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EU Threatens Twitter And Facebook With Possible 'Hate Speech' Laws (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo:
On Sunday, the European Commission warned Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and Microsoft that if the companies do not address their hate speech problems, the EU will enact legislation that will force them to do so. In May, those five companies voluntarily signed a code of conduct to fight illegal hate speech on their platforms within 24 hours... But on Sunday, the European Commission revealed that the companies were not complying with this code in a satisfactory manner.
"In practice the companies take longer and do not yet achieve this goal. They only reviewed 40 percent of the recorded cases in less than 24 hours," a Commission official told Reuters. The Commission's report found that YouTube responded to reports of harassment the fastest, and unsurprisingly, Twitter found itself in last place. "If Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft want to convince me and the ministers that the non-legislative approach can work, they will have to act quickly and make a strong effort in the coming months," Jourova told the Financial Times on Sunday.
"In practice the companies take longer and do not yet achieve this goal. They only reviewed 40 percent of the recorded cases in less than 24 hours," a Commission official told Reuters. The Commission's report found that YouTube responded to reports of harassment the fastest, and unsurprisingly, Twitter found itself in last place. "If Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft want to convince me and the ministers that the non-legislative approach can work, they will have to act quickly and make a strong effort in the coming months," Jourova told the Financial Times on Sunday.
Will this apply to slashdot as well?
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
hate is not an opinion.
It hates freedom of speech, it hates people, everyday people being involved in politics. It has nothing but contempt for them .
it costs closer to 3$ to put up a website than the millions or billions we end up paying now... cease fire stand down..
How is that so?
They've been the one social media platform that is most clearly silencing views they don't approve of.
I detest hate speech but censorship isn't the solution is it.
Besides I imagine filtering hate speech to be nigh on impossible with what is regarded as hate speech these days.
Sounds like the mega-companies need to step up their bribery efforts. I mean "donation" efforts.
"Kill all white people" are ok, because fuck white people. That is perfectly acceptable statements on Twitter and are not considered racist, but everyone else demands that you bow down to their bullshit.
also:
Twitter User Replaces Word 'White' With 'Black,' Gets Banned
https://www.informationliberat...
Why not organize a hate speech removal race, with prices? Competition spurs innovation.
What I'm missing out on is their definition of hate speech. Unless you know that this could just as well be the next step towards more censorship.
Translation: "If you do not censor anti-government statement, we will censor you".
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
If these companies even tried to end "hate speech" or whatever nebulous crime where a specific group of pigs are more equal than another group of pigs, we will see the end of these platforms and companies full sail.
I personally feel that Twitter will be first. They will probably ban Donald Trump's twitter account for some pointless reason. After a day or two of silence, he'll re-emerge on a platform like Gab and not be encumbered by these stupid rules. The second Twitter fractures like this will be their death.
Looking forward to see what the future holds.
... censoring clear and obvious hate speech, which is what the EU directives cover, should be easy. Oh no, wait. They only ever report their successes giving us a distorted impression of how good their technology is. Then they want to sell it to the tax payer at inflated prices as some kind of magically prescient pre-crime.
I can understand outright threats but this is going to turn into some ridiculous ordeal. Censorship is alive and well. Europe is lost just as much as the Americans that they make fun of.
http://tinyurl.com/jhez5xu
In May, those five companies voluntarily signed a code of conduct to fight illegal hate speech on their platforms within 24 hours...
I think a code of conduct to fight legal hate speech should be drafted and signed also...
New Year Eve is coming again and this time Merkel doesn't want facebook breaking press silence about some migrants having good fun with local ladies in Cologne.
Paris is a Syrian ghetto now. The Champs Ãlysées are blanketed in feces. I challenge anyone to link to a recent photograph demonstrating otherwise.
Try posting and quoting from Blazing Saddles - the part where it ends with " but no Irish." And see what happens.
As a white male with a disability that makes it difficult to keep a job (companies don't follow anti-discrimination laws despite being able to do the work), I consider anyone saying white males have innate privileges for being white and male to be illegal hate speech against me. Please remove all content referencing male privileges and ban the related accounts.
Thank you for making the world a better place. If pretend something doesn't exist it'll go away.
This news story is fake news. In law there is no such thing as hate speech not even in the EU.
It is silly childish newspeak equal to hate crime as opposed to a friendly crime don't we just all love those friendly murderers and friendly burglars muggers and so on.
Hate speech is it loved or is it hated by the deaf and dumb. Harassment Internet harassment harassing somebody is not hate speech it is harassment harassment harassment!
"This posting was monitored by British intelligence and various other government quangos under the new surveillance laws in the U.K., everything we say and do is monitored. We are now a police state a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that supervises the citizens activities. Speak out do not be frightened."
I'm not sure what's so difficult about this.
The Censorship Police need to start with TERRORIST Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts. Openly calling for murder and bombings... Start at hate's HOME... Islam.
They say they stand for freedom, but don't. If they don't want their safe space, precious, citizens to potentially see stuff that may hurt their feelings, perhaps they should block them at their inbound connections and be done with it.
