just fine). The more fundamental issues are broadly similar - and deeply unhealthy - in all western countries.
disown 6y ago
> American individualism so often deflects the responsibility of dealing with such trauma on those who are subjected to this kind of harassment because it's not impacting the vast majority of the population ("not my problem"). It's not individualism, it's constitutional rights. The idea of american individualism is not true. We are a collectivist people - racial, native vs foreign born, protestant vs catholic, confederates vs union, etc. > but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech. Don't they arrest people for their dog's salute or symbols right? Europe is far closer to orwellian nightmare than the US I'd say. > In fact, has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US? "Last five years". And what happened? > The worse that harassment gets online, I believe the more segmented and walled off and commercialized the internet will become. No. As sneaky politically driven people use the death of children to demand censorship, that's when the internet will become more segmented, walled off and commercialized. People like you are why there is ever more censorship, segmentation and commercialization. Clutching your pearls and screaming about the children while you only care about political censorship. Do you ever clutch your pearls and cry over the millions of children who are killed in wars? Or do you only cry for them when they serve your political agenda? It can't be an accident that in the last few years, a small but vocal contingent has used dead children at every opportunity to push for more censorship.
- Technically 6y ago
  • Constitutional rights are so commonly understood to be individualist that you see the same reasoning applied to justifying not wearing of masks. In reality the bill of rights is interpreted in a legal context that allows for collectivization of rights, but culturally there's a strong tie to individual liberty that I am shocked someone could deny with a straight face. • You seem to be conflating collectivism with tribalism. Antagonistic and in/out group relations are not necessary for or equivalent to collectivization. Making the two agree is the whole point of "internationalism". • Collectivization necessarily implies that the distribution of equity aligns with the needs of the collective. This is trivially false for all of the ways you've chosen to divvy up society into tribal groups except, I guess, catholicism vs protestantism (which I barely see as a dynamic here anyway). More generally I think you are right, there are great instances of collectivization in the US: I'm not seeing them in your examples, though! The Postal Service, the Public School & Public Library culture are fantastic examples. Even the famously anti-socialist right can be quite collectivized if you look at how, economically, individuals distribute resources to their friends, family, community, "tribe", etc. Arguably many churches in American Christianity foster very collectivized approaches to resource distribution—I know I grew up working my church's food pantry.... However, if we as americans look in a mirror, we are trained to only see ourselves as individuals or part of small isolated groups or "tribes", not as a cell of some larger, functioning, rational, identifiable whole america.
forest_dweller 6y ago
> It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech. They are though. You must not have been paying attention. In the UK we are locking up 7 people a day over "hate speech". The most egergious example is the Chelsea Russell case. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 These laws were sold to us under the guise of "Locking up Islamic Extremists". Now we are putting ankle braclets on 17 year old girls for posting gangsta rap lyrics. We also have the "Non Crime Hate Incident". Where you can be put on a naughty list for saying the wrong thing on twitter. These can stop you from finding employment as you will show up on a background check. You have broken no law but you are treated as if you have. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-51501202 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-51501202 He won in court. But they wouldn't actually review the legislation which is the real problem. Comedians have been investigated for making jokes about Turkish politicians. https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-asks-germany-to-prosecute-comedian-for-insulting-erdogan/a-19177479 https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-asks-germany-to-prosecute-comed... You are foolish if these laws won't be used against the population at large. Look up the term "Anarcho Tyranny".
- emn13 6y ago
  Do you really think the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 case is egregious? The punishment is meaningful, but hardly life or career changing. Just because something has been said in rap lyrics does not mean it's OK to say in all contexts. Do you know the context and what she said? Surely it's conceivable that what she said really was harmful to community. Consider why free speech exists: to protect public debate and essentially hold up the light of transparency to power - clearly there's no trivially obvious line to draw that will protect only that speech, nor a trivially obvious line to draw that will protect all non-harmful speech. So when a society, in a healthy debate not too different to the one we're having now chooses to draw the line somewhere between those too extremes: that's just fine. Personally, I think the US protects speech that simply undermines society (and the US), and that doing so is at worst self-destructive, and at best irrelevant. Yes, we need to protect speech - but we don't need to pretend the line between constructive speech and hate speech is terribly subtle, nor that there is going to be some kind of chilling effect from rules like this. Do you feel threatened by this court outcome? No, right? I do agree that some of the laws are bad, for instance the law in Germany that protected Turkish politicians from well-deserved criticism. As I hear it, they think that in Germany too: this law isn't some new development by thought-controller wannabe's, it's a bad law on the books that's rarely enforced and that's quite-old; pre WW2. Put in on the pile of failings of the Weimar republic. It's not a small pile. Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares. If anything, the real threat isn't Orwell's 1984, it's A Brave New World: a populace that chooses to close its eyes to the truth by simple social feedback loops that reinforce groupthink as opposed to critical examination. If you like literary references, we need to remove our machine-learned equivalent's of Dr. Strangelove's CRM 114 discriminators. To protect discourse, we need to shape the environment it happens in to steer those feedback loops away from outrage-inducing echo chambers that filter our perception of the world to distinguish us from politically others -and instead towards truth-enhancing critical thought. Ideally, all without a central, abusable source of power: sure! But the alternative shouldn't be that we're all forced to inhabit balkanized bubbles of media, carefully curated to be free of all of those pesky facts that might undermine a firmly held opinion.
wmf 6y ago
Fundamentally, I believe that everyone has the right to not be subjected to death threats and systemic harassment from hate and conspiracy groups I've thought about this problem and there may be solutions (and even profitable business) based on existing harassment laws, but AFAIK no one has tried it. Imagine scaling the Hulk Hogan lawsuit using "copyright troll" style tactics. This could create a "scared straight" deterrent effect on harmful social media.
arminiusreturns 6y ago
> but (...) truly people need to be responsible for what they post online. I strongly disagree. Anonymity is an important and integral part of the internet and the free speech it enables. Moving towards this sort of thing will only be used for abuse and censorship. It saddens me how much this has become an accepted position, even on hn, and I'm quite tired of all the justifications for giving up important rights, anonymity is closely related to privacy for example, just because of some scarey boogeyman of the day. Anonymity offers the ability to criticize entities (governments, corporations, people), to communicate in ways more freely than otherwise, to discuss personal issues without fear, to have a presence online without stalkers or other abusers attack, it also avoids the most common rhetorical abuse I see, which is overreliance on argument from authority by separating the identity of the person making the argument from the argument itself, and I could go on. I could go on... Do you really think the vast amount of negatives that come with your proposal would be worth the tradeoff? https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 [1] 1. "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration. On the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a lawyer in private practice named Stewart Baker who had been chief council to the National Security Agency, our listeners, and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became, later on, the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and has much to do with what happened in our network after 2001. At any rate, the four of us spent two pleasant hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end there was a little dinner party at the Harvard faculty club, and at the end, after all the food had been taken away and just the port and the walnuts were left on the table, Stuart said, “All right, among us now that we are all in private, just us girls, I’ll let our hair down.” He didn’t have much hair even then, but he let it down. “We are not going to prosecute your client, Mr. Zimmermann," he said. “Public key encryption will become available. We fought a long, losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic.” And then he looked around the room and he said, ”But nobody cares about anonymity, do they?" And a cold chill went up my spine and I thought, all right, Stuart, and now I know you’re going to spend the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and we’ll see how it goes. And it’s going badly. We didn’t build the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake. Now we are paying for it." -Eben Moglen
jariel 6y ago
Politicians are public figures, if someone wants to call them a 'traitor' and/or 'oaf' to their friends, that's fine. If people are harassing each other, well, there are laws for that too.
herbst 6y ago
For many of us beeing not allowed to blame people with specific (usually way to generalized) slurs does not exactly lessen our ability for free speech. Imo this perception is only drawn on us by americans.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I just don't see the equivalence here. I agree that platforms have a responsibility not to enable harassment and death threats, but calling a politician "traitor", "corrupt", "fascist" is neither of those things. What are you supposed to do when a politician is corrupt or fascist, if you aren't allowed to talk about it?

