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Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

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Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

#61

Post by pluma »

sgift wrote: post #52
buckbova wrote: post #6

> Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough. As an American I can't imagine being arrested for speaking my mind about a race or religion whether it's considered hate speech or not. It's just unfathomable. Thanks to our forefathers for putting free speech on such…

Germany learned the hard way that letting people "speak their mind" does not always lead to great outcomes. The Weimar Republic actually had the things you wanted, it even allowed parties to be part of the parliament while wanting to eliminate the Republic. The result was Nazi Germany. We decided against repeating this. Different histories lead to different results.

I think the disagreement is that Americans (and Brits, and possibly other countries deriving their legal traditions from the Crown) generally consider speech merely expression.

Expressing your hatred is not what's illegal in Germany. Inciting violence and hatred is. It just so happens that certain ways of expressing yourself also incite violence and hatred.

Saying "I hate Muslims" is in itself not necessarily a crime in Germany. Saying "All Muslims should be killed" on the other hand is a direct call to action, asking people to commit a crime and thus directly attacking public order and human rights.

It's similar to shouting "fire" in a theater: it's not illegal because it's expression, it's illegal because it aims to mislead people into thinking there's a threat to their life and to act on that fear (i.e. cause a panic as people run for the exits).

It's also no different from the adage "one person's freedom ends where the freedom of another person begins". You can express yourself all you want, you just have to consider how that affects other people (and not so much in the sense of "I am offended" but "You are right and I will go and commit the crimes you're asking me to").

EDIT: FWIW, Germany has "freedom of opinion" and "freedom of expression" in its constitution. But it also strongly defends not just the rights of individual humans but also of "human dignity". Most laws are ultimately derived from that.

EDIT2: Also keep in mind that the US in some cases takes it so far that _giving people money_ is considered a form of expression and therefore protected speech. This would never fly in Germany because "expression" doesn't automatically cancel out everything else.

Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

#62

Post by Broken_Hippo »

jbmorgado wrote: post #55
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you even trust such results? I mean, lets look at where they come from. Reported crimes in systems that are biased against some folks, with laws that are easier to break and get caught with when you are poor. Some of the folks are poor because of the situations that have happened to them - war, civil unrest, domestic violence, racism and discrimination of the past still affecting them. And lets not forget,…

You are setting up a framework of thought where no matter how much data you gather that shows some group is indeed more violent, you are allowed to just dismiss it on the basis of some situational perceived discrimination.

Not really, I'm just aware that a lot of these sorts of grouping stereotypes are wrong - and much of the past studies have been flawed by discriminatory views.

For example, take the "poor people commit more crimes". Now, I don't know that this is true, though I know folks believe it and some studies have seemed to back it up. But I also know that a lot of poor folks lack ways to hide their crime (no private place to smoke pot in, for example) and live in areas more likely to be policed heavily. The only thing I can really come up with is that poor people get caught for crimes more often, and so are easily over-represented in the prison system. The conclusion that "poor people commit more crime" is one of bias.

This sort of thing is enough to cast doubt on a lot of these sorts of statements and check for such biases. It is a bit different from the data actually being true with the cause of the trend being discrimination. For example, "Felons often return to crime after release in the US" is likely true. Part of the reason for that is because of discrimination and biases against the ex-felon (especially in certain subsets of felons). I'd not ignore the data, but address the discrimination when trying to fix it.

Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

#63

Post by Houshalter »

sgift wrote: post #52
buckbova wrote: post #6

> Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough. As an American I can't imagine being arrested for speaking my mind about a race or religion whether it's considered hate speech or not. It's just unfathomable. Thanks to our forefathers for putting free speech on such…

Germany learned the hard way that letting people "speak their mind" does not always lead to great outcomes. The Weimar Republic actually had the things you wanted, it even allowed parties to be part of the parliament while wanting to eliminate the Republic. The result was Nazi Germany. We decided against repeating this. Different histories lead to different results.

The Weimar had lots of extremist parties on both the left and the right. It just as easily could have gone communist as fascist. Part of the reasons the Nazis were supported was because they were anti communist. Somehow I doubt modern Germany is just as hard on extremists on the left though.

The people being silenced aren't necessarily anti-democratic either. The Nazis were pretty clear they wanted to eliminate the republic, as you mention. Not just people upset at immigration policy.

Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

#64

Post by dmichulke »

pluma wrote: post #58
dmichulke wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that Nazi Germany also disallowed people to "speak their mind". So if you say free speech caused Nazi Germany, I might as well say: Lack of free speech let Nazi Germany (and even more so the Holocaust) go on for such a long time. So is limiting free speech really the solution? I think we're setting a dangerous precedent.

