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In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

economist.com

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Re: In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

#151

Post by hardwires »

anigbrowl wrote: post #146
hardwires wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> But it isn't fair to still judge people born in a country where some of their grand(grand)parents did bad things. I'm not doing that. I'm pointing out that it is laughable to believe that German society could "teach our manners and morals" to the "foreigners" conducting business here. The German society didn't create Nazism out of nothing, the (repressed) superiority complex is still very strong, only now the schi…

It sounds like your argument is 'people should ignore our laws against hate speech because we're the people who brought about WW2 and the holocaust, so you shouldn't trust us on this stuff.' Of more simply 'ignore laws that aim at preventing a repeat of a crime because of the commission of that crime.' ¯\(°_o)/¯

I'm sorry, your analysis is incorrect.

I'm not talking about this fantastic new hate-speech law per se, I'm talking about the broader attitude in Germany where we just expect foreign business to gratefully deal with all of our bullshit, because we really are a bunch of narrow-headed cultural hegemonists.

Imagine if Turkey asked Facebook to enforce Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The reaction in Germany would be widespread ridicule, probably by some of the same people that demand this new law enforced because it's German law.

Re: In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

#152

Post by RaleyField »

RaleyField wrote: post #138
Tomte wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing missing for enforcement was Facebook respecting our laws. They simply said „none of our officers is living in Germany, so fuck off“. Now we‘ve added a way to make them hurt. Financially. And I see virtually everyone in the net freedom circles objecting to FB deleting illegal posts. Because our laws are unjust, you see. Only American laws count. We really need to teach Facebook, Twitter, Uber, AirBNB and all…

> Because our laws are unjust, you see. Maybe you should entertain the idea that they are? It wouldn't be the first time. And what if every country had the same long arm attitude of pushing their opinions on foreign companies?

To people downvoting - you are all a bunch of morons. And e.g. this is an insult that is sanctionable under section 185 of german criminal code as it is mentioned in the new NetzDG act which would make ycombinator liable to 5m€ fine should they fail to remove it under certain circumstances. This is why the law is unjust. Now even though I don't reside in or don't use services from companies residing in Germany I'm strongly encouraged to refrain from pointing out morons amongst you because state actors are strong-arming companies they shouldn't have jurisdiction over.

Re: In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

#153

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #71
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a decision made to limit your constitutional freedoms due to legal obligations towards the public. That is very much the definition of a criminal case. Your words.

Yes, thanks, but I am aware of the analogies I use. Are you actually confused about the fact that Facebook is not actually a court, and thus by definition whatever Facebook does is not actually a "criminal case", and that thus my point is not about whether or not what Facebook does would be referred to by a legal scholar as a "criminal case", but about whether it quacks like a criminal case, it walks like a criminal…

I'm not confused about the fact that Facebook is not a court and does not have the ability to impose a criminal sentence, and the ensuing criminal record.

Re: In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

#155

Post by sctb »

stijnh wrote: post #51

Advocating for multiculturalism and immigration (i.e. the replacement of native Germans) seems to me to be a bigger hate crime than the resistance to it.

This breaks the commenting guidelines here.

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

#156

Post by blablabla123 »

paulddraper wrote: post #110
blablabla123 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, obviously the law is not well designed and at least in some aspects redundant. I mean there was this popular Heise case (the German publisher) where it was clearly stated that Heise is responsible if people do violations against the Hate Speech law. On the other hand the law got there because sites like Facebook - and yes also Heise - do a questionable job at handling racist content. And there are tools beyond…

> I mean...HN has such a simple solution for this, the rating button Simple indeed. This rating system must why it is so rare to see objectionable content on social media like Reddit.

I mean common instrumentation available is: yes rating button, real name, mandatory picture, verified picture, verified identity, friends feature, high visibility of friend feeds, public-only communication, admins... Social web services of any sort implement some combination of these.

Reddit implements only a rating button as far as I know. (Sorry not a regular user, but I bet it has one or two other mechanism to prevent people from posting complete trash regularly.)

Actually before Facebook become popular, almost all social media platforms were practically anonymous. In the middle of the 90s this worked IMHO quite well because only few people had access anyway. So you could see that Forums, chats etc became trashier. Facebook came up with real identity profiles (real name, picture etc etc), so the quality of content and contacts got exceptionally high for social media.

I guess another leap in this direction might become necessary. Not sure what this would be, but if we don't want state to babysit our social networks, the site operators better come up with innovations in that area.

