Delete Hate Speech or Pay Up, Germany Tells Social Media Companies

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook-google-twitter.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Feurope

by dbcooper • 9 years ago

55 61 9 years ago

nytimes.com

ams6110• 9 years ago

Wonder how this affects websites that allow comments, but are not primarily "social media" sites?

Many sites that use e.g. Disqus for comments are filled with vile racist, homophobic, and other hateful comments.

xyzzy_plugh• 9 years ago

Also, what about Twitch or Youtube chat?

kuschku3• 9 years ago

Any site that isn't social media is exempt. Any site with less than 2'000'000 German users is exempt.

You only have to remove content if it is obvious that it is violating existing law, and someone has filed a report, within of 24 hours. The original poster can also oppose this.

The law is basically the same as the DMCA.

dhruvrrp2• 9 years ago

According the European Digital Rights association, the law's definition of social media is so broad that it would apply there as long as the service has 2 million German users (the wording is not clear whether this number is active/registered/total users).

The law's definition of social media - telemedia providers who operate commercial platforms that allow users to exchange or share any kind of content with other users or make such content accessible to other users (“Social Network”).

tehabe• 9 years ago

The issue of hate speech is real, but putting private companies in charge of deciding what is hate speech and what isn't, is a bad idea.

mowenz2• 9 years ago

It was not too long ago that in Germany a political artist was prosecuted for a poem insulting a politician.

In other words, governments have already repeatedly proven they should not have authority over what speech is acceptable, even in Germany currently.

FabHK8• 9 years ago

Not so fast. That was German satirist Jan Böhmermann reading a "poem" on TV about Turkish president Erdoğan (the content is not really important, but it was rather insulting, and purposefully so: calling him dumb, cowardly, and smelly; alleging he beat little girls, fucked goats, watched child porn, and subjugated minorities, and so on.)

Now, as it happens, Germany has a paragraph on its criminal code, § 103, that prohibits insulting foreign heads of state. Thus, prosecution was initiated. However:

1. The case was dropped.

2. In fact, legislative proceedings to drop § 103 are on their way.

So, I'm not too worried about the freedom of political speech in Germany. Holocaust denial and nazi propaganda are prohibited, for historical reasons, but apart from that political speech is free and vigorous.

rl33• 9 years ago

I'd love to see tech companies band together and play hardball with governments that try and pull this shit. Just discontinue services on the whole country.

The politicans would quickly change their tune once the entire country's voting base wakes up to the fact they've been thrust into the internet dark ages by their own legislators.

rgbrenner3• 9 years ago

Like when Google left china.. that really showed them /s

You know there are countries where Facebook does not operate.. local companies get easy funding to recreate the service.. after all it's a proven business model

The eu is certainly a big enough market to support a local version

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 9 years ago

Maybe the EU is, but I doubt Germany is. In addition, Even though there is Baidu, it is preferable that the rest of the world can Google "Tianamen square" and get back something resembling the facts. If Google had used this logic of "well somebody else will do it anyway", the rest of us would have only seen what China permitted.

rl33• 9 years ago

The point is that in Western countries, their entire populations are already heavily invested in those services. Suddenly losing access would be unthinkable.

charia• 9 years ago

From what I've heard, this isn't/shouldn't stand up when challenged in court.

ericdykstra• 9 years ago

Real life Ministry of Truth. Not only is this another strike at freedom of expression in Germany, but it's an attack on the privacy of Germans.

The idea that arresting people for "hate speech" online is going to make your country any better or safer is laughable. It just means people making jokes will get arrested because one of their jokes offends a few people [1].

Here's a great video by a German who is concerned about the expanded surveillance state and limitations on free speech: https://youtu.be/WFCKTvGU8oU

Here's another video about German hate speech crime and statistics that I found insightful: https://youtu.be/kX84h6aKpaU

1. https://www.rt.com/uk/342513-dog-nazi-salute-arrested/

FabHK8• 9 years ago

Sorry, but no. Forcing companies that disregard the law to pay fines (not 'arresting people') is no strike at freedom of expression in Germany. (Note that your link [1] is about the UK, a different country.)

Yes, holocaust denial and Nazi propaganda are prohibited in Germany for historical reasons, but the notion that his severely impedes the freedom of political speech is mistaken.

And yes, I've read my John Stuart Mill, and mostly agree with him.

