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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."
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."
Where Free Speech is not acceptable!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If you're wondering why the European Union (dominated by Germany) doesn't protect freedom of speech, blame the Nazis. And blame us.
Thanks Russia! You big fat spoilsports. You and China are ruining the Internet for the rest of the world.
Go away!
I am a European and I hope they will fight this. I also hope they will not win that fight and decide to close down shop in Europe. And nothing of value was lost.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The the EU, USA and China are economically tightly linked. The fall of any of these would hurt the rest.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Where Free Speech is not acceptable!
Two points. 1) Free Speech from the American perspective isn't a universal perspective. It is unique to our circumstance and our history. The EU has Free Speech but the details are a little different and that is fine in principle. We can quibble over the details of where the line on free speech should be but you have to address how you plan to control hate groups if you let their rhetoric flow freely. Europe obviously feels that it makes more sense to squash to speech up front since they lack the unified government structures to deal with it later like the US does. There are problems with this but that leads to point 2) The EU has had actual Nazis and been the epicenter or two World Wars. Disagree if you like but it's pretty understandable how they might flinch a little at the sort of rhetoric that resulted in literal catastrophic ruin to the continent and millions of deaths. If the US had the history of conflict Europe does you might have a different perspective too.
This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die.
#DeleteFacebook
"No Speech for Yew!" :-P
Twitter is going to need to split up into different sites, and just not show the EU the rest of the world's tweets. They can still show the US the EU's tweets, though. Will people use VPNs to get full access to twitter? Probably not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You are welcome to drown in the sink of your own filth. We just don't want it here.
Then get off our internet.
And here you highlight the main danger of this kind of approach: even if you agree with banning hate speech in principle, you are inevitably going to end up in a situation where there is selective enforcement, and that gives far more power to the people who get to choose what to enforce than anyone should be comfortable with a select group wielding.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In the USA, we value freedom so fuck off EU.
In the USA, we value Uber so fuck off EU.
You are doomed to fail anyway.
Well, I guess there are some folks who claim that they would die if they didn't have Facebook.
But I doubt if the lack of Facebook would sink the EU.
However, this spat is just one of politicians being posers. It's like Donald Trump causing a fuss with the NFL to distract folks from the real problems.
Now Facebook can claim high moral ground with "Free Speech" while the EU politicians can claim that they are fighting Yet Another Evil US Internet Company.
. . . so what will the weather be like tomorrow . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The whole "hate speech" crap is just a crying shame. Really, it's nothing but political censorship, because whoever is in charge gets to determine what viewpoints are hateful. Despite the European charter of human rights, Europe does not really believe in free speech. Really, the US doesn't either - look at the latest mess in Berkeley.
If and when we can, it is important to push back against this kind of censorship. No one makes you follow anyone on Twitter - so why would hateful opinions even bother you? On Facebook, if someone posts something you don't like, block them, or make your page private. Are so many people really such snowflakes that a few hateful words will destroy their world?
Really, it's kind of pathetic...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Name one war that the USA has won, where they did not have the French as allies.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You hit the nail on the head. The lack of places for growth are just causing the rich to leverage their power to get richer without benefiting the poorer. Trickle down economics would work if there was a place for valid growth because that would generate jobs, but there just isn't.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Free Speech from the American perspective isn't a universal perspective. It is unique to our circumstance and our history. The EU has Free Speech but the details are a little different and that is fine in principle.
And we tend to be a little bit less nipple-averse than the US.
Our concept of Free Speech vs Censorship doesn't in any way go nut whenever there's a little bit of flesh shown somewhere (*).
Nudity isn't a reason to kick-ban you from European media, because of "Think of the Children" and "OMG! Femal Anatomy ! Run for your lives !".
Indeed, based on past history, each side of the Atlantic pond has a slightly different approach on the Free Speech vs Censorship scale.
We can quibble over the details of where the line on free speech should be but you have to address how you plan to control hate groups if you let their rhetoric flow freely.
There are also other very valid trends in Europe that try instead to instil a little bit of critical thinking when exposed to bullshit on internet.
(This specific youtube channel deals more about fakenews and conspiracy theories, but the general approach of teaching critical thinking is also applicable for anything else going on the internet).
So instead of blocking the rhetoric of hate groups, you try tackling the problem from the other side by making the people less receptive to the king of bullshit that goes online.
(And by the way the channel names happens to have some unfortunate implication in the US, but in its native France it's just a quote from a known author)
---
(*) : Common, naked butts and visible female nipples ?
