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Sri Lanka Blocks Facebook, Instagram To Prevent Spread of Hate Speech (lankabusinessonline.com)
Sri Lanka has blocked social media websites Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to avoid the spread of hate speech in the country, local media reported on Wednesday. From the report: Even though there is no official confirmation from the authorities, the Cabinet Spokesman Minister Rajitha Senaratne on Wednesday said the government has decided to block access to certain social media. Telecom Regulatory Commission (TRC) has started to monitor all social media platforms to curb hate speech related to communal riots escalated in Kandy district. Telecommunication service providers (ISPs) have also restricted internet access in Kandy district on the instructions of the TRC.
It's funny, the social networks have gotten to the point where they can disrupt a society more than they can help it. Time to shut them all down and start again.
We hated your hate speech so we blocked your hate so you can hate, hate.
I can totally see blocking Facebook and Instagram, but I don't really get WhatsApp? You could just as well block the phone network.
I feel so sig.
For example is criticizing someone's political, social, economic, or religious beliefs hate speech?
Is bullying harrassing and insulting a person hate speech? And if so, is it hate speech simply to call them an idiot, or would you have to go as far as calling them a nazi or something equally hurtful?
That government, so nice of them fighting against hate speech. Sure... the first responsibility of rulers is caring for their subjects, everybody will buy that.
Religion should be classified as mental illness.
You've got an excuse to shut down social media because people post 'hate speech' on it, aka complaining about the bad effects of diversity.
See also Singapore, China etc. And it's coming to Europe too. After Merkel decided to let in anyone who arrived, Germany started to have a problem with racism - aka the natives bitching about the bad behaviour of the new arrivals.
The solution was to threaten social media companies with massive fines unless they remove 'hate speech' within 24 hours
https://www.economist.com/news...
"WHAT the hell is wrong with this country?" fumed Beatrix von Storch to her 30,000 Twitter followers on December 31st: "Why is the official police page in NRW [North Rhine-Westphalia] tweeting in Arabic?" The MP for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party detected in the force's multilingual new-year greeting a bid "to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men". The next day her tweet--and, for 12 hours, her entire account--vanished from Twitter. In the subsequent political storm Alice Weidel, co-leader of the AfD, came to Ms von Storch's defence: "Our authorities are subordinating themselves to imported, rampaging, groping, punching, stabbing migrant mobs," she tweeted. That, too, was promptly deleted.
Germany's memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi undergird its commitment to free speech. "There shall be no censorship," decrees the constitution. Even marches by Pegida, an Islamophobic and anti-immigrant movement founded in 2014, receive police protection. But the country of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust also takes a punitive attitude to what it deems "hate speech". Inciting hatred can carry a prison sentence of up to five years, Hitler's "Mein Kampf" is available only in annotated form, and it is illegal to single out any part of the population for insult or other abuse that could "breach the peace". Irmela Mensah-Schramm, a Berlin pensioner who spray-paints over swastikas and other racist graffiti, is a national hero.
Reconciling these two convictions--for free speech and against hate speech--is becoming harder, particularly since Angela Merkel's refugee gambit in 2015. Opening Germany's borders to some 1.2m mostly Muslim migrants has fuelled the rise of nativist outfits like the AfD and Pegida. Racist propaganda and sensationalist reports (some, though not all, fake) of criminal and rapist immigrants have rippled across social media. In 2016, for example, the number of criminal investigations into online hate speech in Berlin rose by 50%. A number of the newcomers from the Middle East and Africa are anti-Semitic. Confronting such ills without encroaching too much on freedom of expression is tricky.
The most prominent example of the balancing act is the new Net Enforcement Law (NetzDG), of which Ms von Storch's and Ms Weidel's tweets were early victims. Inspired by the rise of fake news and a report suggesting that only a minority of illegal posts on social media were being removed within a day (and just 1% or so on Twitter), the law cleared the Bundestag last June and came into force on January 1st. It sets out 20 things defining a comment as "clearly illegal", such as incitement to hatred or showing the swastika. Once posts are flagged by users, a social-media firm has 24 hours--extended to a week in complex cases--to check and remove those that contravene the rules, or face a €50m ($60m) fine. In the first week, Facebook's over 1,000 German moderators have had to process hundreds of thousands of cases.
Overwhelmed by the volume and wary of incurring such huge fines, social-media firms are erring on the side of censorship. On January 2nd Titanic, a satirical magazine, joked that Ms von Storch would be its new guest tweeter. Two of the subsequent tweets mocking the AfD politician were censored. When Titanic republished them, its account was suspended for two d
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;
Where's Arthur C Clarke's ghost going to post his sexy scuba selfies now?!
