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Facebook Must Delete Hate Postings Worldwide, Rules Austrian Court (reuters.com)
An Austrian court has ruled that Facebook must delete hate speech postings worldwide. "The case -- brought by Austria's Green party over insults to its leader -- has international ramifications as the court ruled the postings must be deleted across the platform and not just in Austria, a point that had been left open in an initial ruling," reports Reuters. From the report: The case comes as legislators around Europe are considering ways of forcing Facebook, Google, Twitter and others to rapidly remove hate speech or incitement to violence. Facebook's lawyers in Vienna declined to comment on the ruling, which was distributed by the Greens and confirmed by a court spokesman, and Facebook did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Strengthening the earlier ruling, the Viennese appeals court ruled on Friday that Facebook must remove the postings against Greens leader Eva Glawischnig as well as any verbatim repostings, and said merely blocking them in Austria without deleting them for users abroad was not sufficient. The court added it was easy for Facebook to automate this process. It said, however, that Facebook could not be expected to trawl through content to find posts that are similar, rather than identical, to ones already identified as hate speech. The Greens hope to get the ruling strengthened further at Austria's highest court. They want the court to demand Facebook remove similar - not only identical - postings, and to make it identify holders of fake accounts. The Greens also want Facebook to pay damages, which would make it easier for individuals in similar cases to take the financial risk of taking legal action.
ANyone ever read Ray Bradburys forward on why he wrote F451? He wrote it years later and it was included in some editions. He described something akin to creeping political correctness arguments put forth by narrow interest groups were going to strangle all expression because everything offends somebody. The solution the politicians favor is to ban things that offend. So soon books would be not only banned but people would go out of their way to try to make sure nobody could have access to offensive books. It would all be bread and circuses.
At the time I read that, San Francisco was going through a phase where the public libraries were Bolwderizing Mary Poppins so that the slang spoken by the Black maid was converted to a more respectable kings english. Original copies were pulled from the libraries.
I felt he had a point. It doesn't really matter if the book is offensive. Protecting people from offense is worse.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Tell them to piss off and block Austria from Facebook. I hate Facebook, but I can't stand it when some country (be it the USA, some member of the EU, or Austria) tries to enforce their laws on another country. Someone is going to have to eventually show them the middle finger.
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Doesn't the Austrian appeals court know the limitations of it's own jurisdiction?
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
If someone offends you, you should apologize to them because...
1: You took offense at something not intended to be offensive.
2: You took offense purely to start a fight.
3: You did something in the past to warrant being subject to offensive matter.
If none of the above apply, you should ignore the person and not feed the troll. Otherwise, apologize for your loss of control.
I think this would be a demonstration that they are not aware of the limitations of their jurisdiction.
Remember the last time an Austrian tried to dictate policy globally?
Place something witty here
They are essentially suggesting Facebook is not allowed to possess certain samples of published speech in any form anywhere in the world, and not allowed to publish certain such samples anywhere in the world. That means if someone in France publishes something that Austria says to remove, and it's stored on a US server, Facebook isn't allowed to just remove it from Austria; they have to remove it from everywhere.
Seems like they're trying to play games to control speech worldwide.
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the framers recognized that human rights *already* existed and said shall not infringe rights.
That's nice and all, but it's bullshit. It's a nice idea and I applaud anyone who actually believes it for their surplus of imagination, which I hope they continue to share with the world so that we can be exposed to new ideas. But in practice the only "rights" you've got are those which others will fight to defend, and this one other: to do as you will. And I don't mean this in some kind of religious sense, but in the sense that all living organisms have certain things in common based on physical reality. We all have to consume, digest, and excrete. We all reproduce, at least as species. We all attempt to survive.
The idea of "natural rights" is a lovely one, and the idea that the constitution should not exhaustively enumerate our rights as people or as citizens equally laudable, but in the really real world of people with conflicting opinions and desires, it's only those rights which are explicitly protected which you can even pretend you've got. And even then, there's practically innumerable examples of their infringement.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They're not "rights"; they're laws. It's a privilege. The concept of "rights" is a philosophical one which, essentially, suggests that some laws are somehow different from other laws in a metaphysical way. It's sort of like religion or some other belief system.
It's certainly convenient for us to have certain things codified as law, so long as enforcement operates in our benefit. From an economic standpoint, certain things which people might think should be rights aren't always possible. Food, medical care, shelter, and communication have all been cited as things which should be human rights; these things are possible to supply to everyone if your economy is sufficiently-developed, and they're cheap to supply to everyone if your economy is developed beyond that point, and yet you can't supply them in poorer economies because it simply won't work. An economy is poor because it doesn't have the means to produce; we think too much about the means to represent exchange (money), and not enough about where what we exchange comes from.
Freedom of expression is extending to the point that obscene speech isn't considered criminal, and nudity in public isn't illegal. A Federal court recently ruled that women's breasts are legally allowed exposure in public; and a guy at MIT used to go to class in only sandals, having won a court case that said nudity without lewdness isn't illegal. That's fine for most of us who either don't care, would like more boob flashes from cute girls, or are cute girls giving the boob flashes. However, it also means that parents will have their kids exposed to such a culture, which removes their control over their childrens's values. Girls will grow up in a world where it's okay to go topless. 15-year-olds will be flashing college students 10 years their senior, and this is totally okay now.
There are multiple groups of people here with conflicting so-called rights. Of primary importance, there's a group who believe certain behavior is impropriety, and want to instill "good family values" into their kids; and another group who believe Victorian ideals are outdated and a little playfulness and eye-candy is a good thing--including the ones who don't like being told they can't show themselves off a bat as the eye candy. These groups cannot cohabitate the same space without one oppressing the other, either by force of law or by sheer influence of presence.
So yeah. Things like rights, responsibilities, and imposition are relative based on your viewpoint. A lot of words we use to describe rights have no meaning; things like "freedom", "democracy", and "justice" are contextual to the speaker's and listener's minds, and have conflicting definitions depending on who you ask. "Patriotism" is often about doing what you're told without questioning if it's right, although the revolutionaries will tell you you're not a true patriot unless you love your country enough to remove villains from power and set it back on the path of righteousness; and in America, we talk about patriotism in a context with the Constitution and the rights it lays forth to subtly suggest that not supporting whatever the American government says right now is not supporting human rights.
I don't have warm, fuzzy feelings.
You've come up with words and statements and justifications to frame things that make you personally comfortable as some kind of spiritual mandate from a higher power, and to frame laws as holy scripture. I only see that certain things make the world more convenient (for me and others), and that power hasn't stripped those things yet. I understand that someone else pays for those so-called rights as well, in the form of things they can't do because it would violate my more-important rights.
Delusion became dangerous to me at some point. This is how I responded. I was raised being taught that the governments of the world secretly trade with the half-fish people of sunken Atlantis and that carrying certain metals will cause spiritual energi
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