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German Minister: Facebook Should Be Treated Like a Media Company Rather Than a Technology Platform (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Germany's Justice Minister says he believes Facebook should be treated like a media company rather than a technology platform, suggesting he favors moves to make social media groups criminally liable for failing to remove hate speech. Under a program that runs until March, German authorities are monitoring how many racist posts reported by Facebook users are deleted within 24 hours. Justice Minister Heiko Maas has pledged to take legislative measures if the results are still unsatisfactory by then. Maas has said the European Union needs to decide whether platform companies should be treated like radio or television stations, which can be held accountable for the content they publish. Under current EU guidelines Facebook and other social media networks are not liable for any criminal content or hate posts hosted on their platform. Instead, in May Facebook, Google's YouTube and Twitter signed the EU hate speech code, vowing to fight racism and xenophobia by reviewing the majority of hate speech notifications within 24 hours. But the code is voluntary not legally binding. The state justice ministers meeting in Berlin called on the government to take swift action against hate speech on the Internet. The ministers called for more transparency and said social media companies should be obliged to regularly publish figures on how many hate posts have been deleted. They also wanted more public information on how notifications are processed and the criteria behind the decision making. Facebook says it is a technology company, not a media company, that builds the tools to supply users with news and information but does not produce content.
I vote that Poland be retroactively punished for the disgusting xenophobia it showed towards Germany and the Soviet Union in WWII.
Furthermore, the Ukraine shouldn't be allowed to get away with its Xenophobia against undocumented Russian immigration.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Germany has more than enough laws already to persecute the authors of threats against others. All this new "hate speech" nonsense it just a disguise to introduce censorship, because that is so much more convenient than actually going after those who author criminal content, and it's especially useful the more vague you define "hate speech" so you can use it against any kind of opposition you do not like.
Not having a Facebook account is the new not having a television.
I don't have that either :-)
The problem is though a LOT of people get their "news" from social media exclusively. If it's posted on Facebook, it's the news. Doesn't matter if it really happened, or if it's completely fake. (In fact, the more click-baity the news, the more likely it's going to be shared and treated as real.).
Hell, I know more than a few people who believe Reddit is the source of everything they need to know.
Heck, I should start a "here a Trump's tax returns" fake-post and give it a bit of a click-bait titles and information. Do one fake tax return showing how Trump is really for democrats, and one for the alt-right and you can have both sides believing contradiction. Depending on who you want to troll, it'll be easy because too many people believe that if it's on the Internet, it's true. Doubly so if it's Facebook.
The art of critical thought is dead. If you can troll it, people will think it's real.
Those people are too stupid to do anything about.
Before Facebook they likely just took anything from CNN as truth. Before that ABC/NBC/CBS.
You just can't fix stupid.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I think we all know the majority of social media has no value. In fact the poster should pay the rest of society for wasting their time.
FB users are content creators - who, of their own free will, decide to surrender all rights to the content they create to their publisher.
But FB is definitely a publisher. Why is this even controversial?
They certainly can leave, but I also think it's time that web based companies no longer hide behind being a 'tech company' when they clearly earn their money from regular mainstream non-tech services, such as advertising.
These companies use 'tech' to compete against established companies in existing markets. They don't create 'tech' to sell, in most instances, their 'tech' is not for sale. For instance, you can't go to uber and license their software to set up your own uber platform, similarly, does facebook have anything to sell other than advertising (and possibly data)?
For this reason, I think facebook is a publishing/broadcasting/media company. They should be bound by those standards in the respective jurisdiction that they operate, and not get a free pass because their approach is different to traditional companies in that market. I don't agree with censorship, but Germany doesn't have a full equivalent of the 1st ammendment, they specifically censor many areas; most of europe does, and the history of censorship is centuries long. The USA is an anomaly when it comes to free speech.
In an era where computer technology underlies any and all business and other organized operations, it's quite clear that companies shouldn't be able to pass for "technology companies" simply because they implemented their own platform. Rather, the term should be reserved for those companies who have no other business besides making and selling hardware, software, and support services for the two.
For example, this makes Uber a taxi company, and Airbnb a hotel company, subject to the rules and regulations of those industries -- rather than being able to make up their own rules with "independent contractors" and "helping letters and renters meet (while handling customer service, cash transactions, and taking a cut in the middle)".
However you feel about the German censorship legislation, the above should stand in any nation where rule of law trumps neoliberalist contract-brokering; which in a liberal democracy it should.
You may or may not be right in what you are saying about this particular issue, but I think you are speaking from a background of a particular interest: you think freedom of speech is more important than other considerations in society. I am not here expressing any personal opinion about this, only pointing out the context. It is important to keep in mind that government and state are there to serve the whole of their people - ie. ideally all participants in society - not just certain interest groups, and if the overwhelming majority feels that freedom of speech isn't as important as, say, the safety of the weaker members of society, then it is right of the state and the government to try to address the issue. It is of course perfectly valid to argue that the way to address it is to try to educate people, but that takes a long time, and perhaps the issue needs handling now? Also, many - even most, I suspect - will agree that freedom of any sort comes with responsibility: if your use of your personal freedom harms others, then you are responsible for that damage and should potentially be punished for it.
It's like driving your car: you have the right to drive on any public highway, but if you drive recklessly and kill somebody, or if your actions cause an accident that kills somebody, then you have a responsibility for what happened. Of course, reckless driving is in itself an offence for which you can be punished, but you could argue that it shouldn't be - that it isn't necessary, because other laws already make it possible to punish a reckless driver for killing people etc, but I think most will agree that it is better to make the shortcut, since reckless driving is very often the cause of serious accidents. Stopping reckless drivers prevents accidents, and it may also prevent many from getting to the point where they have killed somebody and face a long, custodial sentence. Hate speech is the same thing: it is very often the trigger for racially aggravated crime, terrorism etc. Making hate speech an offence punishable by a fine may make some think a bit before just spouting some nonsense because they are drunk and angry; the first step down any path is always the hardest - once you get used to targeting a group with words, it becomes easier to think that beating up somebody isn't that bad and so on.
I'm not saying that I am necessarily right - but it would be deeply wrong not to have the debate simply because of "Freedom of Speech". I mean, freedom of speech aplies here as well, am I right?