France passes law forcing online platforms to delete hate-speech within 24 hours

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/france-passes-law-forcing-online-platforms-to-delete-hate-speech-content-within-24-hours/

by raybb • 6 years ago

63 93 6 years ago

techcrunch.com

VWWHFSfQ3• 6 years ago

france is such a weird place. In some ways it's a very free society. In other ways it's not free at all. Don't most of the euro countries have weird laws about hate speech like this?

jakear• 6 years ago

In which ways is it "very free"? (not necessarily doubting you, but it does seem like I often hear of multitude ways they don't even have freedom of speech)

guggle2• 6 years ago

I don't know where you're from but I'm sure I could find weirdness there, just like everywhere.

That said, this law is heavily criticized at the moment, for good reasons.

lykr0n• 6 years ago

They don't have a US style foundation of Freedom of Speech.

krapp• 6 years ago

France provided part of that foundation. The philosophy of America's founding fathers regarding freedom of speech, and the First Amendment itself, were inspired by (among other sources) The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from revolutionary France.

rmrfrmrf• 6 years ago

Are you really free if Jack Dorsey gets to decide what you're allowed to tweet?

trianglem6• 6 years ago

It’s simple. You’re not free to be intolerant. What is intolerant? Anything that involves biological differences that people are unable to change.

pmlnr• 6 years ago

Live and let live - if you follow that, it's ok to hate or be intolerant, just do it quietly, without involving anyone.

Trying to block intolerance by force is wrong.

Teach how to overcome it, or just teach to keep it to one's self.

lopmotr• 6 years ago

The kids movie Shrek was hate speech for making fun of the king being short? People were actually offended by that but you want the movie outlawed which is extreme.

dogma1138• 6 years ago

So by that definition it’s ok to make fun of fat people because they can go on a diet and hit the gym?

jshevek2• 6 years ago

What is intolerant? Anything that involves biological differences that people are unable to change.

You haven't provided a meaningful answer to your question. For example, praising someone's eyes would be intolerant. Providing a factual description would be intolerance.

Joeri• 6 years ago

It can be argued the U.S. is the “weird” country for not restricting hate speech. It’s not just the EU, most countries regulate hate speech. This is not perceived as restricting freedom, because it protects the freedoms of the group the hate speech targets (one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins).

kansface• 6 years ago

it protects the freedoms of the group the hate speech targets

Which freedoms would that be?

asdf21• 6 years ago

How does abusive speech, assuming it isn't from a government official, restrict freedom?

spacephysics• 6 years ago

I think the fundamental issue of hate speech is in it's inability to be clearly defined. From https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/hate-... "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence toward a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation"

or from https://www.britannica.com/topic/hate-speech "speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group identified by attributes such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, physical or mental disability, and others."

the definitions vary widely. Let's say we nail down a definition. Perhaps closer to Britannica. Then the issue is interpretation.

"speech or expression that denigrates a person or persons on the basis of (alleged) membership in a social group": Even alluding to a matter would deem it poor. I support basketball, as it was a sport I grew up with, and is a part of my identity. If someone says "basketball is a stupid game,", well then that's technically hate speech.

You can't have a free society with restricted speech.

smoe2• 6 years ago

I guess it is "weird" in a sense that in various places in Europe online platforms are (and have been for long time) liable for user generated content.

E.g. if a Swiss news site has a comment section where users violate anti racism laws, the site owner can be sued since they published and didn't remove it.

Regarding free society. I think each one has its own quirks and difference where they consider someone's freedom ends. E.g. the US's handling of nudity and swear words is absolutely bizarre to me as a European and as someone from the US you might think the restriction on speech and use of symbols many places in Europe have go too far.

filoleg3• 6 years ago

the US's handling of nudity and swear words is absolutely bizarre to me as a European and as someone from the US you might think the restriction on speech and use of symbols many places in Europe have go too far.

Does the law in the US actually regulate that? I was under the assumption that the nudity prohibition on TV and such was simply a voluntary measure. Facebook is welcome to allow it at any moment, they just choose not to, in order to prevent it from becoming a porn repository. I could be totally wrong on this one, but it makes sense, and it explains why it is still totally allowed elsewhere.

Similar to how videogame ratings in the US issued by ESRB are not legally binding and are just a voluntary system that stores use, to decide which games to carry (e.g., most stores won't be carrying Adults Only rated games) and who to sell them to.

trianglem6• 6 years ago

“Weird”

I would use the word fantastic instead.

VWWHFSfQ3• 6 years ago

not really

aspenmayer• 6 years ago

'There are multiple levels of fines. It starts at hundreds of thousand of euros but it can reach up to 4% of the global annual revenue of the company with severe cases. The Superior Council of the Audiovisual (CSA) [0] is the regulator in charge of those cases.

'Germany has already passed similar regulation and there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level.'