Facebook's censors are going to have brain haemorrhage if they visit certain breaches in Europe.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
publish only content we approve of, or we shut you down. That truly sounds like a formula in China and Russia right now: You publish what we tell you or we will fine you. Sounds a lot like: publish what we tell you, or we shut you down. The requests by the EU sound a lot like the regulatory systems in China where you have reps you report to to approve content. People may say it's for safety but "those who give up essential liberties for a little extra security deserve neither liberty nor security". In other words, there is always going to be some people who have an unpopular or sometimes even dangerous opinion, but if we suppress it being express even non-violently, we eliminate free thought, and when you have that, you have tyranny.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
They will shut off access to their services from the EU and see how they like that. If they follow through with these requests, it will by default affect principles of free speech here in the USA. What the EU already considers censurable hate speech is insane. As time goes on, they will only add more and more that Facebook and Twitter will have to follow.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
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:
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.
--
Only cowards censor.
what you can't do is incite violence. After WWII the EU is still a little more sensitive to the use of what we here in the states call a Dog Whistle. Actually the EU's always been like that. In America we let people violate the spirit of the law while adhering to the letter all the damn time. The EU doesn't tolerate that. I can't say I blame them. They do it with their banking system too and they're generally better off for it (except Greece who got caught holding the bag when the 2008 crash hit).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
These companies should wait until the matter becomes a regulation, because only that can be contested in court. Legislation can also be contested in court, but not before it's subject to the whole parliamentary transparency process; which is what the commission (executive) is trying to avoid with these threats.
Those companies have already seen this a couple of times from various governments. It's all bluster; the commission can of course put pressure on them, but that's likely either inconsequential or outright illegal.
Ahem: Throwing the Godwin Flag.
Here's what Mike Godwin himself had to say about the neo-Nazis at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville: "By all means, compare these shitheads to the Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you."
I'd call [the NSDAP and its successors] fascist-left
Though the platform of the NSDAP included workfare programs, the rest of its nationalist, anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-Marxist ideology smells a lot like paleoconservatism, the ideology of the alt-right.
"We have to put a stop to the idea that it is a part of everybody's civil rights to say whatever he pleases." - Adolf Hitler
The issue here is something recent anti-white supremacist protesters need to take to heart. The principle of free speech is agnostic. You cannot claim to uphold free speech while simultaneously attempting to deny it to those you disagree with. Either you believe in free speech, even when that speech offends you. Or you believe in suppression of certain viewpoints and their expression. The latter puts you in the same category as China, Russia, and Nazi Germany - the only difference is which ideas you've decided to suppress.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The idea behind free speech is that you can't counter a negative with a negative. If you consider it to be justified to impose negative policies against ideas you consider to be negative, you are by definition justifying negative policies towards your ideas by those people if the tables are ever turned. After all, from their perspective, you have negative ideas and thus they are justified in imposing negative policies against you And all of society devolves into a self-perpetuating cycle of negativity.
Free speech attempts to break this cycle by saying everyone is allowed to have their say. And instead of actively fighting against the expression of ideas we don't like, we'll simply rely on rational people (who hopefully make up the overwhelming majority of the population) to judge and dismiss those ideas as ridiculous. The proper response to white supremacist propaganda is citing historical examples of where their beliefs have led the world in the past - innocents living (or hiding) in fear, mob lynchings of innocents, genocide, world war. Convince rational people that we don't want to go down that direction again.
It would be interesting. Either they cut their EU operations or their US corporations, or go bankrupt from the fines from either of them. Personally I'd split the company. One EU company serving EU customers, one US company serving US customers. The EU company falls under European law, the US company under US law.
We need to get stuff written into these globalist "trade agreements" to protect Americans' first amendment rights from over-reaching Europeans.
It's similar to obscenity: "won't somebody please think of the children" as an excuse for censorship hits a hard wall when it unduly infringes on adult speech. In this situation, Europeans are the children. They will pull down speech Americans have a right to see.
More accurate would be to compare Europe to China censoring Tienanmen Square images from google.cn, but since Americans are used to thinking of them as friends who make basically-sane policy, I will refer to their citizens as children who must be protected from "hate" instead.
Silicon Valley has become a notorious nest of censors, almost overnight in the last couple years, but this is becoming irrelevant. The American Right is calling for platform regulation, because Silicon Valley today has more power than the government did when the First Amendment was signed. And European courts are successfully applying their ridiculous "right to be forgotten" censorship to Google search results world-wide. If both things happen, Silicon Valley will be caught in the middle, so their employees' irresponsible activism no longer matters, only nation-state politics matters.
The censorship wars are being fought on so many fronts simultaneously. We need a better strategy to preserve what should be our political ideals. I wish there were some way to export all the unhinged millennials to Europe, then shut down Facebook in Europe and let them all read it over Tor. However this is impossible because too many of them are actual citizens, and Facebook will cave to the European ad revenue just as Amazon caves to the Chinese revenue. We should get First Amendment protections written into trade bills. We only need to cover countries with significant ad revenue, not the whole globe.
Because one of the central messages of the right is that people should all be identical (so therefore they are totally ok with authoritarianism, since the dictator will just make laws that are the same as what everyone wants anyway, the government should tightly manage the economy because we all basically want the same things, etc). It's not that freedom is bad; it's that freedom is unnecessary. If you had freedom, you wouldn't use it because you'd still want to do the same things as everyone else.
