EU Gives Ultimatum To Facebook and Twitter: Obey Us Or We'll Start Regulating (theregister.co.uk)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The EU Commission has fired a shot across Facebook and Twitter's bows, having issued a proclamation decreeing that "social media platforms" must do more to remove "illegal content inciting hatred, violence and terrorism online." Although what is said in the EU proclamation is nothing new -- indeed, in the UK, the measures proposed by the EU's talking heads have been standard practice for years -- what matters here is not what is being said publicly, but instead the threat of what might happen unless Facebook appeases the bloc's leaders. The EU said that platforms should appoint dedicated points of contact for police forces and other State agencies to talk to about illegal content; appoint trusted content moderators ("flaggers," in EU-ese); and invest in "automatic detection technologies." In addition, illegal content should be deleted within "specific timeframes."

All straightforward; nothing new there, at least from the British perspective. Yet the threat is in the EU's later words: "Today's communication is a first step and follow-up initiatives will depend on the online platforms' actions to proactively implement the guidelines. The Commission will carefully monitor progress made by the online platforms over the next months and assess whether additional measures are needed."

Comments

Re:The EU

[Baron_Yam]

Pretty much every aspect of your life is subject to the collective will of the society in which you live. You cry, 'Freedom of speech!', and they're saying, 'Stop the spread of dangerous hate!'. Since they have a lot more experience with domestic terror groups than Americans do, I understand why they're going that way.

Right now, you're probably right. But when groups of malcontents are allowed to fester unchecked, they eventually cross the line from being bitter to being violent... and that's when the EU approach suddenly looks better.

So far as I know, nobody has figured out how to balance the two concerns in a way that makes everyone (or even most people) happy.

I'm usually reasonably happy with Canada's position, which is something like 'free speech until you're advocating harming people'. That tends to get Americans twisted up in knots, but it works for us, and we (as much as I can speak for all Canadians) don't feel like we're living under the constant surveillance of Big Brother's telescreens.

Fuck you EU and your censorship

[UnknownSoldier]

Your bullshit "hate speech" is nothing more then censorship.

Apparently you learnt NOTHING from (British) Political Philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) to which this YouTuber beautifully summarized:

[He] made an argument for free speech including that of hate speech for a good reason.

He argued that if we censor hate speech our fundamental beliefs of what is right and wrong are not tested.

If our beliefs are aren't argued against then we don't attempt to rationalize what we believe to be true.

We don't think about why our beliefs are right.

When we don't question our beliefs we don't think about them.

And when we don't think about our beliefs we don't learn new things. We don't advance and improve our thoughts about what is right and wrong.

He argued that even if someone's argument is wrong it still serves a purpose of making us rationalize and check our beliefs and even improve them.

Being able to listen to an argument that is wrong lets us understand what makes an argument wrong and improve our own beliefs from learning from someone else's failure.

Gee, oh look, C. S. Lewis (Hey, look another smart British citizen!) said the SAME thing, except he called it Chronological Snobbery

Grow the fuck up EU already. Just maybe you should pay more attention to your history.

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Only cowards censor.

Re:The EU

[lgw]

Where did you get that from? Free speech is free speech. While no one is obligated to provide you a platform to speak from, people can freely talk about whatever they'd like, and as only the most offensive speech was ever in need of protection, that's what we're talking about. The freedom to speak (or otherwise express your thoughts).

If the government gets to label speech it doesn't like "hate speech" and suppress it, then the government has to power to suppress any and all speech. The excuse isn't the point: the suppression of speech is the point.

Again, conflict will be resolved by speech or by violence. I prefer speech. I also think my ideas are better, and feel no need to prevent my opponent from speaking - let him! The more nay idiot who disagrees with me speaks, the more he'll embarrass himself. Or, you know, the possibility exists that I'm wrong. But not about free speech - there's to much evidence from history that suppressing speech never fixes anything, merely shifts thins to violence earlier.