damnencryption 6y ago
Politicians can only be good or neutral.
alpaca128 6y ago
> What are you supposed to do when a politician is corrupt or fascist, if you aren't allowed to talk about it? In the same country (Austria) a court actually ruled that a certain right-wing politician can be said to be close to nazi ideology due to the existing evidence. So, you are allowed to talk about it, but you might get problems if you don't have a basis for your claims.
- bigbubba 6y ago
  So in Austria you're not allowed to insult a politician unless a court agrees with your insult? That's incredibly fascist.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    This isn't specific to politicians. Calling someone a fascist in public(meaning 10+ witnesses I think) is considered defamation and, yes, if you cannot prove such claims it can have consequences. Note that this does not apply to just any kind of insult as you say. It's for cases when it's considered harmful for one's public image, as usual with defamation. I've never heard of a simple "Idiot!" leading to any consequences. I don't know why it's "incredibly fascist" to win a defamation case when someone called you a fascist in the open. Though I do admit that it's hard to draw a clear line with these things, and there are arguments for both sides as long as it doesn't steer towards censorship.
    - bxk1 6y ago
      These things could easily end up in ECHR, because a "fascist", just like an "idiot", could be considered an opinion, judgement, not a fact and so it cannot be false, unless it means something very specific in Austria.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US? None of those people are in jail. And that regime, despite its best efforts, is being peacefully removed from power. America is the world’s oldest [EDIT: large, old] extant democracy. I wouldn’t lightly consider toying with something so basic as free speech. Several European and Asian democracies are already teetering towards authoritarianism, the first step of which is curtailing public debate.