Speeching is filthy and should be banned.
This is a common practice in this part of the world. A temporary blockage of social media for 1-2 days, usually restricted to just a district or a city is common in India.
It is employed when the law enforcing agencies are caught unaware about some sudden flashpoint that triggers street violence. This blockage stops spreading of violence to larger area and give time to enforcement agencies to mobilize their resources
It is not to be confused with censorship or blanket ban of internet / social media forever. Over all it has a positive impact in preventing larger scale destruction of life and properties for cost of inconvenience of few days.
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence. - Robert Frost
So people who want to "noplatform" things they term "hate speech" are deliberately being immature, uneducated, ignorant, insecure hot-heads?
Sounds right.
Can they still use tor ?
Yup. That works every time. How long until the next civil war?
Hmm, a government faced with civil disturbances decides to block social media "to curb hate speech"?
Right.
-Styopa
This is part of a state of emergency imposed after violence broke out between Buddhists and Muslims.
I've been to Sri Lanka quite a lot in the 1990's (I had friends there), when the war was still raging in the north and east, and then the government responded to bombings and other emergencies by declaring a state of emergency and imposing curfews. They basically shut down large parts of society to let things cool down, including transport. It once happened just when I was about to leave the country. Public transport suddenly didn't exist anymore, taxi drivers didn't want to take long distance rides because they were afraid to get stranded somewhere, and only with the aid of a police officer from my friends' neighbourhood were we able to arrange transport for me to the airport. It was spooky, there was no other traffic at all and an astounding number of roadblocks had materialized out of nowhere.
While the Sri Lankans I met generally were incredibly nice people the country does have a history of overheated reactions that result in burned properties and deaths, and that appears to be happening again now. The government responded in the way they tend to respond, and nowadays that apparently includes shutting down social media. The state of emergency is declared for 10 days, so that should be the duration of the social media shutdown too.
It is the *Christians* who are supposed to be the one spreading all kinds of HATE SPEECH, right ?
What happened?
Where are those *Hateful Christians* ??
> ... Religion should be classified as mental illness ...
How can you classify religion as mental illness when we have the Religion of Peace ??
Scary! Maybe hating thyself will be banned...would that make the world better? How about locking someone up for hate...hmm? What about just excising them from society to prevent their hateful thoughts?
Do you think suppression of a people is worse in the long run than allowing it to surface in a less explosive manner? Rhetorical question I hope.
... as long as they don't block IRC and blogs and RSS.
The reason is appalling though, IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Anyone caught hating shall be ejected by the Oompa-Loompas!
...it's useless.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
When your government and/or corporations start to control your speech, you live in a tyranny.
Shut those entities down.
I'm not suggesting anything, but they are incapable of controlling you if there facilities had all their communications cut and jammed.
When talking about elections, Stalin reputedly said: "It's not who votes that counts; it's who counts the votes". Whenever one of these "hate speech" articles come up, I think of something similar: It's not the hate speech that matters; it's who gets to define what hate speech is.
I live in Europe, where the equivalent to the American 1st Amendment is ridiculously watered down. The European equivalent says: "Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. ... The exercise of these freedoms ... may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for..." and the list of exceptions continues...
Which means: Just like in Sri Lanka, European governments can restrict your speech based on the ruling elite's ideas of necessity, safety and morals. Which basically means that they can restrict any damned thing they please.
Censorship is evil. Speech may be uncomfortable, it may be offensive, but there are very, very few situations where it should be restricted.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Me thinks they want to rid their country of propaganda.
So when can I move in? I miss being able to make funny faces behind digital camera photos, knowing that it's just going to rot in a locally owned hard drive. Now, the magic square shows up and people don't even bother looking at their privacy settings. The Australian aborigines are right; it does steal your soul.
When a dangerous topic comes up, yank the plug for a few days and hope it defuses itself.
That's what happened when the news of the Google anti-right-wing censorship rampage broke.
If you think this situation started with the refugee crisis, think again.
Completely agree. I'd also add that Germany has had a long existing Turkish minority in the country which has created tensions for a while. In fact, before the refugee crisis, Chancellor Merkel had a speech in which she declared failure in Germany's efforts at multiculturalism and integrating its minorities. Mind you, we should also remember the German context in that it imported Turkish workers and effectively ghettoized them, making only token efforts to integrate them in hopes they'd go back home when no longer needed. Instead, three generations later, Germany is waking up to the fact that maybe they should have been more proactive in bringing them into the fold. This tension was already there, and the refugee crisis simply blew it up even further.