Shock European court decision: Websites are liable for users’ comments

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/shock-european-court-decision-websites-are-liable-for-users-comments/

by scott_karana • 9 years ago

20 24 9 years ago

mavdi• 9 years ago

This is great. Websites are keen on publishing these comments and benefit from the angry clickbaits and discussions, they should then be responsible for them too. If it's on your website and you're displaying it, then you own it.

I want this applied to Facebook and all its racist, sexist and homophobic user content too.

cryptonector4• 9 years ago

I would rather have lively discussions that sometimes attract trolls than an insipid, dry, non-discussion discussion.

The moment you need to moderate every comment, and worry that you might get sued/prosecuted by people whose discrimination is different to yours, is the moment you simply become a censor or simply drop comments altogether.

r00fus3• 9 years ago

With the advent of automated trolling and state and corporate propaganda machines (see: persona management automation software), maybe the default should be "off" on comments unless the forum has sufficient moderation capabilities.

It's like arguing against firewalls on the open Internet.

Gys• 9 years ago

It only helps the big ones to become stronger. Companies like Facebook have the partners, the tech, the lawyers, the lobbying power, etc to turn developments like this ultimately into a competitive advantage.

Small players, like startups with innovative ideas, will have more and more difficulties to survive.

GCU-Empiricist2• 9 years ago

So what is the scalable solution to allow discussion without causing automated censorship, inflicting astroturfing vulnerability, or hiring significant staff overhead that allows things like reddit to start up, or are you happy with the ecosystem we have?

jdavis7033• 9 years ago

Perhaps a pay-to-post scheme. If it takes $1 to make a post people will comment a lot less, and hopefully when they do comment it'll be saying something meaningful. This will also help reduce automated span.

prepend• 9 years ago

Push comments off your site and onto Twitter/Reddit.

cryptonector4• 9 years ago

It's not meant to have a scalable solution. Of course, some players will be able to afford an AI-based solution. Their fora will be insipid and dry.

jdavis7033• 9 years ago

Facebook, the New York Times and Cloudflare are all free to police or not police their platforms against hate speech as they want to be. (Thankfully they've all come around to realizing hate speech is not good).

However once the government gets involved, that's when we've lost free speech. Free speech protections have always been in place to ensure you can't go to jail for what you're saying. What they aren't for, is making private individuals and corporations harbor any kind of speech on their property. It'll be truly scary if the government starts forcing corporations to censor speech. Let's leave the pressure we put on these firms to consumers, activists and shareholders.

r00fus3• 9 years ago

Governments are like corporations in many ways, except they have voting rights for their constituency. They're just another group of people.

Sure, governments have guns, but as long as there is a constitution preventing abuses and the rule of law, that is constrained.

The bigger danger is cooption of governments by corporations and other powerful interest groups that have no such protections/limitations.

titanix2• 9 years ago

You may want that but there is not clear line for a blurry and highly politically charged concept like sexism. A comment such as « my gf just cook an amazing cake, she’s awesome » could perfectly be labeled as sexist by some activist because associating a woman with cooking is deemed sexist.

In addition, in the European context the racism part will be used to censure comments critizing the immigration politics of Western Europe countries (which every citizen should be able to discuss given the importance of it) and any discussions about Islam that don’t go the way the government want it to go. In fact, this is already happening for years and it is a worrying fact.

HappyDreamer• 9 years ago

That's incorrect. There is no such censoring. At least as far as I've seen, and I live in Europe, in the country that has accepted the most refugees from Syria per person in the country (plus many migrants/refugees from other places in the Middle East and Africa).

Everyone is free to discuss the immigration politics on the Internet and elsewhere, and plenty of people are angry about it. There are even political parties that have this thing as their main agenda.

golemotron• 9 years ago

Is there any justification for DMCA Safe Harbor [1] in the US anymore? When it was enacted screening user content was considered not practical. Now is done by almost every service.

[1] http://digital-law-online.info/lpdi1.0/treatise33.html

jdavis7033• 9 years ago

Yes, screening content is still hard and/or expensive. It's more technically feasible than before, but it's still one of the things small startups struggle with.

r00fus3• 9 years ago

I wonder what the fallout will be for small websites running their own comment streams vs. Disqus vs. Facebook.

Will these websites prevent or bifurcate access from Europe?

foobarandgrill• 9 years ago

Considering the article is from two years ago it's not such a shock now.

bllguo• 9 years ago

Yeah, this is incredibly misleading.

shak77• 9 years ago

Shock? This has been like this since forever.

gruez• 9 years ago

[2015]

cryptonector4• 9 years ago

Free speech violates human rights. Got it.

Sarcasm aside, this ruling is the sort of insanity that one can expect from human rights courts in countries that lack a long-standing commitment to freedom of speech. The very notion of a "human rights court" is foreign to citizens of countries with nothing like the American Constitution's 1st Amendment and absolutist jurisprudence that we have here in the U.S. No such thing as a human rights court is necessary when the laws are themselves just and enforced by just courts. From the U.S., the notion of "human rights court" seems to exist only so as to impinge on individual freedoms rather than so as to strengthen them, and this follows from the idea that they should not be necessary in Western countries that should have just laws to begin with -- and this perception is supported by this sort of ruling.

One even expects that saying the above alone will be seen as evidence of racism/sexism/whatever-ism for even merely denying that a human rights court should be necessary in the West... implies denial of human rights simply because of the institution's very name. The very act of naming something in this way leads to suspicion that it is a euphemistic name, like all those People's Democratic Republics of yore (and, still, the DPRK), or the UN's very own not-remotely-sane human rights commission.

maxerickson• 9 years ago

No such thing as a human rights court is necessary when the laws are themselves just and enforced by just courts.

The Supreme Court spends plenty of time laughing unjust laws out of existence.

Having a court setup to evaluate laws seems like a difference in mechanism more than a difference in effect.

matt4077• 9 years ago

“Human Rights” in this context is rather similar to the US’ Constitution’s amendments, not whatever chain of free associations you are coming up with: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human...

Shock European court decision: Websites are liable for users’ comments

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