Would it be OK, if Trump was black to run a Ponzi scheme? What about a woman running a Ponzi scheme?
The accounts revealed so far, are demonstrably fraudulent, and yet no investigation, no prosecution? False earnings numbers on Trump National Doral, to justify the Libor +1.75% rate, all you have to do is read two contradictory documents to demonstrate it, and he could be in jail for 25 years... but no, old white guy walks away with the grand prize.
You know he's paying those mortgages by skimming off investment money? That elevates fraud to the level of a ponzi scheme. You can even see that by comparing the numbers given to the investors to the revealed accounts in tax disputes. Will you FBI? No, of course you won't.
Suddenly speech is dangerous, and true speech more dangerous!
...now that the US lost the last bit of control it had over the internet free speech is going to go out the window on any site that has a presence outside of the US.
Illegal speech? What is this?
Who defines what is hate speech? Some consider all dissent as hate speech. This is madness.
we must destroy it!
And the Internet Archive is afraid of the USA?
... I have a hard time with the typical US notion of free speech and no censorship.
To those of us whose parents or grandparents had to live and suffer through WW2, I is pretty much unthinkable to allow someone to deny the horrors of the concentration camps and all things associated. That is very much what the rules on hate speech are about, preventing those very things to happen again. If you propagate that kind of world view, you're going to find yourself in front of a judge, and will be punished for spreading, or trying to spread, such a mindset. [btw, from what I read from your president-elect's tweets, chances are high he'd have found himself in front of a judge too]
On the other hand, many of you USians can't stand the view of naked nipples, which for us is very simply something utterly natural. Nipplegate just couldn't happen over here, we're by far not that puritanical. Isn't refusing a picture of a naked nipple (say, a breastfeeding picture) also "censorship"? Talk about hypocrisy.
To hell with the EU in every capacity. and Fuck Facebook, Twitter, Google and anybody else that censors free speech.
I have no facebook or twitter and I no longer use Google or Youtube. All because of their invasive control policies. My personal information is my intellectual property, and nobody on earth has a right to be unoffended by my free speech. otherwise I will quickly get offended at everything they say and do, and turn about is fair play.
That will send a proper message.
Remember when the left said the right would limit speech? And now its the exact opposite happening. Funny but sad.
Freedom of Speech matters more. It also is the key to fighting racism with anti-racism. The door swings both ways. Someone can post horrible racist shit to people, and then ten people can post about what a douchebag the racist is, and make him look like a shithead.
Censoring racist speech helps racism, it really does, because it hides racist attitudes in a place where it can fester and become worse. Don't confuse racism with White Supremacy, or Christian Supremacy. There are many non-white racist out there. ISIS, Al-Queda, and other terrorists are racists. They are not racists in the same way that the KKK is racist, but they are racist.
It is a little known fact that ISIS and Al-Queda have executed African Blacks and Indians, and untold numbers of Persians because they were not of the same Ethnicity as Saudi Arabs. These groups are as racist, if not worse than the KKK, or the various racist Neo-Nazi militia groups in the USA.
The hate speech laws in Germany and other parts of the EU, are empowering groups like the Golden Dawn, because people on the Secular left have been conditioned to see Racism in the Prism of White Supremacy only, and while yes that still exists, the secular left is seen as a defender of the Right wing Saudi-Arab supremacist ideology these hate groups present. I still don't think the answer to fighting hate is more hate. I don't think the White Supremacist right wing Demagogues is a way to save western civilization from destruction.
I think that the way to stop this cycle of madness we are trapped in is to expose the lunatics on both sides for the sick madmen they are. If an individual person is trying to make everyone's life miserable, that person should become the object of everyone's ire.
Disagreeing with the progressive globalist agenda in any way is hate speech and needs to be removed, otherwise RAAAYCIS MUH SOGGY KNEES ISLAMOPHOBIA!
...like Jourova.
No, it is a collective decision. I am ashamed to be European.
Yes, various Authoritarians — from Franco in the West to Stalin in the East — made elimination of the freedom of speech their top priorities:
The proper reaction to "bad" speech is good speech.
But if you are willing to justify other nations' not having an equivalent of the First Amendment by their history, what other freedoms and liberties would you excuse them not having, uhm? Maybe, Iran is justified in its persecution of gays by some terrible homosexuality-related episode of the past — I'm sure, one or two can be named by an expert on the country's history? Or, perhaps, it is Ok for the sunny and cheerful people of Mexico to continue banning abortions — because of some exquisite evils taking place in Chichen-Itza centuries ago?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The socialist EU un-elected commission are just a bunch of Nazis!!! It is time for a people's revolution & end the EU.
Because it's not feasible to manually review all messages, have AI filter out or over-mark suspect phrases in such countries, but include a notice similar to the following:
Notice: This message has been filtered to comply with law [law name and number] based on various words or phrases that look suspicious to our hate-speech detection software. If you feel this censorship was applied in error, click here for tips and assistance [link given].
This will help make users know how silly and annoying the laws are, and they may lose support.