[0] https://www.csa.fr

qball2• 6 years ago

there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level

I suspect that if the EU really does implement this, the US will likely make it against US law to obey media censorship requests from other countries against speech that the First Amendment protects. They probably should have done that a little while ago (curating content under the request of a foreign government should be one of those things that revoke your Section 230 privileges), but better late than never.

Other countries dictating what can and cannot be said on US services is already a big problem, and will only get worse, and the EU's bargaining position is much weaker than China's given that the vast majority of EU citizens use US services.

akersten3• 6 years ago

It is not constitutional for the US to make it illegal to remove content. Regardless of why you would remove it.

The 1st Amendment cuts both ways there - you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard. That's your freedom as a US entity to decide what you express. The reasoning behind why you removed content (a violation of your website's terms, a request from a foreign government, contractual obligation with McDonalds to not host Pink Slime videos in exchange for $1MM a year) doesn't matter from a constitutional perspective. So the US government revoking a protection of an existing US law as punishment for an expression (removing content) would be an unconstitutional violation of free expression.

trianglem6• 6 years ago

Good. I would much rather have a good amount of censorship then let bigots hide behind the “free speech” argument.

drenvuk• 6 years ago

I hate bigots as well, but I hate your kind of thinking even more.

Causality12• 6 years ago

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."

opinion-is-bad• 6 years ago

Who decides what needs to be censored? How do we ensure a fair process if we could be silenced for just questioning the censors?

The hate speech slope is slippery and unscrupulous politicians will always want to interfere.

trianglem6• 6 years ago

Anything you cannot biologically change is hate speech. It’s not complicated and it’s objective.

eikenberry• 6 years ago

That sounds bigoted against people for free speech to me. You should be banned.

toron123• 6 years ago

But what in case of the abuse of the system? Administrators will end up deleting whatever is reported. Not to mention it can be used in political fight.

di4na• 6 years ago

there are things in it to punish people abusing the system too

koenigdavidmj2• 6 years ago

To use a US example, I doubt there are many perjury charges prosecuted related to DMCA takedowns.

ve55• 6 years ago

These laws are often not thought through to that extent. And especially not thought through for the very-long term, e.g. what effect removing potentially-offending speech may have on societies across decades

II2II• 6 years ago

It could also be argued the other way around: businesses put very little long term thought into how their systems would be used. One of the consequences is that their systems can be manipulated to propagate hate speech at a scale that would not be possible otherwise.

Now I'm not pretending that this is a new problem. It existed in the days of BBSes. It existed in the days of print. The list could go on. This should be been seen as forewarning. Doubtlessly, newspapers always received letters to the editor containing hate speech. Very few of them would be published, borderline cases may be published with additional commentary. It would take a very special publication to publish hate speech because it would affect their reputation. Yet they moved to the online world and opened the floodgates with "comments" that received little if any review before publication. There is a strong incentive for people to misuse this privilege against the best interests of the publisher since they immediately gain wide exposure. That is for a service that has a strong incentive to pay heed to what they publish, even in the digital world.

This short term mentality, coupled with the immediacy and global scope of the internet, resulted in certain parties using the Internet as a propaganda machine for speech that is detrimental to society and even the services that permit it. It is difficult to reign in short of shuttering the outlets for publication or giving them strong incentives to invest the resources into combating it.

centimeter2• 6 years ago

How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this?

If every country with an economy the size of 1 or 2 large US states start making up their own censorship laws and trying to force companies to enforce them, at some point this causes huge inefficiencies.

I can see two end states to this:

1. If the censoring country has enough international legal influence, companies will probably have to block users from that country from using their services.

2. If the censoring country does not have enough international legal influence, the company ignores them and the government has to explicitly censor its citizens' internet connections.

I kind of prefer the second because it's more visible and dramatic - I think a lot of people probably aren't even aware when their country has censorship laws.

This also creates economic opportunities for two classes of alternative content distribution:

1. Content distribution based out of legally friendly countries, a la the Sultanate of Kinakuta. Expect to see the media start using terms styled after "tax haven", like "cybercrime haven", for countries that don't enforce US/EU censorship/copyright laws.

2. Content distribution based off of peer-to-peer networks that are harder to wage lawfare against. Bittorrent, IPFS, etc. fit the bill here.

zozbot234• 6 years ago

How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this?

We saw it happen with GDPR already. Though we also see many companies play ball with censors, e.g. in places like China. If suddenly a Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon is judged to be "hate speech", it's easy to just censor the cartoons. Most users won't exactly care, there's plenty of government-endorsed content that they're still allowed to access.

bad_user• 6 years ago

What happened with GDPR exactly?

jimbob45• 6 years ago

France is a relatively small market?

VWWHFSfQ3• 6 years ago

yes. Especially if they actually try to fine someone like reddit "4% of the global annual revenue of the company" for not deleting someone's hateful comment.

