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Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

derstandard.at

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Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#111

Post by codedokode »

lazyjones wrote: post #54
starbugs wrote: post #8

Could anyone shed some light on which problem this is supposed to solve exactly and what triggered it in the first place in Austria right now? Have there been any issues caused by anonymous posts recently? Maybe I'm just living under a rock, but my feeling was that the main issues we're currently facing stem from political distortion caused by populism misusing platform mechanisms to spread misinformation. I don't se…

> Could anyone shed some light on which problem this is supposed to solve exactly and what triggered it in the first place in Austria right now? Existing hate-speech legislation allows persecution of users already, but in some cases the offenders hide too well or Facebook does not cooperate with authorities. Online newspaper forums are also now full of professionally organized dirt campaigns, sometimes tolerated by l…

Isn't it enough just to remove those comments?

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#112

Post by peletiah »

namlem wrote: post #94
rmu09 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was triggered by a defamation lawsuit where a former female MP was being harrassed via facebook, made the harassement public via twitter, and subsequently sued by the owner of the facebook account. She lost the lawsuit and was ordered to pay damages. The court found that the owner of the facebook account is not necessarily the harasser, so making the harassement public is libel. Of course this case was only a we…

Are civil cases not based on preponderance of evidence in Austria? It seem like a fuck up of the court than a problem of internet anonymity.

The case was never about anonymous hate-postings as the harasser's comments where posted under his real name, he just claimed that other people had access to his facebook-account. The case has been overruled by the higher instance a few weeks ago. I don't agree that this was the trigger for this law, the current gov consists of two right-populist parties/movements and made other irrational decisions in the past.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#113

Post by yorwba »

pjc50 wrote: post #79
rmu09 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was triggered by a defamation lawsuit where a former female MP was being harrassed via facebook, made the harassement public via twitter, and subsequently sued by the owner of the facebook account. She lost the lawsuit and was ordered to pay damages. The court found that the owner of the facebook account is not necessarily the harasser, so making the harassement public is libel. Of course this case was only a we…

That seems like an absolutely nonsensical outcome from the court. Does anyone have the court transcript? (yes I'm aware of the risks of reading machine translated legal German, but it would be interesting to know) (I see that Facebook's ineffective harassment policy is at the root of this again)

The decision was apparently invalidated by a higher court and the trial has to be repeated: https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2019-03/sigri...

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#116

Post by masswerk »

founderling wrote: post #107

Users of online forums in Austria will have to provide operators with their true identities or risk fines that could run into the millions. How trustworthy is a publication where the very first sentence of an article is nonsense? Users do not risk being fined millions. The webmasters will.

The original German version has it somewhat right by just associating potential consequences after an indent. This is just a case of lost in translation.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#117

Post by Intermernet »

gxwmg wrote: post #87
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OeVP current platform is to curb rights of immigrants, to reduce social support systems, lowers corporate tax rates, introduces laws to restrict social housing to non immigrants, reduces child support payments for children in other EU countries, continues the policy on border controls in Schengen, restricts skilled immigration, sets a maximum limit of 1.5 euro per hour income for asylum seekers when doing social…

But do the ÖVP actually do that? I'm Spanish and I voted for a "conservative" government this last election, where they promised to do, well, stuff I expected from a conservative party, and they didn't do shit. That's why I call them "centrist". They say they are conservatives, but they don't conserve anything.

What specifically would you like them to conserve? I find conservatism confusing because the specific base state that apparently needs to be conserved differs from person to person. Do you want to go back to feudalism? Do you want to go back to the bronze age? Or do you just want to go back to when the literacy rate was below 50%? Conservatism needs to be specific in its goals otherwise it only represents a desire for a purely unchanging society.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#118

Post by masswerk »

lazyjones wrote: post #105
masswerk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this is intended for international audiences, it maybe worth stating that "left-leaning" is what was considered center just a few years ago. (The idea of a general consent is somewhat a thing of a past.) Particularly "Der Standard", the newspaper the post is linking to, is now often attributed as "left" and its forum, the biggest and oldest one in Austria is subject to diffamation. (If you're reading the commen…

> it maybe worth stating that "left-leaning" is what was considered center just a few years ago. Please don't attempt to change the meaning of my post with your own interpretation. When I write "left-leaning", I mean exactly that.

Where are there any "left-leaning" public posts of notice in Austria? This isn't the 1970s anymore, when there were actual Maoists… "Left-leaning" is now somewhat of a contested concept and there is no common consent on its meaning – which is what I was trying to point out.

Re: Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties

#119

Post by codedokode »

stdclass wrote: post #12

The funny thing is, they have a threshold of 100.000 users that must be registered at the site. So a site like unzensuriert.at (like breitbart in the US) which is a right leaning / government favourable website will not fall under such a law and won't get penalties.

If the government will decide whom to prosecute then of course, pro-government websites won't have any problems no matter how many users they have. Laws like this are usually made to be applied selectively.
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