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A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

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Re: A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

#91
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several US based sites which allow nipple posting, if that's your thing.

There is a big difference between “treated as porn” versus “this part of anatomy is specially evolved to be inserted into the mouth of an infant, so we don’t care if you show pictures of that exact scenario”.

[deleted]

Re: A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So in Austria you're not allowed to insult a politician unless a court agrees with your insult? That's incredibly fascist.

Public insults for the sake of insulting someone should be punished in an age where common sense is almost gone. Even more so when appellatives that can seriously ruin someone's image like fascist, racist, antisemitist (etc) are thrown around. Politician or not is irrelevant.

Re: A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

#93
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then it becomes a race to the bottom indeed. The article used that wording, "a classic risk of a race to the bottom", but it doesn't feel entirely accurate to me. A classic example of a race to the bottom is when jurisdictions compete to attract businesses by lowering their corporation tax rates and regulations. The end result would be zero taxes and zero regulations (unless a country offered a negative tax rate or…

Is a tax or regulation incentive race to the bottom really a bad thing? The residents of those jurisdictions that end up without much tax income and the externalities of the lax regulations so they would suffer and pressure their government to increase the tax and make the regulations stricter. Eventually, it should reach an equilibrium where those things are "fair" as determined by all the participants in the market…

> What are the alternatives besides something oppressive like using military power to prevent other countries from taxing their citizens too little?

Dropping the dogma of free trade and free flow of capital, and taxing any transactions involving tax havens to the point where it's not profitable to use them for tax avoidance.

You can only have countries' tax systems and regulations competing in global "free market" of jurisdictions if the countries are actually free to set arbitrary tax rates and tariffs.

Re: A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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] a…

> 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…

you know what else is fertile ground for disinformation and conspiracy theories? literally every single protest i have ever attended. and yet we recognize that the right to assembly far outweighs the impact of a couple schizoid burnouts talking about tower 7 and the zog. the same is true of the internet.

a censorship regime will not make people any more prepared to handle free and open discourse, it will only enable those in power to further marginalize those who aren't. imo what is vitally needed is education on media literacy, this should be considered just as important as history or civics. give people the tools for growth.

Re: A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in Austria you're not allowed to insult a politician unless a court agrees with your insult? That's incredibly fascist.

Public insults for the sake of insulting someone should be punished in an age where common sense is almost gone. Even more so when appellatives that can seriously ruin someone's image like fascist, racist, antisemitist (etc) are thrown around. Politician or not is irrelevant.

In an age where common sense is almost gone, I'm pretty reluctant to say that insults should be punished. Because, you know, that punishment is going to be applied without much common sense. So it's going to be applied much more broadly than it should, and in situations where it doesn't fit, and it's going to ruin peoples' lives.

Re: A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

#96
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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?

taboo words and acts are defined by the moral majority. 15 years ago that same moral majority believed i didn't deserve the right to be married, we are still well within living memory of a time when it was entirely acceptable to call someone a nigger but two men who kissed were liable to lose their jobs. free speech is the most fundamental tool we have for ensuring equal rights and dignity. that is worth far more than getting rid of a few marginal edgelords.

Re: A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

#97
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I host my own website in the United States and post writing which is non-protected speech in Australia, might I be required to block Australian IP addresses from accessing it, or even to remove it altogether? Even though I don't have any Australian presence, my content is available in Australia, which might meet a standard for offering a service in Australia. I know this is not what this ruling is about, but it do…

Minor note: You mean Austria, not Australia.

maybe they're just super into hentai.

Re: A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

#99

Facebook is not "the internet worldwide", it is one website among hundreds of millions of websites available on the internet.

This really has nothing to do with Facebook. They just happen to be the website that got used to set the precedent. This can now happen on any of those hundreds of millions of websites that have any presence there.

Re: A court ruling in Austria could censor the internet worldwide

#100
post #5

I’m particularly worried about the requirement that posts with the “same essential meaning” be detected. Should this become precedent, must every startup now run Content ID systems... based on NLP and word embeddings? Can a company be held liable for not setting the threshold correctly and allowing even the slightest negative sentiment about a subject through? Can a politician sue to have all references to a certain…

Let me introduce Austria to the "Streisand Effect".
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