bitwize 6y ago
> America is the world’s oldest extant democracy. That would be San Marino. The U.S. Constitution is the oldest constitution still in force. But we're still pretty young as democracies go. Hell, we haven't even been around as long as one of the first libertarian states, the Icelandic Commonwealth, was.
- pjc50 6y ago
  San Marino has only been a democracy since, what, after the Italian revolution? It is a uniquely old microstate, though. (Another line of counter-argument is that the US wasn't a democracy until the civil rights act...)
save_ferris 6y ago
> America is the world’s oldest [EDIT: large, old] extant democracy. Nothing about our history guarantees our future as a democracy, this is hot hand fallacy at its finest. If there's one thing that's consistent across human history, civilizations always fail at some point. > I wouldn’t lightly consider toying with something so basic as free speech. Several European and Asian democracies are already teetering towards authoritarianism, the first step of which is curtailing public debate. Free speech existed prior to the internet, it's not like Tim Berners-Lee changes the world and all of a sudden free speech exists. Canada has much stricter free speech laws than the US and their political discourse seems to be just fine. Plus there are already plenty of restrictions baked into "free speech" online. You can't threaten to shoot up a school on social media without consequences, why can't the same principles be applied to people who make death threats towards individuals? Companies already have the ability to lock you out of your account for no reason whatsoever without any defined arbitration system. What about the internet is so truly sacrosanct that we permit such inconsistency from corporate governance while railing against legal protections mandated by governments? Free speech is already being messed with; it's being used to automate the virality of hate speech with ruthless efficiency.

michaelscott 6y ago

> has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US? There have been probing tests of the nature of free speech laws in a number of countries outside the US in recent years, notably the potential transgender pronoun compulsion laws that landed Jordan Peterson in trouble in Canada, as well as a number of tried or in trial cases in places like the UK[0] and Australia[1]. It's a difficult line to draw, as threats of violence and general harassment clearly shouldn't be allowed or tolerated. I'm not sure the trend that these other Western nations are attempting to follow is necessarily good either though, as some veer dangerously close to thought policing. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/dec/27/battle-lines-drawn-as-a-crop-of-free-speech-cases-come-before-high-court https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/dec/27/battle-lines-dra...

alpaca128 6y ago
> notably the potential transgender pronoun compulsion laws Which, in my opinion, go clearly a step farther than just censoring offensive language. I can understand the latter to some degree, but forcing people to replace certain words in their communication only differs from Orwell's dystopia in the size of the dictionary. It's a dilemma: huge communities like Facebook cannot really be moderated effectively and are a fertile ground for disinformation, conspiracy theories and spreading hate. At the same time we don't want to limit speech more than absolutely necessary. To me it's clear we simply are not (yet?) mentally prepared for information exchange and communities in this global magnitude. It can be positive when followers of a niche hobby can get together, but the same mechanism is dangerous in contact with targeted disinformation campaigns and cults.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > but forcing people to replace certain words in their communication only differs from Orwell's dystopia in the size of the dictionary. It's dystopian that people can't hurl the N-word at each other?
  - 6y ago

beervirus 6y ago

> It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech. Funny to see this comment in a thread about a European regulator attempting to censor, worldwide, criticism of some politician.

