Germany is considering a stable, open, democratic, peaceful, constructive and successful country. There are any number of rankings/scoring regarding freedom of the press and of expression, resilience to corruption, democracy, economic opportunity etc in which Germany scores better than the US.
These are laws passed by the national parliament, elected to represent its constituents. The law is subject to approval by not only the national courts, but the European Court of Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights.
To somehow consider it a grave injustice when Twitter is now required to act when they are informed of activity considered illegal in that jurisdiction is ridiculous. Because presumably you're doing so out of some understanding of "democracy". Yet you are ignoring quite a bit of the local democracy that lead to this.
> There are any number of rankings/scoring regarding freedom of the press and of expression, resilience to corruption, democracy, economic opportunity etc in which Germany scores better than the US.
One of the reasons people regard these rankings as a total joke is exactly because of incidents like this - Twitter being forced to delete satirical tweets.
More broadly, I think most people would agree that beyond the extremes (say, US vs North Korea), the precise rankings of countries on these metrics are based on questionable methodologies with vague priors and are generated largely by politically motivated organizations.
> One of the reasons people regard these rankings as a total joke is exactly because of incidents like this - Twitter being forced to delete satirical tweets.
I'm sorry but in the extensive travels of tons of people who've been around the world, those rankings are usually right on the money. It is obvious to most people who've been around that Germany or Norway have much greater levels of freedom of expression than Venezuela, as a rather trivial example.
That's what I said - at the extremes, it's obvious that Germany is more free than Venezuela, but when you start comparing first-world countries, or even whether one undeveloped country is worse than another, it gets a lot murkier.
Freedom is a strange thing. It's not really tangible or measurable in an easy way.
I would feel more free in New Zealand than in the USA, even though New Zealand has hate speech laws. However, in New Zealand, the police don't carry guns, I'm not at risk of getting shot because of a blown tail light.
Personally, I don't measure freedom by what tweets Twitter is required to remove.
It is not at all though. The law very clearly spells out that for unclear cases (and the satire tweet definitely falls under that) there are significant exceptions and leeway.
Twitter is strongly incentivized to err on the side of caution (for them) by deleting in unclear cases. If they wrongly believe a tweet is legal, they are punished. If they wrongly believe a tweet is illegal, nothing happens. To pretend a company in this situation is not being legally forced to delete "protected" satire is sophistry. The only rational thing to do in that situation is delete all tweets anyone could possibly claim are illegal if there's the slightest bit of grey area to them. The matter is made worse by time limits: they have to delete NOW, not have staff discussions and legal assessments.
The supporters of the law said exactly what you said, ignoring that reality. The result is in the article.
Additionally, from outside Germany, this looks less like "stopping hate speech" and more like enforcing the "basic consensus" of the CDU cited in the article.
You're incorrect. They have no reason to fear punishment from a wrong call.
For one, the law doesn't require deletion. They just have to make it publically inaccessible pending outcome of inspection. And if they're unsure about the legality they can punt it to another org and won't suffer consequences.
In fact, the law even stipulates that the data must be retained for 10 weeks to allow further action.
> They have no reason to fear punishment from a wrong call.
If they make the wrong call, they face fines. The supreme arbiter of what is lawful and unlawful is not Twitter; it is the German courts, but Twitter is the one responsible for removing unlawful tweets, and Twitter is the one who is fined if they do not remove unlawful tweets promptly. Twitter is not fined if they wrongly remove lawful tweets. Especially (but not only because of) given the volume of tweets and reports, the only rational course of action for Twitter is to delete/block if there's the slightest chance a court somewhere might declare it unlawful.
> For one, the law doesn't require deletion. They just have to make it publically inaccessible pending outcome of inspection.
I think everyone understands that, on the scale of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., that deletion entails precisely that: making content publicly inaccessible, even if the company can hypothetically restore it. Not even on that scale: it's pretty typical to have a "deleted" flag in your database for content for normal web applications.
More to the point, supporters of the law have claimed over and over that it won't affect legitimate content, but here is exactly an example that the opponents of the law were talking about that we're commenting on right now.