It's somewhat similar to how retail shops list out the tax separate on receipts rather than just include it in the prices (which would otherwise simplify the receipt). Listing it out separate makes the fact that taxes are being applied clearer to the customer, making them less likely to keep or increase them in elections.
Table-ized A.I.
Not just Europe. The recent election in the US shows that disturbing xenophobia* is alive and well in the US also. I was hoping that was a thing of the past and that democracies were more mature now. Apparently not.
Europe went through an ugly war that was triggered by or justified by racism and xenophobia. After having the shit bombed out of you, your family, and country; you may have a different perspective on hate-speech versus free-speech. Experience changes opinions.
I'm not condoning such censorship, but am seriously wondering how different I'd feel after going through what Europe did, and the US election made it less hypothetical.
* Supporters of T often claim it's merely about "protecting our borders and citizens". But T could have made essentially the same statements in much less offensive ways; and rarely apologizes for the awkward phrasing that to a good many of us, sure sounds like dog-whistle-politics. If you don't really mean it, make an effort to clean it up and grow better with time. Otherwise, you earn the criticism.
Table-ized A.I.
it is a stone-age culture that only invented a stick and should die out
Europe still hasn't learned the most important lesson of WW2: Don't appease nations trying to threaten you into doing something.
It doesn't. But there IS stuff on Slashdot that qualifies, although IMHO there's not a lot. But if you browse at -1 as I always do, you'll see it.
Arguably, the moderation system here already takes care of the problem. Users who aren't logged in won't see much if any hate speech; it almost never makes it higher than +3, and if it does then it drops below that threshold pretty quickly. So they actually have to drill down to find it - it's not immediately obvious. Users who ARE logged in are unlikely to see it if they browse at +1 or higher, (again, unless they drill down), because most of it is posted by AC's whose comments start at 0. People who browse at lower than +1 soon know what to expect and can determine if they want to see that stuff or not.
Godwin time: Mein Kampf is still available for anyone to read, but it isn't unexpectedly waved in front of anyone's face - people have to seek it out. Hate speech on Slashdot is similar to that. And this kind of speech SHOULDN'T be banned; we need to maintain an ongoing awareness that those attitudes exist and are actively shaping our world. People should be able to easily avoid most of it if they so desire, but hiding it entirely and driving it totally underground is dangerous.
Spot on, in all respects.
There's sometimes a hate-speech reply at the very front of every article here, you can sometimes see it when you view an article right after it gets posted. When there are very few replies. There haven't been any recently, but there was a time (recently) when every article had one at the very beginning.
It's usually a single-line message "gay faggots" or "gay n*ggers" or about cows. "You are all cows. Cows go moo". That sort of thing.
(There hasn't been any recently, so perhaps it was either a) a paid poster during to the elections, or b) Slashdot has a better filter.
Since it's always always a first post, I suspect it's a bot. Since some of it is complete nonsense (cows? really?), I suspect it's an anchor for forum sliding.
1) The bot ensures that the post is first, and the text ensures that it gets modded down.
2) If something appears in the discussion that the owner wants to suppress, they log in and post a reply to the invisible first post.
3) We see the reply (at +2), but not the first post. The text to be suppressed is now slipped further down the page.
As a corollary to #3 above, the poster might have several accounts and post a fake argument about spelling or grammar. It all seems above-board and legit, but the interesting bits get pushed down the page, hopefully below the fold.
And finally, I read an analysis online (with links and references) that estimated that the *maximum* number of white supremacists in the US is less than 50,000, and most of those are passive. The article (which I can't find right now) notes that only 200 people showed up at a KKK national meet. It estimates that there are less than 1000 people across the US who are the stereotypical "Banshee" style member, who actively perform hate crimes against other races.
Their exploits get amplified by the media, so we see the problem as bigger than it is.
(Am I wrong? Let's have some links.)
I think most of the hate speech comes from teens and young adults looking to rile people up. I don't think there's really a lot of white supremacy activity going on in the US any more.
Note that I did *not* say that there was no predjudice or bias, only that there is no lynching, cross burning, and such. Blacks can be around anywhere in the country without fearing for their life due to the color of their skin.
I want to see two governments get into a fight over a fundamental rights issue. It'll be very entertaining.
When are we going to finally define the word "racist" as hate speech?
I mean in current parlance racist is the n-word for white people.
Does "Atheism/Catholicism / choose-your-ism is wrong/ ignorant" count as hate speech?
How about 'we need to take action against 'entity of your choice'?
What about people with demographic xyz are more likely too?
The problem with any law impinging on freedom of speech is that it will inversely be used by those in power to diminish or reduce counter opinion.
Think of all those 'hateful' anti-Obama/ anti-trump people out there?
Should freedom of speech be determined by who is in power or who runs the company?
I think advocating hate speech laws is hateful.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
or was that just a load of snivelling bollocks you spouted???
And all those Imam's preaching about the desire of allah for the deaths of "the great satan" or whatever they're calling the USA now.
What about leaks of top secret documents of your government? That's speech too.
Or is freedom of speech not quite the absolute you claim here, because you think THIS form of speech should be fine, but aren't going to consider any you think aren't fine before making your silly claims?