notahacker 6y ago
I mean, I'm sure there are many things about Austrian politics which are less than ideal, but I'm not convinced a lawsuit and series of appeals taking three years to decide that a claim that a Green Party member was a fascist and a traitor was defamatory was quite the dystopia Orwell had in mind. (And Orwell lived in a country with strong libel laws, which his publisher was constantly worried about his own writings falling foul of and he was very happy to encourage his publisher to worry about more when the libellous comments were made abut him)

emn13 6y ago

The arguments that the kind of speech referred to in the article is worth defending are really weak. Sure: there is no question that free speech in general is a useful tool in increasing transparency and thus public enlightenment - thus protections in general aren't in question. Yet the defenders of absolute or unconditional protection repeatedly - as in this article - make remarkably poorly supported claims. The first poorly supported claim is that because it's supported in the US, it's worth supporting. This is just weird; frankly. If US laws were perfect, society would be a lot more stable, and you might as well abolish congress. Clearly, laws are not perfect; and where there are regional legal differences, you should not assume the US protections make sense - nor in fact that either approach makes sense. It's frankly irrelevant what US law is on the topic of what protected speech should be. The second, and more fundamental error in reasoning is that somehow a slippery slope applies, or by extension that you can't expect a court (or other control mechanism) to be able to tell harmful speech from constructive speech. Obviously, there will be some corner-cases where decisions will be essentially arbitrary - but that applies in any system, including the US. But what's not at all obvious is that those close calls actually happen very often, nor that they matter much when they do. There's usually wide, clear distinction between what's essentially malicious deception (as in this case) and possible truths that deserve protection. In practice it just doesn't happen all that often that something is possibly both. Here too: you could argue whether or not the posts in question are harmful enough to deserve a ban; but there's no argument that they were truthful and worth protecting; they clearly were not. To summarize: the idea that legal controls on deception or defamation will to a meaningful extent do collateral damage to free speech which increases transparency simply does not appear to be true. Sure, a despot could do both, but a normal society can choose not to do that just fine too. The third (implicit) reasoning flaw is that what we have today is actually free speech. This misunderstanding rests on several pillars. Firstly we should not ignore harms caused by libel laws, especially in a country like the US, where legal costs can be punishment alone, regardless of legal victory, and where legal standards differ by state allowing jurisdiction shopping. Secondly, we should realize that speech needs protection from power in general, not specifically government alone. Much later modern-style free speech developed into a roughly modern form, corporations evolved. Corporations may deserve some protection from the government, but they themselves wield enormous power too, and speech needs protection from their interference too. Finally, the protections we do have are quite... abstract. They're not sufficient to protect speech in practice, not by a long shot - just witness how abominably whistle-blowers are treated. Rather than the essence of communication and transparency being protected, we protect technicalities. We may not technically live under a massive censorship regime, but that's just because we've interpreted self-censorship and corporate control as being something fundamentally different - and that's dangerous, because we're not protecting speech as some kind of academic exercise to create aesthetically pleasing laws; we're doing it to protect public discourse and transparency. And we're not doing that as is. We really need to move towards a healthy debate on free speech itself. The principle is clearly sound, but our implementation of it is equally clearly not sound. And that holds true just as much in other countries; this isn't some US-specific problem - because pretty much anywhere in the west it's OK to lie about (say) vaccine dangers without any repercussions even though evidence-free conspiracies of that kind do real harm to everyone in society. Yet if you defame someone - just one person! Well, that's apparently not OK, we need to protect individuals from libel? Even if there's any sense in that (I doubt it), it sure doesn't appear to do us much good regardless. There's a reason why e.g. plutocrats such as Putin thought it was worth interfering in foreign public opinion: precisely because he thought freedom of speech does not work well in the countries he tried to manipulate; freedom of speech would not prevent malicious lies from spreading through the public. And you know what? Putin's right. As such, while it's fair contrast the US approach to that of others, I think doing so is akin to worrying about really marginal issues (e.g. exactly where to draw the line between defamation of a politician vs. protected opinions about that politician just doesn't matter much: there are lots of possible lines, and most are just fine). The more fundamental issues are broadly similar - and deeply unhealthy - in all western countries.