As an aside, I'd still rate the level of public discourse in Germany as way above what's happening in many other countries (though it's going downhill, with all the private TV stations and social media, whose goal is not edification and education, but advertisement driven profit and "engagement").

nyolfen2• 9 years ago

June 20, 2017 - Germany Raids Homes of 36 People Accused of Hateful Postings Over Social Media

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/world/europe/germany-36-a...

darawk• 9 years ago

Enforcing laws that restrict expression is restricting expression.

imaginenore• 9 years ago

This law will absolutely be used to curb political speech, that's the whole point. And you know it will be applied by the ruling party against anybody whose views they don't like.

When you're banning "hate speech" without strictly and narrowly defining what it is, it's a pure censorship instrument with pretty much unlimited reach.

I, for instance, think The Bible and The Quran are full of hate speech, but do you think they should be banned in the whole country simply based on my view?

What about a Android vs iOS debates? Should we ban every shit-talking conversation on the internet?

What about BMW vs Audi? Tabs vs spaces? Chocolate vs vanilla?

0x4f3759df• 9 years ago

Illustrates that the whole concept of freedom of speech is illogical.

What if I agitate and undermine the right to "freedom of speech" itself? For self preservation, the society would need to agree that in this instance speech should be curtailed, and bit by bit it will get eroded.

rbehrends5• 9 years ago

This is a bad law, but this is also frustratingly bad reporting. I understand that American media have to often translate foreign legal concepts into something closer to American ones, so they talk about "hate crimes" and "hate speech" (offenses that as such don't accurately reflect legal concepts as they exist in Germany), but in this case it's not even an accurate representation of the law.

The list of offenses that the law talks about includes a whole list of things that aren't remotely hate speech: they include things such as the creation of a criminal or terrorist organization or illegal distribution of pornography (pornography is not per se illegal, but you cannot, for example, sell it to minors).

The goal of the law is basically to enforce offenses that are commonly committed online by deputizing social media companies. And this is where the actual problem lies; the law does not regulate anything that isn't already an offense, after all.

1. Many of these social media companies do not even have a legal presence in Germany and it is questionable whether Germany even has jurisdiction under current EU law.

2. Even if Germany has jurisdiction, having social media companies adjudicate the legality of online content (even where there is a legitimate interest and we are not dealing with offenses that affect freedom of speech) is a bad idea in too many ways to count. The social media company is incentivized to err on the side of banning content; they generally do not have the resources and/or personnel with adequate legal training to properly adjudicate the issue in many cases; and if they get things wrong, there is often no practical way to appeal their misjudgment.

3. The law may (due to its crude mechanisms) have a chilling effect far beyond what any that current laws create, even though on paper we're talking about the same offenses. That's because the legal system generally subjects potential prosecution for many of these offenses to a high level of scrutiny in order to protect freedom of expression. It is unlikely that Facebook and Twitter are going to do the same.

4. As a result, the law is probably headed for a collision course with the Federal Constitutional Court at the earliest opportunity.

kuschku3• 9 years ago

As the law only applies to stuff that is already illegal, and only requires companies to remove it on request, if it is obviously violating the law, ...

Well, we already know what this law looks like. It's just the DMCA, expanded to other types of content. This is bad, but it's not nearly the end-of-the-world that the hypocritical US-Americans on HN have been claiming it is.

rbehrends5• 9 years ago

As the law only applies to stuff that is already illegal, and only requires companies to remove it on request, if it is obviously violating the law, ...

The problem is that these things often aren't "obvious". For example, one offense that is listed in the law is §185 of the penal code, which criminalizes insults (I'm not kidding). Because making every insult a criminal offense would make real freedom of speech impossible in practice, actual application of that law is subject to various and sundry constraints as the result of case law of the Constitutional Court. As a result, it's actually virtually impossible to commit such an offense in the political arena (in practice, the law has therefore been reduced to an institutionalized form of contempt of cop for the most part, and occasionally sees use as a modern form of dueling for the few bored and rich enough to pursue a private lawsuit: lawyers at ten paces, so to speak). But to understand that, you do have to be sufficiently familiar with the case law.

That's not much of a problem when an actual prosecutor examines the facts: the case against Boehmermann, for example, was pretty quickly dismissed, because the prosecutor knew it was going nowhere fast. But now let's have Facebook's staff – most of them without legal training – examine the same facts and they may very well get it all wrong. Or, worse: decide to simply not bother with getting it right and just err on the side of caution. The law does not penalize inadvertent censorship, after all.

yladiz• 9 years ago

So if a company doesn't have a direct presence in a country but has many users from that country (for example, the German law this article is talking about has a threshold of 2 million German users), it doesn't have to follow the laws of that country?