The status quo is that we're not Nazi Germany. The status quo is therefore that we're at the risk of becoming Nazi Germany. This is the case in modern Germany as much as it is the case in the US or the UK. The German answer to that is to look at what allowed us to become Nazi Germany last time and to avoid that. Some of the resulting limitations are questionable (e.g. the parliamentary 5% hurdle), some are not (e.g.…

I mostly agree with your points and just want to note a few things:

> The status quo is that we're not Nazi Germany. The status quo is therefore that we're at the risk of becoming Nazi Germany.

This is not a binary thing, in a democracy there will always be a number of people who think the state is insert arbitrary negative adjective here

So there will always be people who feel threatened (if only in some aspects) by the state, no matter if it's Nazi. And these people want to protect their rights such as free speech, and IMO rightly so. So avoiding becoming Nazi Germany is not enough, you need to avoid even aspects of it such as wars on foreign soil or surveillance of civilian communication, both of which are present today and were in the 1940s.

Limiting free speech is just another aspect that adds to the list of becoming Nazi, hence my 'no'.

> If you rally a crowd, step on a podium and tell them to "gas the Jews" or "kill all white men" or "hunt down and murder Edward Snowden", you're facing jail time.

IANAL but I think this is covered by penal code already [1]. Now hate speech is bad but it'll only convince the ones who are already "close to being convinced". That probably doesn't include you and me, and I personally prefer to know who are the idiots around than to have them shut up and only later realize who they are when they commit an actual crime.

As a side note, it matters even today whether you're a politician (if only in the US) [2]

[1] https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/241.html [2] https://mobile.twitter.com/wikileaks/status/7829062249374105...

Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

#65

Post by Zak »

iratewizard wrote: post #32
Zak wrote: post #24

Where they draw the line on some of these things seems... odd . A degrading generalization about a nationality like one of their examples > the Irish suck seems relatively harmless, while the permissible > Keep the horny migrant teenagers away from our daughters seems much more dangerous. The latter is much more likely to spur some sort of antisocial behavior from a reader.

Is the latter dangerous because it is dissent? It sounds like we are now defining a framework for what dissent is acceptable and it seems to align to a dominant political ideology. Sort of defeats the point of dissent.

It's dangerous because it evokes a specific fear that's likely to inspire action. You could swap migrants and Irish in an area with a sufficient Irish population and it would still be true.

> the migrants suck

Is pretty harmless, while

> Keep the horny Irish teenagers away from our daughters

might well lead to someone assaulting people they perceived to be Irish teenagers who were getting too friendly with their daughters.

Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

#66

Post by sixothree »

dang wrote: post #26
sixothree wrote: post #20

Context is important here. I'm guessing it got lost on you?

Personal swipes aren't ok on HN. Please remain civil. (Edit: It read like a swipe to me, but if you didn't intend it that way, I apologize.) We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659259 and marked it off-topic.

Thank you for removing. It did not add to the conversation.

Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

#67

Post by [deleted] »

dang wrote: post #26
sixothree wrote: post #20

Context is important here. I'm guessing it got lost on you?

Personal swipes aren't ok on HN. Please remain civil. (Edit: It read like a swipe to me, but if you didn't intend it that way, I apologize.) We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14659259 and marked it off-topic.

[deleted]

Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

#68

Post by teacup50 »

sgift wrote: post #52
buckbova wrote: post #6

> Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough. As an American I can't imagine being arrested for speaking my mind about a race or religion whether it's considered hate speech or not. It's just unfathomable. Thanks to our forefathers for putting free speech on such…

Germany learned the hard way that letting people "speak their mind" does not always lead to great outcomes. The Weimar Republic actually had the things you wanted, it even allowed parties to be part of the parliament while wanting to eliminate the Republic. The result was Nazi Germany. We decided against repeating this. Different histories lead to different results.

Nonsense!

Germany banned Hitler from public speaking in the 1920s; all this did was give Hitler more notoriety, and the NSDAP more propaganda material to work with.

Nazi Germany still did not emerge through democratic processes; they failed to gain a parliamentary majority despite years of street/voter harassment. Instead, they subverted democracy by exploiting a civil liberty loophole in the Weimar Constitution.

If anything, the rise of Nazi Germany demonstrates why such loopholes in protections for civil liberties are so fundamentally dangerous. For a more modern example, look at how "hate speech" laws in Russia are in fact used to silence political dissent.

Re: Internal documents shed light on the guidelines that Facebook’s censors use

#70

Post by throwanem »

beedogs wrote: post #29
buckbova wrote: post #6

> Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough. As an American I can't imagine being arrested for speaking my mind about a race or religion whether it's considered hate speech or not. It's just unfathomable. Thanks to our forefathers for putting free speech on such…

As an American, I'm perfectly happy with what Germany is doing and wish Americans were less absolutist about free speech.

As another American, I'm happy you are free to express that opinion, and also happy so few share it.
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