AlchemistCamp2• 6 years ago

France is a medium-sized market, roughly equivalent to California—much smaller than the US, China or Japan, but larger than many countries.

nickff2• 6 years ago

There is a third possible 'end state', which is that each restrictive country with a large market ends up in a 'sandbox'. This could look a lot like the Great Firewall, but outsourced.

filoleg3• 6 years ago

Given enough time, this is just simply the end-result of option 1.

ScottFree2• 6 years ago

Isn't there already a de-facto sandboxing by language?

jhanschoo2• 6 years ago

Practically speaking, businesses that lack resources and interest are just going to adopt the most restrictive censorship that they find worthwhile for access to their market.

For example, Chinese services are still available beyond the firewall, just not catered to the average non-Chinese.

To the consumer, most don't care, for most purposes; c.f. TikTok's popularity.

jhanschoo2• 6 years ago

How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this?

Hasn't the same thing happened with respect to copyright in the other direction? Any online business with proper revenue already needs to abide by laws to take down copyrighted material, and the same arguments had been made when enforcement of them became a thing. I don't see that the burden with respect to hate speech is fundamentally different, arguably even lower.

sneak2• 6 years ago

Who decides authoritatively what is or isn’t “hate speech” within the 24 hour period?

The conclusion TFA makes seems likely: these services will just err on the side of “delete first, ask questions later” to protect themselves from liability, making all sorts of legal expression impossible.

The current state of online publishing is really sad, and getting worse. Very few modern services used for hosting can be used to publish legal yet fringe or controversial opinions, which should terrify you even if you don’t agree with those things.

We’re moving toward a world where a dozen large companies will be the final arbiters of what can or cannot be published, regardless of what the law says. If you can’t see why that’s a grave threat to society, I question your imagination.

...and that’s just in peacetime. Imagine the special wartime requirements that will apply to these services if their hosting nations ever feel legitimately threatened.

trianglem6• 6 years ago

Being made fun of for anything that people biologically cannot change is hate speech. It’s not some complicated quagmire of laws you are trying to make it out to be.

sneak2• 6 years ago

If only content moderation and human expression were that simple. Alas, it is not to be.

If you read it carefully, I just “made fun of” people who are unimaginative. Is that an innate trait? Should my content be censored?

Should a comment on a video of a tall person that says “how’s the weather up there?” be censored using criminal liability?

This criminalizes even hosting the discussion about what beliefs along these lines are or are not correct. Someone posts about their (mistaken) beliefs, in essence asking about a disproven theory correlating race and IQ. Other people correct them, educating them as well as any other lurkers. Should the sysadmins go to jail for not deleting the entire thread?

Being wrong on the internet should not be illegal.

There is absolutely not a bright line, and it is somewhat naive or perhaps even dishonest to claim otherwise.

thoraway1010• 6 years ago

We had a recent example along these lines with certain sports and records where there were some hate speech references to a potential biological basis for differences (men vs women and masters age vs non masters).

t-writescode• 6 years ago

24 hours means it’s going to need some sort of automation for Reddit or any popular news website’s comment section.

So what is hate speech in a way that can be automated?

Will that automated approach squelch valuable speech too? What if a certain disease impacts an ethnicity more than others? Is ‘black people tend to Sickle Cell more often than white people’ hate speech? Could a moderator decide that, given the fines? Could automation?

This is where a very loud problem is and this is the complexity you’re claiming is ‘simple’.

Causality12• 6 years ago

It's easy to forget these days that we in the Western world are not all one big house with the same rules, and reality checks can be jarring. It behooves us to remember the differences, lest we be overly shocked when we see a diner in an American restaurant carrying a sidearm or a European getting arrested for teaching a dog the Nazi salute.

m0zg• 6 years ago

I wonder what'll happen to postings by gilets jaunes now. That's still ongoing BTW, coronavirus notwithstanding.

henearkr5• 6 years ago

I bet this will induce deplatformization.

You do not react the same way if you are a platform (in which case you just deactivate or delete the contents as soon as it is flagged by anyone), or if you are yourself responsible for your website (in which case you will fight to defend that you don't need to take down the contents).

My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system, considered a platform under this law?

Just asking because, even if I am ready to be 100% independent from platforms when they mean FB or Youtube, I certainly am not ready to get rid of cloud hosting...

akersten3• 6 years ago

My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system, considered a platform under this law?

They'll probably go after the first point of contact they can find in the chain hosting the text they don't like.

Facebook would clearly be hit with the demand before Level3 would. A peer-to-peer message board that is mostly decentralized, but has a homebase in AWS to coordinate the swarms? Yeah, probably AWS is going to be told to do what they can to take it down.