disown 6y ago

> American individualism so often deflects the responsibility of dealing with such trauma on those who are subjected to this kind of harassment because it's not impacting the vast majority of the population ("not my problem"). It's not individualism, it's constitutional rights. The idea of american individualism is not true. We are a collectivist people - racial, native vs foreign born, protestant vs catholic, confederates vs union, etc. > but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech. Don't they arrest people for their dog's salute or symbols right? Europe is far closer to orwellian nightmare than the US I'd say. > In fact, has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US? "Last five years". And what happened? > The worse that harassment gets online, I believe the more segmented and walled off and commercialized the internet will become. No. As sneaky politically driven people use the death of children to demand censorship, that's when the internet will become more segmented, walled off and commercialized. People like you are why there is ever more censorship, segmentation and commercialization. Clutching your pearls and screaming about the children while you only care about political censorship. Do you ever clutch your pearls and cry over the millions of children who are killed in wars? Or do you only cry for them when they serve your political agenda? It can't be an accident that in the last few years, a small but vocal contingent has used dead children at every opportunity to push for more censorship.

Technically 6y ago
• Constitutional rights are so commonly understood to be individualist that you see the same reasoning applied to justifying not wearing of masks. In reality the bill of rights is interpreted in a legal context that allows for collectivization of rights, but culturally there's a strong tie to individual liberty that I am shocked someone could deny with a straight face. • You seem to be conflating collectivism with tribalism. Antagonistic and in/out group relations are not necessary for or equivalent to collectivization. Making the two agree is the whole point of "internationalism". • Collectivization necessarily implies that the distribution of equity aligns with the needs of the collective. This is trivially false for all of the ways you've chosen to divvy up society into tribal groups except, I guess, catholicism vs protestantism (which I barely see as a dynamic here anyway). More generally I think you are right, there are great instances of collectivization in the US: I'm not seeing them in your examples, though! The Postal Service, the Public School & Public Library culture are fantastic examples. Even the famously anti-socialist right can be quite collectivized if you look at how, economically, individuals distribute resources to their friends, family, community, "tribe", etc. Arguably many churches in American Christianity foster very collectivized approaches to resource distribution—I know I grew up working my church's food pantry.... However, if we as americans look in a mirror, we are trained to only see ourselves as individuals or part of small isolated groups or "tribes", not as a cell of some larger, functioning, rational, identifiable whole america.

forest_dweller 6y ago

> It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech. They are though. You must not have been paying attention. In the UK we are locking up 7 people a day over "hate speech". The most egergious example is the Chelsea Russell case. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 These laws were sold to us under the guise of "Locking up Islamic Extremists". Now we are putting ankle braclets on 17 year old girls for posting gangsta rap lyrics. We also have the "Non Crime Hate Incident". Where you can be put on a naughty list for saying the wrong thing on twitter. These can stop you from finding employment as you will show up on a background check. You have broken no law but you are treated as if you have. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-51501202 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-51501202 He won in court. But they wouldn't actually review the legislation which is the real problem. Comedians have been investigated for making jokes about Turkish politicians. https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-asks-germany-to-prosecute-comedian-for-insulting-erdogan/a-19177479 https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-asks-germany-to-prosecute-comed... You are foolish if these laws won't be used against the population at large. Look up the term "Anarcho Tyranny".

