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Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

wikimedia.brussels

61–70 of 82 posts

Re: Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

#61

If the gov't will be in charge of it then it will be shit as all government services are in general. If there is no profit in it for someone the platform won't improve. It's the classic "the capitalist owns a restaurant vs the people own a restaurant, but which has better food".

Can’t be worse than privately owned Twitter or Facebook.

It would be worse in different ways.

1. There’s a lot of backlash against Twitter’s new owner for his change in editorial policy. Users or tweets that would have been previously removed are no longer being censored. On a government-run platform protected by the first amendment, no censorship would be permitted. That’s mean you would have, for better or worse, a ton of racist content, conspiracy theories, violent images, pornographic images, and fake news.

2. There’s a lot of concern of data security and privacy. If you don’t trust Zuckerberg with your data, would you trust the government?

3. People flock to services that other people widely use. There are numerous social network alternatives these days, but people still flock to the major ones like FB, IG, TikTok, etc. Would anyone want to use FedBook? I have my doubts that a government-run social media platform would gain any real traction.

Re: Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

#62
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed.

Ref: https://news.yahoo.com/french-woman-faces-trial-insulting-16...

that's the right of every people here in EU. If you offend me (online or offline) I can sue you and you could face trial.

It's called defamation.

Nothing to see here.

EDIT: insult here must be read using its most informal meaning (offense sufers the same destiny), not the legal one. We have different wording for the two circumstances "ingiuria" for the legal term which has been depenalisedd years ago and "insulto" to mean offending someone.

Saying to someone "pedophile" is both an insult (a personal attack) and can be defamation, if the person is not a pedophile.

The system is designed to be highly protective of the presumption of innocence, a judge must decide if the circumstances need to be solved in a trial by another judge or the case can be dismissed because there isn't enough substance to call it defamation.

So every depiction of EU being swift to put people in jail for their opinions is highly exaggerated.

Re: Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

#63
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am inexplicably reminded of the following great quote: > As an European it was always hard for me to understand American culture. What was fascinating for me is that they like bragging about their freedom which was weird for me, because I didn't think that I have any less freedom than them. I always thought 'What is the difference'. However after this game I finally understand it. NA is just so fucking free.

What game? Also, NA meaning North America? Why would Mexico and Canada be lumped into it, they don't have the same constitutional protections that USA gets.

Source:

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/76bemv/tie...

Re: Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

#64
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe doesn’t have free speech because -

October, 2018: "In Europe, Speech Is an Alienable Right: [the European Court of Human Rights] upheld an Austrian woman’s conviction for disparaging the Prophet Muhammad." https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...

That's maybe part of a more general "perceived inability of some Muslims to handle polemics against their religion with grace" (from the article). Searching for "bobblehead Jesus" vs "bobblehead Mohammed" on Amazon is a good example of that.

The more disturbing issue is the ECHR's ruling.

Re: Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

#65
post #45
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which things?

In Poland you cannot insult the president: https://www.politico.eu/article/poles-legal-jeopardy-insulti... . You can also go in jail for "insult to religious feelings". In the UK people get fined for offensive tweets, including saying things like "men are not women". In France people are facing trials for insulting Macron: https://news.yahoo.com/french-woman-faces-trial-insulting-16...

In US you can go to jail for being black or not following police officers orders or responding to them in a way they do not like, or talking to them, or taking pictures of them.

And they can shoot you.

Just like any authoritarian police state.

EDIT: freedom of speech is not related only to offending the president or saying good things about Hitler, it also mean I can talk and eventually argue with a police officer in EU without worrying that they will arrest me or shoot me. It means I can take a picture of a firemen's truck without the camera being seized by the police (it happened to me in Florida) and no way of talking to them that there's no need to abuse of their power, you can actually delete photos from cameras.

etc etc

authoritarianism and control works best when it's not in the law, but in the people habits.