Re: In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

#157

Post by anigbrowl »

hardwires wrote: post #151
anigbrowl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your argument is 'people should ignore our laws against hate speech because we're the people who brought about WW2 and the holocaust, so you shouldn't trust us on this stuff.' Of more simply 'ignore laws that aim at preventing a repeat of a crime because of the commission of that crime.' ¯\(°_o)/¯

I'm sorry, your analysis is incorrect. I'm not talking about this fantastic new hate-speech law per se, I'm talking about the broader attitude in Germany where we just expect foreign business to gratefully deal with all of our bullshit, because we really are a bunch of narrow-headed cultural hegemonists. Imagine if Turkey asked Facebook to enforce Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The reaction in Germany would b…

I'm not talking about this fantastic new hate-speech law per se

Then you should have made your general point at the outset. Surely it's clear that the law applies to people providing services to consumers in Germany.

Imagine if Turkey asked Facebook to enforce Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code.

In Turkey? OK I guess. I haven't bothered to look up Article 301 or even whether it exists since I presume you're making a rhetorical point.

Re: In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

#158

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

hardwires wrote: post #151
anigbrowl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like your argument is 'people should ignore our laws against hate speech because we're the people who brought about WW2 and the holocaust, so you shouldn't trust us on this stuff.' Of more simply 'ignore laws that aim at preventing a repeat of a crime because of the commission of that crime.' ¯\(°_o)/¯

I'm sorry, your analysis is incorrect. I'm not talking about this fantastic new hate-speech law per se, I'm talking about the broader attitude in Germany where we just expect foreign business to gratefully deal with all of our bullshit, because we really are a bunch of narrow-headed cultural hegemonists. Imagine if Turkey asked Facebook to enforce Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code. The reaction in Germany would b…

You do understand that one can object to the enforcement of a specific law (whatever country it is from) because one objects to the content of the law without objecting to the idea that souvereign countries can and should generally enforce their laws on everyone who influences what happens within their borders, right?

Re: In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

#159

Post by tpm »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #149
tpm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think any judicial system in the world is - or could be - equipped to deal with millions of potentially criminal comments from a social network on a case per case basis you are deluding yourself. More than that, it would be a textcase of privatising profits and leaving the costs to pick up for everyone else, while facebook siphoons the profits to tax havens.

> If you think any judicial system in the world is - or could be - equipped to deal with millions of potentially criminal comments from a social network on a case per case basis you are deluding yourself. So, what's your point then? No judicial system possibly could, but Facebook can? Or Facebook can't either, so let's just ignore the constitution? > More than that, it would be a textcase of privatising profits and l…

Which constitution? The German one? I am sure they did not ignore it when writing this law, and if they did, someone will refer it to the BVerfG, which can then cancel the law. Anyway, private media (as opposed to public media, such as the BBC, ARD etc where the rules are very different) are not bound by laws or constitution to publish everything anyone throws at them. The corporations and individuals are free to do anything that is not forbidden by laws. So Facebook is free to decide what to publish, unless it is forbidden by law.

> Wut? Taxing Facebook more in order to finance an independent judicial system that takes care of the legal cases involving Facebook is a textbook case of privatising profits and externalising costs? I'm not sure I follow!?

Perhaps I missed where you mentioned raising taxes for Facebook as a solution. That's an interesting idea. I see two possible problems with that:

1) Facebook sells ads. Other companies sell ads. How do we decide who pays the higher tax and who not, and make it fair? For example, Google (sans Youtube and the irrelevant G+) is not a social network, but can still spread disinfo, hate speech etc. Should they pay the tax too?

2) Even if we had the money for such a judicial system, there is still the question of effectivity - the damage spreads very fast in this case, can we even design such a thing that provides good value for money while staying reasonably objective? And of course Facebook has the same problem now, as other private media (newspapers, TV stations) had before them - and the cheap solution seems to be to err on the side of caution. Are you soure we can do better?

I think it is correct, Facebook (and twitter, ...) extracts value from communication between citizens, and it looks like (e.g. from the Economist article mentiond above) also creates negative externalities that did not exist before.

Re: In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

#160

Post by anigbrowl »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #147
anigbrowl wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which speech acts are likely to incur legal sanction, exactly? What about the effects of those speech acts upon their subjects? The German approach is to hold the speaker liable for that cost. Some speech acts reduce the freedom of other people.

> Which speech acts are likely to incur legal sanction, exactly? This is not about legal legal sanction, but about de-facto legal sanction. By definition, Facebook is only exercising its property rights. But that doesn't change the fact that they do limit perfectly legal speech as a result of a law that forces them to decide whether a given speech act is illegal, thus putting them in the de-facto role of a court, jus…

It seems to me that Facebook is in the business of publishing people's comments and pictures on its platform in order to profit by displaying advertising next to them. As a publisher in the German market, it can be held to the same standard as any other publisher. You complain that the people making the decisions have no clue of the law, but nothing stops Facebook hiring German staff with the requisite legal knowledge to discharge that obligation, or alternatively declining to accept connections from German IP addresses.

Now that I have answered your points, please do me the courtesy of answering the question I posed above instead of deflecting it.

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