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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.
Well, you're wrong and very naive. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Under strong influence by the US and with hindsight about the Weimarer Republic, after WW2 Germany was designed as a so-called "wehrhafte Demokratie", i.e. a democracy that can defend itself against both external and internal threats. That's the main reason why hate speech is prohibited Germany nowadays.
The Nazis were able to rise in the Weimarer Republic for many reasons, and one of them was that they were able to poison the political climate by extraordinary hate speech and by roaming the streets and beating up political opponents. In fact, history has shown over and over that the line between hate speech and actual violent hate crimes is very thin, and once a certain threshold is reached, terror starts to reign and democracy must fail. (Terror doesn't mean what you might think it means in this context, like in occasional acts of "terrorism", it means a constant fear throughout the population that is spread by word and actions and can turn a free country into a totalitarian regime within just a few weeks or months.)
It's funny but the leadership there seems to be ignoring the brexit/trumparica message and continues to double down on these kind of things. They shouldn't be surprised when more right wing political groups are elected.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
Well, that's mostly the case.
Hate speech is not about stating that you "hate" a group of people. That's protected by your freedom of expression in Germany. You may also insult or offend people based on race, colour, ethnicity, sexual orientation or whatever. And while there are lawsuits here and there filed in those cases, they're usually dismissed. However what's not protected and classified as hate speech is if your speech includes threads of violence or similar things, that are covered by coercion laws. In German the expression for this is "Volksverhetzung" which loosely translates to 'incitement of the masses'. Another expression is 'Hassprediger' which translates to hatemonger and describes people that incite hatred or violence towards other people or groups. Holocaust denial is the really special case in Germany, that should disappear soon. The more time goes an, the fewer people's experiences get denied and ridiculed by this. The original intention to get rid of the remaining Nazis, was also fulfilled. There's no practical reason to keep this up any more besides of censorship of people who want to publicly declare that they're ignorant of a lot of evidence.
The weird thing is that there are already laws that cover these things. Individuals can be persecuted, although they rarely get convicted. So why trying to make platforms liable? The answer is simple: Next year is election year and politicking, as in doing things for the sake of appearing to care for the people, is a very popular move in politics.
The line between speech and actual crimes is a very big one.
No, it isn't. Seriously the so-called proponents of free speech on slashdot are among it's worst enemies.
Why?
Because you all keep trotting out the line about how speech doesn't do anything on it's own and is harmless. With defenders like you, free speech doesn't need enemies. The reason that free speech needs defending is precisely because words have immense power.
How many soldiers did George Washington personally kill? Enough to overthrow an empire? Or did he instead use the power of speech to get enough people behind his cause for that to happen? Or if you prefer, Hitler never personally killed anyone, those 10 million murders attributed to him were entirely down to the power of speech.
So speech is powerful and it is foolish to pretend that actions are unconnected to speech. If that were the case, then speech would not be important enough to be worth defending.
SJW n. One who posts facts.