To soapbox for a second - this kind of policing is ridiculous on its face from my perspective as a US citizen. (And that's coming from someone who has no issue with companies themselves moderating their websites, I think that's a natural solution to cultivate the online community that the site operators desire. But the government compelling them to do so is beyond the pale.)

henearkr5• 6 years ago

Uh... okay, then, if you are truly self-hosted (meaning, there is a big whirring, heating server in your living room), then would your internet provider company be compelled by the law to cancel your subscription?

Because, this is only the continuing of this logic...

guggle2• 6 years ago

I bet this will induce deplatformization.

And that would the return of the web as I liked it.

One can dream.

olivermarks• 6 years ago

Hate speech definition: 'abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation'.

How can this possibly be enforced? This is Bowdlerization of online debate. (removing material that is considered improper or offensive from (a text or account), especially with the result that the text becomes weaker or less effective).

Hate speech will just be pushed underground, it doesn't solve anything or make anything go away but it does reinforce 'the establishment view', something the French ENA currently have a tight control on.

superflit3• 6 years ago

This is a very broad term on this law.

"prejudice against a particular group."

So if I call Trump supporters "ignorant red necks and backward people," Will it be considered Hate speech?

Or when people say:

"White people are <slurs> <negative adjective>"

Will that be considered hate speech too?

Disclaimer: I am a "protected" minority, but I am in favor of free speech. Even if what you say is ugly or garbage.

PS. I consider downvotes here as offensive and "hate speech".

rstupek• 6 years ago

seems easy to consider those all hate speech

henearkr5• 6 years ago

From what you can see in France or more broadly in Europe, the hate speech is only characterized when you really offend the minorities (or some persons belonging), and more specifically when you do so by yielding a kind of wanting-to-sound-objective argumentation to harm them. This is worse when you call to harm them.

In your examples, which are clearly mere slurs, you do not try to sound objective in your bad depictions of them.

In my experience of what can be seen in the news, your risk something more if you are telling, for example, "white people just damage all the books they touch in bookstores, because they never care how they handle them".

A4ET8a8uTh0• 6 years ago

I think it was a long time coming. Ever since Yahoo ruling ( also in France ), the internet was in a downward spiral. I am not arguing it is a good thing, but the trajectory was clear for a while.

axegon_• 6 years ago

Poor admins and moderators... I genuinely never understood what the fuss is about. Hear me out here. I spent a good amount of time of my life living abroad. Almost 6 years to be exact. And this was during a time when commenting stuff online was relatively rare still. That said, an eastern European in a western European country is inevitably going to face racism/xenophobia. If you are a man it will hit you even sooner. And if you are in the late teen age group like I was, I'd say give it 2 weeks tops, regardless of your background. Sure, it was unpleasant but I felt far worse when someone from the crowds stood up for me. I've lived in eastern Europe in the late 80s and 90s, do you honestly think that some moron blabbering is making me feel insecure or threatened? I'm more than capable of standing up for myself if it comes to that, let them talk. If I'm not doing anything about it, chances are I've worked out that this is the best course of action. If anything, that helped me become who I am today and made me a lot more resilient. Fun fact, some of the people who gave me the hardest time coming in are the ones who have me a hand several years later when some dark moments hit me. And I can't thank them enough till this day and though we live on the opposite ends of the continent, we are now close friends.

And till this day, whenever I hear some "hate speech" as they call it, I don't even bother registering it in my brain. "Yeah, cool story bro".

My point is that censoring and forcing people to work like machines around the clock to hide comments is completely redundant. What this does is forcing people to fragment the internet into decentralized echo bubbles, where the two camps can ramble on about their own views and claim that that's how everyone thinks. And historically that has never worked and thinking that it will now is beyond absurd.

Threatening someone personally in public is one thing and it should be dealt with accordingly. But the general "f {insert any nationality, race, religion, etc.}"... Meh... Ok, whatever...

ScottFree2• 6 years ago

You're missing the point.

"A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to." -Anthony Daniels

filoleg3• 6 years ago

Fully agreed. Just "hate speech" on its own seems like a non-issue.

If it gets to a point where it obstructs your way of life or people spewing that kind of language are following you and such, it sounds more like "harassment" or "threats", and we already have laws in effect that protect people against that. Same with calling for harm to certain groups of people, as that would fall under "inciting violence".

wiml• 6 years ago

Following some links back from that article reaches this: https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/actualites/remise-du-rapport-d...

(there is both a French and an English PDF at the bottom). Interestingly to me, one of the main concerns of that writeup is the non-transparency of the editorial function of social networks, e.g., the secret algorithmic choice of what posts/tweets to show you and what order to present them in.

This kind of suggests that a service can avoid some amount of censorship attention simply by acting more as a neutral carrier, instead of the current tendency of the large players to present a filtered and adjusted view.

France passes law forcing online platforms to delete hate-speech within 24 hours

Related Stories