Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill • Hacker News Board

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#181

Post by bzb6 » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

__s wrote: post #57

COGlory wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is in the public interest to allow platforms to remove such content This is not always true, and that is the issue. If the government is going to, for instance, tell us we can't gather on public property, there has to be some way to guarantee that a digital commons will remain.

Let Poland run news.polishcombinator.com where they decide to not moderate anything not against Polish law then Are we going to have dang explain how any post he moderates violates Polish law? What about what he's moderating which isn't illegal in Poland?

Nobody seemed to care too much here about these issues when the gdpr was shoved into the faces of everybody.

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#182

Post by pacificat0r » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

Gwypaas wrote: post #12

Regarding the majority party of the coalition which he is governing with. The party has caused what constitutional law scholar Wojciech Sadurski termed a "constitutional breakdown"[58] by packing the Constitutional Court with its supporters, undermining parliamentary procedure, and reducing the president's and prime minister's offices in favor of power being wielded extra-constitutionally by party leader Jarosław Kac…

A similar stupid law was proposed by a Romanian minister some years ago but with the goal of stopping you calling people (basically ministers) idiots on website comments.

They eventually realized it's not enforceable and it just created some fuss.

The reason that died as it started is because there's no way how such a thing ever work or be enforced.

Does it not matter where I host my site?

What can Poland do about my website hosted in UK (or any other country)?

At worst this just destroys any hosting services that operate in that country.

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#183

Post by ayende » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

wrsh07 wrote: post #144

> In the event of removal or blockage, a complaint can be sent to the platform, which will have 24 hours to consider it. Within 48 hours of the decision, the user will be able to file a petition to the court for the return of access. The court will consider complaints within seven days of receipt and the entire process is to be electronic. It seems like this is not a burden for Facebook but requires manual work from…

The court would start handing out 2.2 million USD per offence very quickly. Even at Facebook scale, that will hurt

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#184

Post by Jon_Lowtek » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #44

mabbo wrote: post #5

> Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law. This is kind of insane. So if I offer a free website- a private company operating as I like- I would be forbidden from removing content from my own website that I don't like because the person who wrote it- again, not a paying customer- wants it to be there. Not only…

> This is kind of insane. It's especially insane because Polish law is not a superset of every other country's law. If a web site is forced to remove content because it violates a law specific to the country the site is based in -- boom, now they've broken the law in Poland.

Social media is heavily balkanized along language borders.

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#185

Post by tathougies » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

I am glad Poland is doing something, but I'm not sure I like this bill either. This is just censorship by another name.

I think we need to make a distinction -- as the US Supreme Court did -- between large, publicly held corporations and small closely held corporations. In Hobby Lobby, the Supreme Court said that only closely held corporations (those held by a small, definable number of people) had freedom of religion and association. That is their justification for why Hobby Lobby did not need to provide BC coverage. Because it was owned only by one small family, forcing them to take the revenue (which they own) to pay would directly violate the religious beliefs of that small number of people.

On the other hand, Amazon does not have freedom of religion, because Amazon has thousands of shareholders with no universal religious inclination. A fundamentalist christian owner of Amazon stock cannot reasonably ask Amazon to stop paying for birth control.

But, I've only thought about this for a few hours. I'm interested in what other policies can be implemented to serve both the rights of hosts and the rights of content creators.

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#186

Post by garaetjjte » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

Note that polandin.com is site managed by TVP, Poland state propaganda TV station.

Recently, they compared aggressive mob invading Capitol to legally elected opposition in Polish parliament. https://twitter.com/tvp_info/status/1346927489902211073

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#187

Post by Barrin92 » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

Gwypaas wrote: post #12

Regarding the majority party of the coalition which he is governing with. The party has caused what constitutional law scholar Wojciech Sadurski termed a "constitutional breakdown"[58] by packing the Constitutional Court with its supporters, undermining parliamentary procedure, and reducing the president's and prime minister's offices in favor of power being wielded extra-constitutionally by party leader Jarosław Kac…

Yep the government has for a while been dismantling any opposition by stacking the courts, replacing critical state media, attacking journalists and so on. The support for this kind of law is actually just consequent because social media is the platform that lends itself most to riling up a mob.

It's simple majoritarianism, rallying a hyper-loyal voter-base and disadvantaging scholars, intellectuals, scientists and so on.

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#188

Post by scotty79 » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #77

scotty79 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be better if internet went not in the direction of removing stuff but in the direction of providing users with tools to avoid the content they don't wish to engage with. We shouldn't rely on security through obscurity when it comes to dangerously stupid ideas.

Cant work. If you are in the super market buying food, and people are giving out free trials of crack cocaine -> addiction city. You can very regularly see Nazi apologia which is so dressed up and benign sounding. "Teach the facts", "did this really happen" - the debunking of which requires access to people used to debunking it. The same rule applies to a variety of topics. Simply put, the average person is not prepa…

> Simply put, the average person is not prepared for lawyer level rhetorical devices in the wild.

Maybe we should figure out how to educate people to prepare them?

Can we really build our safety on our ability to keep stupid people ignorant of stupid ideas?

I think that's the kind of security through obscurity that is currently failing us so hard. Stupid people are finding stupid ideas anyways, sharing them, building upon them. Trying to keep them away from stupid ideas is like trying to keep your body perfectly germ free. You can't really do that. Not in the long term. You are better of figuring how to boost your immunity.

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#189

Post by dukeofdoom » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

Gab is made by a Polish Guy. Andrew Torba. Here is an article he wrote:

Social Credit Score Is In America: Visa Blacklisted My Business and My Family for Building Gab

https://news.gab.com/2020/06/26/social-credit-score-is-in-am...

Him talking about the migration to Gab

https://tv.gab.com/media/5ff8989c87e3f385144ad67e?viewKey=70...

Re: Poland Justice Minister announces online freedom of speech bill

#190

Post by space_fountain » Mon, Jan 11, 2021, 9:39 PM UTC

jariel wrote: post #49

Gwypaas wrote: post #12

Regarding the majority party of the coalition which he is governing with. The party has caused what constitutional law scholar Wojciech Sadurski termed a "constitutional breakdown"[58] by packing the Constitutional Court with its supporters, undermining parliamentary procedure, and reducing the president's and prime minister's offices in favor of power being wielded extra-constitutionally by party leader Jarosław Kac…

This comment misrepresents the situation by failing to indicate that the 'Constitutional Crisis' started before the current Law and Justice government took power by the previous governments anti-constitutional actions of trying to appoint Constitutional Court judges ahead of the end of their terms. For a summary of events: [1] Imagine if Barack Obama / George Bush decided to go ahead and punt some SCOTUS members ahea…

So in keeping with the law at the time (well the law they passed), they elected 5 justices to replace up coming vacancies. Later it was ruled that 2 of those nominations were unconstitutional (I think because they were for justices who's terms expired after the new legislature was seated), but the newly elected Law and Justice government refused to seat any of them and elected their own slate of 5 justices. When the constitutional tribunal refused to include those 5 justices until the dispute was resolved, rather than back down the new government raised the threshold to conduct business so that the new justices would have to be included and even worse chose to interpret a clause requiring a majority to mean a supper majority and gave themselves the power to remove justices.

The constitutional tribunal ruled this new law unconstitutional, but because that ruling was not made under the new rules introduced by the again according to them unconstitutional law the new government ignored it.

It's one thing to pass unconstitutional laws and quite another to pass unconstitutional laws and refuse to listen to listen when you're called out on them