Re: Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that not true? Yes you can say fuck trump or fuck biden(why are you self censoring yourself on the internet btw), but you can't say "I have a gun and I'm going to shoot you" to a police officer - you will be arrested and put in prison even if you were "just saying things". Your freedom of speech isn't absolute. For other examples - several states made it illegal for journalists to report on violations on farms…

Well go on and insult an EU country leader here. :)

Are you.....under the impression that French laws apply in all of EU or something?

Re: Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

#67
The part that people can't do themselves is the massive storage and indexing of posts/content/uploaded data (because expensive). I'm envisioning a more or less public (hosting is publically funded) API where anyone can build and host their own frontend, with each custom frontend having their own content discovery algorithm(s) and custom moderation options based on the underlying data and indexes provided by the API.

What I mean is that the publically hosted API itself will be minimally moderated, hosting anything except for illegal material. The rest will be solved by (highly granular and specific) indexing/tagging or similar such that each frontend can choose to leave out or otherwise moderate the presentation of certain material. That indexing will also be the basis of writing custom content discovery algorithms.

The API could even allow training of AI models on usage data (for recommendation or moderation) without leaking anything by declaring a set of available parameters and offering to train and deploy models proposed by the public.

This way we won't have to leave the innovation and the making-it-fun-and-usable parts fully up to the government, and we will hopefully avoid government-enforced censorship.

Re: Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

#68
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you can go to prison for saying things.

To add to this comment which is unfairly downvoted, some example of laws in Europe that I collected over the years: France's "hate speech" laws, which prohibit speech that is deemed to be insulting, threatening, or discriminatory on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, or sexual orientation. (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_France ) Germany's NetzDG law, which requires social…

yes in the US you can wave Nazi flags, but if a police officer stops you for allegedly speeding and you remove your hands from the wheel or look them in the eyes, they can and will shoot you.

They shoot to kill over a thousand times a year.

If any of those EU countries had such stats, they would shutdown the police entirely for abuse of violence.

Fortunately, we are civilized and it never happened.

Anyway you are wrong about the Lodo Alfano in Italy, which I know very well being Italian. The law has been active for a few months before being declared unconstitutional.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodo_Alfano

I wonder how wrong you are for every other country

EDIT:

wrong on the French law too

"On 18 June 2020, the French Constitutional Council struck down core provisions of the law."

and probably on many others

I have no time to check them all, but I already have the feeling that most of them suffer from the same selection bias of the Italian and French one.

EDIT 2:

the article talking about the Spanish law is no different

Hasel was not arrested for insulting the Spanish monarchy, but for saying that the police and the monarchy were responsible of torture and for spreading terrorism in his lyrics.

Hasel has a criminal history and had already been arrested two times already for resisting to the police (which is a crime in most western countries) and housebreaking.

He knew he was going to be arrested because he had been found guilty in a trial that he could have won, but never showed up.

So he barricaded himself inside a university building.

I wonder how it would have ended in other freer countries...

The application of the law has in the meantime been changed to allow for more dissuasive measures instead of repressive ones.

And I must say that I despise the way Spanish police works, but in this case they did what they were supposed to do: they arrested someone who had been condemned for a crime by a regular court.

Re: Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

#69
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Poland you cannot insult the president: https://www.politico.eu/article/poles-legal-jeopardy-insulti... . You can also go in jail for "insult to religious feelings". In the UK people get fined for offensive tweets, including saying things like "men are not women". In France people are facing trials for insulting Macron: https://news.yahoo.com/french-woman-faces-trial-insulting-16...

In US you can go to jail for being black or not following police officers orders or responding to them in a way they do not like, or talking to them, or taking pictures of them. And they can shoot you. Just like any authoritarian police state. EDIT: freedom of speech is not related only to offending the president or saying good things about Hitler, it also mean I can talk and eventually argue with a police officer in…

Great, but we are talking about Europe, can't you read?

Re: Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

#70
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am inexplicably reminded of the following great quote: > As an European it was always hard for me to understand American culture. What was fascinating for me is that they like bragging about their freedom which was weird for me, because I didn't think that I have any less freedom than them. I always thought 'What is the difference'. However after this game I finally understand it. NA is just so fucking free.

What's the game that quote refers to?

League of Legends
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