France passes law forcing online platforms to delete hate-speech within 24 hours • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by axegon_ » Thu, May 14, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

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...

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

#52

Post by renewiltord » Thu, May 14, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

trianglem wrote: post #23

opinion-is-bad wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anything you cannot biologically change is hate speech. It’s not complicated and it’s objective.

I look forward to the compliant version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paralympic_Games

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

#53

Post by spacephysics » Thu, May 14, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #14

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #2

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?

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).

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-... "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 "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.

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

#54

Post by akersten » Thu, May 14, 2020, 9:45 PM UTC

henearkr wrote: post #40

akersten wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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...

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.

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

#55

Post by henearkr » Thu, May 14, 2020, 9:47 PM UTC

superflit wrote: post #38

olivermarks wrote: post #31

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 effectiv…

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 " 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 offe…

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".

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

#56

Post by ghostwriter » Thu, May 14, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

trianglem wrote: post #23

opinion-is-bad wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anything you cannot biologically change is hate speech. It’s not complicated and it’s objective.

With this law in place, your (or anybody else's) stance on what constitutes hate speech or whether it's objective doesn't matter at all. What matters is who is in charge of defining and applying these policies, and you wouldn't have noticed how you'd become a criminal one day. Capisce?

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

#57

Post by akersten » Thu, May 14, 2020, 9:52 PM UTC

qball wrote: post #34

aspenmayer wrote: post #3

'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

>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…

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.

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

#58

Post by filoleg » Thu, May 14, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

nickff wrote: post #32

centimeter wrote: post #12

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…

There is a third possible 'end state', which is that each restrictive country with a large market ends up in a 'sandbox'. This could look a lot like the Great Firewall, but outsourced.

Given enough time, this is just simply the end-result of option 1.

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

#59

Post by wiml » Thu, May 14, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

Following some links back from that article reaches this: 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.

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

#60

Post by II2II » Thu, May 14, 2020, 9:55 PM UTC

ve55 wrote: post #11

toron123 wrote: post #9

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.

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

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.