In Germany, online hate speech has real world consequences

The obvious solution then would be to make it public space and not a private one. Make social networks a public utility. Then it can be governed without all the contradictions between the interest of public and private profit.

> If we don't tax pubs specifically for drunk driving incidents

However there is a special tax on alcohol (although I am not sure if this applies to all alcohol in Germany, even beer, in my country it does).

> But my primary point is that we shouldn't just ignore the constitution just because it's more convenient at the moment

Yes but what if the society is already damaged beyond repair when we finally do find a good solution?

Why does the social network have to be publicly owned for law enforcement to be "publicly owned"? Supermarkets are privately owned, but still, if I assault another customer, the case isn't decided by the legal department of the supermarket ... so what's the fundamental problem with applying that approach to social networks?

> However there is a special tax on alcohol (although I am not sure if this applies to all alcohol in Germany, even beer, in my country it does).

Well, sure, though I think the justification for that had little to do with drunk driving, given that those taxes are way older than cars ;-)

> Yes but what if the society is already damaged beyond repair when we finally do find a good solution?

Then we need to change the constitution?

I mean, the point of a constitution is that you don't just willy-nilly cross certain boundaries. You usually can still change it to a reasonable degree, but you need a large majority to do so, which should ensure that you have really thought about what you are doing.

Trampling all over the freedom rights of individuals in a panic over some perceived danger is exactly what a constitution is there to prevent, as history is full of cases where that didn't end well. There is no guarantee that that is always the right approach, but overall it seems to me that what groups of people do in a (moral) panic leads to way worse outcomes than letting some individuals do some not so nice things for a while, and constitutions exist to warn us of that danger, so we should be very careful with ignoring them.

Also, a state disregarding its constitution may be pretty damaging to society as well, as a lot of trust builds on that foundation.

I was referencing one of the original comments made by a German far-right politician on Facebook that started the debate about the responsibility of platforms like Facebook in moderating hate speech which in turn resulted in the law the article describes:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

It's not a slippery slope in this case. I admit it's a bit unfair to reduce psyc's argument to this but the language the law covers is entirely in the category of "people openly demanding that certain other people be killed or subjected to violence". Facebook dragged their feet to moderate comments like these and the law is a response to create a legal tool to force companies like Facebook to moderate hate speech or face serious fines.

Nobody has articulated that this restriction is harmful; nor protected; and certainly not why. By contrast, the harms of the messages limited thusly are rather more clear.

Furthermore, you're trying to draw some really broad analogy, and find that facebook is the government and thus that constitutional protections apply to enforcement by facebook. I mean... that's murky at best - and note that even if this were direct government censureship it's not even clear this would be a bad idea or whether the hypothetical governmental corolloray would be constitutionally prohibited (which is particularly unclear since nobody knows exactly what that might be).

Facebook is excercising disgression in which content to publish to whom, and when. They also happen to make a lot of money like that. So regardless of the original authors rights; it's not at all clear that facebook should be immune from prosecution for publishing prohibited content. In a sense, this new law is still letting them off unreasonably lightly.

I think we as societies still need to figure out what the heck the age of data science means for free speech. I don't think being all fundamentalist about that is going to help, in any case.

The very first comment in this thread:

"A couple of comedians and satire magazines have been hit"

Yes, there are limits to the freedom of speech (and technically, there is not even freedom of speech in the German constitution, but rather freedom to express one's opinions). But satire is generally very firmly within the bounds of protected speech, the constitutional court has had to deal with such cases many times, and it has found over and over and over, some of the cases involving just the satirical magazine referred to above, that satire is almost always within the bounds of where the state may not interfere with the freedom to speak. The constitutional court has explained at length the importance of satire and controversial art for political discourse.

So, no, the harm of the messages limited is not clear at all.

> Furthermore, you're trying to draw some really broad analogy, and find that facebook is the government and thus that constitutional protections apply to enforcement by facebook.

No, nothing like that. Facebook is not bound by the constitution. The constitution only binds the state. Facebook may delete satire as much as they like. But the state may not incentivize Facebook to delete satire, because the state is bound by the constitution, and the state is forbidden from restricting satirical speech (for example), and by extension from making other parties restrict satirical speech. It's not Facebook's actions that go against the constitution, it's the state's actions that incentivize Facebook that go against the constitution.

> and note that even if this were direct government censureship it's not even clear this would be a bad idea or whether the hypothetical governmental corolloray would be constitutionally prohibited (which is particularly unclear since nobody knows exactly what that might be).

Well, except that it is. The constitutional court has dealt with that. Restricting satirical speech is an almost total no-go for the German state, the constitutional court will not have that.

> Facebook is excercising disgression in which content to publish to whom, and when.

That's indeed a good point, though on the other hand, they probably will say that they try to act as agents finding useful information for their respective users rather than as publishers selecting what they consider interesting. That's also a lie, of course, but still with some truth to it. Really, what they are doing doesn't really fit directly any traditional roles.

> So regardless of the original authors rights;

But you cannot disregard the constitutional rights of the authors because you want to achieve some other goal, that's the point of constitutional rights.

> I think we as societies still need to figure out what the heck the age of data science means for free speech.

Well, yeah, I guess society still needs to figure it out, but the answer really isn't that difficult:

Communication needs to be freed of surveillance/advertisement needs to be separated from communication.

Probably not really possible, but this fusion of communication technology with advertisement/marketing/manipulation technology is a huge problem and ultimately at the heart of all of this. The need to get people to pay attention to their advertisers corrupts all other actions of Facebook, Twitter, and the whole bunch.