emn13 6y ago
Do you really think the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 case is egregious? The punishment is meaningful, but hardly life or career changing. Just because something has been said in rap lyrics does not mean it's OK to say in all contexts. Do you know the context and what she said? Surely it's conceivable that what she said really was harmful to community. Consider why free speech exists: to protect public debate and essentially hold up the light of transparency to power - clearly there's no trivially obvious line to draw that will protect only that speech, nor a trivially obvious line to draw that will protect all non-harmful speech. So when a society, in a healthy debate not too different to the one we're having now chooses to draw the line somewhere between those too extremes: that's just fine. Personally, I think the US protects speech that simply undermines society (and the US), and that doing so is at worst self-destructive, and at best irrelevant. Yes, we need to protect speech - but we don't need to pretend the line between constructive speech and hate speech is terribly subtle, nor that there is going to be some kind of chilling effect from rules like this. Do you feel threatened by this court outcome? No, right? I do agree that some of the laws are bad, for instance the law in Germany that protected Turkish politicians from well-deserved criticism. As I hear it, they think that in Germany too: this law isn't some new development by thought-controller wannabe's, it's a bad law on the books that's rarely enforced and that's quite-old; pre WW2. Put in on the pile of failings of the Weimar republic. It's not a small pile. Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares. If anything, the real threat isn't Orwell's 1984, it's A Brave New World: a populace that chooses to close its eyes to the truth by simple social feedback loops that reinforce groupthink as opposed to critical examination. If you like literary references, we need to remove our machine-learned equivalent's of Dr. Strangelove's CRM 114 discriminators. To protect discourse, we need to shape the environment it happens in to steer those feedback loops away from outrage-inducing echo chambers that filter our perception of the world to distinguish us from politically others -and instead towards truth-enhancing critical thought. Ideally, all without a central, abusable source of power: sure! But the alternative shouldn't be that we're all forced to inhabit balkanized bubbles of media, carefully curated to be free of all of those pesky facts that might undermine a firmly held opinion.

wmf 6y ago

Fundamentally, I believe that everyone has the right to not be subjected to death threats and systemic harassment from hate and conspiracy groups I've thought about this problem and there may be solutions (and even profitable business) based on existing harassment laws, but AFAIK no one has tried it. Imagine scaling the Hulk Hogan lawsuit using "copyright troll" style tactics. This could create a "scared straight" deterrent effect on harmful social media.

arminiusreturns 6y ago

> but (...) truly people need to be responsible for what they post online. I strongly disagree. Anonymity is an important and integral part of the internet and the free speech it enables. Moving towards this sort of thing will only be used for abuse and censorship. It saddens me how much this has become an accepted position, even on hn, and I'm quite tired of all the justifications for giving up important rights, anonymity is closely related to privacy for example, just because of some scarey boogeyman of the day. Anonymity offers the ability to criticize entities (governments, corporations, people), to communicate in ways more freely than otherwise, to discuss personal issues without fear, to have a presence online without stalkers or other abusers attack, it also avoids the most common rhetorical abuse I see, which is overreliance on argument from authority by separating the identity of the person making the argument from the argument itself, and I could go on. I could go on... Do you really think the vast amount of negatives that come with your proposal would be worth the tradeoff? https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 https://youtu.be/sKOk4Y4inVY?t=518 [1] 1. "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration. On the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a lawyer in private practice named Stewart Baker who had been chief council to the National Security Agency, our listeners, and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became, later on, the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and has much to do with what happened in our network after 2001. At any rate, the four of us spent two pleasant hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end there was a little dinner party at the Harvard faculty club, and at the end, after all the food had been taken away and just the port and the walnuts were left on the table, Stuart said, “All right, among us now that we are all in private, just us girls, I’ll let our hair down.” He didn’t have much hair even then, but he let it down. “We are not going to prosecute your client, Mr. Zimmermann," he said. “Public key encryption will become available. We fought a long, losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic.” And then he looked around the room and he said, ”But nobody cares about anonymity, do they?" And a cold chill went up my spine and I thought, all right, Stuart, and now I know you’re going to spend the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and we’ll see how it goes. And it’s going badly. We didn’t build the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake. Now we are paying for it." -Eben Moglen

jariel 6y ago

Politicians are public figures, if someone wants to call them a 'traitor' and/or 'oaf' to their friends, that's fine. If people are harassing each other, well, there are laws for that too.

herbst 6y ago

For many of us beeing not allowed to blame people with specific (usually way to generalized) slurs does not exactly lessen our ability for free speech. Imo this perception is only drawn on us by americans.