Leaked white paper proposes U.S. Congressional regulation of social media

The public airwaves are regulated by the FCC. There is no reason to pay broadcasters to prevent some candidate from becoming elected.

"Einer allein von 2000 Million Menschen der Erde darf in Deutschland nicht reden" => "He alone from 2000 million humans on earth isn't allowed to speak in Germany." - propaganda of the NS.

We had hate speech laws since we had an emperor. Freedom of opinion is one of the most fundamental rights in modern Germany.

It's not just about The Pentagon Papers and Wikileaks. It's about people being able to point out banal incompetence and small scale corruption so it can be corrected without being retaliated against by petty members of the city government with egg on their face, even when there are no journalists willing to take the small story.

It's not even just about whistleblowing. When you have to write everything knowing your mother, your boss and every busybody in the PTA will probably read it, people are going to self-censor.

And then there's this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/07/twitter-t...

> Anonymous leaks are still best presented by a journalist that's willing to vet the info and put their name on it.

Journalist is not a title of nobility, it's anyone engaged in that specific activity.

To do what you're asking, a source would need to anonymously send the information to different prospective journalists until one has the resources and willingness to vet and publish it, in parallel if it's at all time sensitive. In other words, the source needs the ability to send information anonymously to an arbitrarily large number of people with no formal credentials. Who then themselves need the ability to anonymously pass it on to arbitrarily many others who they think might have more resources or be more willing to formally attach themselves to something with risk of retaliation by powerful forces.

Which is basically a description of anonymous social media.

> What anonymity does do to social media is muddy the waters to a great degree. Online discourse is now built on bad faith, because of the lack of consequence and reputation.

We already have the ability to verify identities. We know that @ggreenwald on Twitter is Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept because it says so on the official web page of The Intercept.

Nothing stops anyone from only reading things written by people with verified identities. If you don't like anonymous or pseudonymous speech then why are you listening to it? Instead what you're proposing is to prohibit everyone else from hearing it. Which is never something anyone should get to decide for everyone else.

I have provided you with actual legally traceable citations to law and their implementations. You cited a propaganda poster.

You are conflating a regime of arbitrary censorship with specific and nuanced legislation that was implemented as a direct result of Nazism. To argue that the basis of Germany's contemporary hate speech laws, including the most recent legislation regarding social media, is not a direct result of Germany's experience with Nazism is delusional.

http://www.ecaj.org.au/2014/critics-of-section-18c-get-histo...

> there was no equivalent of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in the Weimar Germany. The only laws against hate speech were criminal offences, not civil remedies. Weimar Germany had nothing equivalent to the framework which currently exists under the Racial Discrimination Act within which complaints of racial vilification have, in the vast majority of cases, been successfully conciliated through the Australian Human Rights Commission or resolved by direct negotiations between the parties.

> In Weimar Germany, the absence of civil remedies was made worse by the fact that the relevant criminal offences were honeycombed with immunities for members of the Reichstag, the German Parliament. Nazi members of Parliament became the nominal publishers of single or multiple antisemitic publications. This facade meant that no one could be prosecuted for the hate crimes perpetrated by the publications. The Reichstag could waive immunity for its members, but did so rarely.