Whereas one of the central messages of the left is that we don't all want the same thing, so there should be less forceful control to make everyone be the same. Diversity is natural and normal, and disagreement (and even incompatible conflicts) is not only ok, but even expected.
The right expects less extremism (but they're wrong and actually do have diversity, despite being against it) so some of their diversity is perceived as "extreme."
The left expects lots of diversity, so whatever there is, doesn't shock anyone since it would be weird if it weren't there. Things can be extreme, but you don't label them as extreme because the strategy of communication isn't to point out differences. Extremity is irrelevant to whatever actual topics are at hand, or whenever extremity is relevant, it just helps to provide an example for why we need more freedom instead of less of it.
For the right, extremity itself is a big, distinguishing (and usually unwanted) property.
So "extreme right" really means something, whereas "extreme left" is almost redundant.
The Spanish-American War:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You may include the Mexican American War as well, although France was doing their own thing in Veracruz around the same time frame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And how do you define "allies"? Just because you're not at war with someone doesn't mean they are your allies. Are you trying to suggest that the U.S. has always been allies with France? Because that is most certainly not the case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Anyways, perhaps they would step away from these ridiculous demands if social media became more decentralized
and distributed: store messages locally, removing the ability of a central agency to "censor through forced deletion".
And that would also be a very good reason to concentrate efforts on teaching critical thinking rather trying to censor, as I've mentioned.
The younger generation seem to be more active on WhatsApp (the reason why Facebook bought them), SnapChat (the reason why Zuckerberg is enraged of not being successful to buy them), or Telegram (often criticized in old-school media to harbor lots of extremists chat groups).
i.e. platforms that tend to practice more often end-to-end encryption (as opposed to client-to-server) and store a lot less centrally.
(Probably initially liked by the younger generation because their parent can't whatch them for the above reason, unlike centralized social media such as Facebook)
It would be hard to implement censoring in these kind of platform. But teaching the people to use their brain would still be useful even in these case.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
AFAIK, modern Christianity and Judaism doesn't criminalize homosexuality. It may consider it immoral and unnatural, but not illegal. Islam, on the other hand, considers it a mortal offense worthy of stoning or being tossed off a high building.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The USA will protect free speech. Free to give a speech. Stay free after a speech. Freedom to read, freedom to comment.
No EU like reports, fines, questions, interviews.
The question for a US brand then becomes how to keep their paying EU consumers but not have any interaction with any part of the EU bureaucracy?
As the EU builds a new digital Berlin wall to keep free speech out how can EU users still enjoy US products and services?
Ship to collection locations just outside the EU so EU citizens can collect product and services without risking EU investigations?
Use a third safe nation to repackage a shipment? So the origin is no longer a nation with strong freedom of speech protections?
Some sort of low cost per site VPN that offers the user full US freedoms to any user of the US site?
With a bit of ingenuity US freedom of speech and freedom after speech will be on offer world wide.
As other nations move to a bureaucracy of legal boredom, US products and services will grow. Fun sells.
The EU will be left to ban sites and then try and ban using VPN services.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If I spend my time writing, please, use yours to READ what I wrote BEFORE spreading lies.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in DIGNITY and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
(Caps mine). Saying homosexuals are "inmoral" or "unnatural" is a direct attack against OUR dignity. HENCE, Christians and Jews and Muslims are CRIMINALS as I stated before.
Please, if you're going to reply again, first READ what I wrote before making me waste my time fixing your lies.
Do you somehow think Mussolini was the only guy in the early 1900s who was influenced by Nietzsche? Soviet communism drew quite a bit from that font as well. As such, Nietzsche being a litmus test for "fascism" or "right-wing-ism" is a nonsequitur.
Fascism is utterly leftist. It eschews liberal values and reactionary values - often using the same verbiage as communists or progressives might. Fascism believes in socialism in the terms that Marx pioneered. However, Fascism believes in a national socialism - a socialism confined to a single country, just as Bolshevism eventually settled on a somewhat similar formula in the Soviet Union until the Second World War. As such, measures practiced by communists are virtually identical to fascist measures, including police states, collectivization of industry and agriculture, belief in group rights over individual rights, et al ad nauseam.
But really, can you seriously sit there with a straight face and call a political system that expropriates property for the people 'Volk', hollows out or topples monarchies, and guarantees jobs for the public, along with all the socialist medical and retirement benefits you might care to mention, a 'right wing phenomenon'?
Please...what a load of bullshit has been foisted on the public for 70 years in the name of propagandistic differentiation between the Nazi enemy and Soviet 'ally'. The communists and fellow travelers dominating the media and academia have been perfectly happy to continue this lie to the benefit of their preferred political system. Otherwise, we'd have to brand all forms of left-wing totalitarianism - Communism, Fascism and Progressivism - murderous evils, as they are.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.