For example, if a newspaper company was about to publish something illegal (like something pro-Nazi), who polices that? My understanding is that its the newspaper company because they know the laws around print media. So, why is social media any different? Why are they not in charge of policing their content? I believe that in some ways, their policing efforts aren't the same as a newspaper because they're not the ones directly creating the content, but they still have a responsibility to police it in some way because it is on their platform.

RcouF1uZ4gsC2• 9 years ago

There is a scary trend of countries trying to force internet companies to enforce their speech standards globally. We recently saw that in the Canadian Supreme Court decision forcing Google to remove a domain globally from search.

If this continues, the only allowable content will be that which does not offend anybody, and if that happens, the open, free Internet we all knew and which has driven a lot of social change throughout the world will be dead. Think of an Internet where atheism is banned because it offends religious people, corrupt politicians's misdeeds are expunged pursuant to their right to be foegotten, exposure of police brutality is deemed offensive and disturbing and banned, and every country's human rights violations are suppressed because they can be.

dhruvrrp2• 9 years ago

The draft bill defines “violating content” as content under Sections 86 (dissemination of propaganda material of unconstitutional organizations), ... 90 (defamation of the president), ... 166 (defamation of religions, religious and ideological associations), ... 241(causing the danger of criminal prosecution by informing on a person) ...

Over reaching laws like this are the biggest adversary to free speech. Even if the current government believes that hate speech/propaganda needs to be restricted, what is gonna stop someone down the line from using this law to silence all of their opponents and criticism?

fiblye• 9 years ago

Dangerous precedent. Expect this to be "good" for a couple years, then the definition gradually expands while nobody is looking and is used to penalize any sort of thought that doesn't fit the social norm.

Barrin92• 9 years ago

the definition isn't expanding, it's simply applying laws that existed since the inception of the German Federal state seven decades ago to businesses that operate on the internet.

Here in Germany racebaiting, holocaust denial and so forth are not protected under freedom of speech, never have never will be. Americans will probably not understand it in the near future, but in German jurisdiction German law still applies. Digital business or not.

I mean, Facebook basically censors every naked piece of skin already and I have to live with it because apparently this is offensive to Americans. Now I find banning nazi propaganda to be much less controversial than a naked human body, but apparently tastes diverge

ryankupyn• 9 years ago

I expect that this trend of deputizing companies to police speech on their platforms will evolve in tension with rising antitrust scrutiny of the tech giants, because the rise of utterly dominant companies (a trend that the EU seems intent on slowing) would make efforts to regulate speech easier.

Large companies like Google have a global presence, and assets that can be targeted within the jurisdiction of most major governments, while a fragmented - and more competitive - market would make it more likely that "holdouts" can rise beyond the reach of a given government. These platforms would provide a redoubt for regulated speech, because it would be much harder to compel them to pay fines (though of course a country can simply block them).

At the same time, these new regulations give a competitive advantage to the companies with the scale and resources to invest in automating the removal process, and increases the challenges for upstart platforms, which now need to develop the infrastructure to aggressively police content on their networks if they want to grow beyond a certain size.

I think that in the long run, this will evolve into a stable equilibrium where governments periodically levy large-but-not-devastating fines in the name of "antitrust" in order to show their dedication to "competitive markets" and "customer choice", while simultaneously working hand-in-glove with these companies to enforce what they consider to be acceptable standards of speech in online communities. In the long run, no major competitors will emerge, and both the established firms and the government will silently thank their lucky stars.

honestoHeminway• 9 years ago

This is just media and goverment trying to put the dschinny of the internet back into the lamp. You can allmost hear the sigh:

"Why, cant we go back to the days - where you all pretended that we represented the public, and the angry with there lifes citizens where firewalled from one another?"

Well, guess what, these people know now that they are not alone- and even if you burned the whole internet to ashes- they would just meet in real life. Some people in germany have a serious freedom of expression is only my opinion attitude. And they radicalize there opponents regularly by not discussing with them (That opinion is beneath me).

mto• 9 years ago

FB's policy is ridiculous. Show a breastfeeding woman and it's certainly gone in the next hours. But I've reported countless foreigners for gas chamber and teleheating crap postings and it was not considered inappropriate...what a BS. Still, the problem with law enfocement is always that "hate speech" is pretty fuzzy (obviously especially fuzzy for facebook)

antisthenes• 9 years ago

..the abyss stares also into you.

Delete Hate Speech or Pay Up, Germany Tells Social Media Companies

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