> Germany is considering a stable, open, democratic, peaceful, constructive and successful country.
The German people have always had a strong authoritarian "we know best" streak and it has caused a lot of problems in the past.
Hence why the peoples of other nations are much more concerned by Germany trying to dictate what constitutes free speech on the internet than they are by a few tweets.
Twitter, if it wants to continue operating in Germany without facing lawsuits / prosecution, has to bow to German law.
It would be better if they could just reliably block the account from reaching German users only, while other users would continue reading the tweets. It, of course, is impossible unless Germany implements a country-wide firewall, the way China did.
I don't think it's likely, though. The point of actions like this is not to strictly eliminate any last vestige of hate speech. It is to send a message, so that other would-be-satirists could reconsider starting an account that breaks the law, and that other international companies which deal with UGC knew what to expect, and took preventive measures.
Which they are not forced to do as there is no such law that binds foreign companies that would apply to those subreddits. They preemptively blocked it completely after they received a letter with some questions by a German government agency that was thinking about including a subreddit into an official block list used by (voluntary to use) youth-protection software or Google. Even if it had been included in the list, it would have been accessible from Germany.
Certainly not. Germany can block twitter, but I don't think the German people will accept that. Countries that love censorship need to realize that if they want to be part of the global discourse, they need to be part of all of the global discourse.
Sorry, here's reality for you. A lot of unpleasant, dangerous, and clearly wrong ideas are present outside your filter bubble. Being aware of them may be also unpleasant and dangerous, but pretending they do not exist, and are not being voiced, is delusional. Choose your poison.
this seems like a red herring or something... are 'calls for genocide' actually a thing worth caring about? is there a legitimate possibility that, say, bob goes on twitter and says 'kill all romanians!' and suddenly there's a genocide of romanians? it's doesn't make sense.
i mean, i get that it's attempting to appeal to one's aversion to a very bad idea, but random bob can't cause a genocide. a strong dictatorship a la hitler or stalin on the other hand... well, that's a much bigger problem than trying to regulate mean words.
are 'calls for genocide' actually a thing worth caring about?
If you're a member of the subject group, then they most certainly are. Instead of constructing silly examples, let me suggest you look into the history of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia or Hutu-Tutsi animus in Rwanda.
military or organized physical violence is not the same as a random yokel saying dumb things on the internet.
invoking real world violence as a stand-in for which one calibrates their regard for a person's tweets seems more like an emotional appeal rather than a logical dialog.
seems like a nonsequitur; either way, if a bad guy wants to throw away opsec and publicly document information for a court to use as evidence... well, i guess it's nice that they're making policework much easier.
That isn't an argument. People who call for genocide can be charged with a crime. There is no reason to remove the content from public record until there is a conviction, and even then there is an argument to be made to leave the content online as an example of what not to say if you want to stay out of jail.
You can charge them with a crime, but leaving specifically objectionable content up is rather pointless because you're not litigating whether it's specifically prohibited (as calls for genocide are in Germany) but whether liability attaches to the apparent speaker/writer (whose account might have been compromised, for example).
Another reason not to leave it up is because it's frightening to the subjects of such eliminationist discourse, who shouldn't have to put up with being considered acceptable targets for systematic violence.
if the law states that companies are deputized to act as police and enforce the law of the land, then i guess they have to comply.
do the companies engaging in policing actions receive the same protections and considerations as actual police and government officials when it comes to legal issues involved with the act of law enforcement?
i feel it's better that the state should be expected to take responsibility for and enforce it's own laws.
Companies aren't "deputised". They are just required to follow laws. It's nothing new, nor limited to Germany, nor nefarious: US companies are routinely required to cooperate with the government. When they submit tax information, have the foodstuffs they sell inspected for contamination, when they ask for your driver's license before selling you alcohol or when they put a "you must be this tall" cardboard cutout at the roller-coster's entrance.
what i mean is: if a law just says 'people can't say mean words', is every private company expected to thereafter analyze all words that exist on it's platform (be it twitter, or sms text, or gmail, etc) make a determination as to whether those words violate the law, and are then expected to take some action, based on it's assessment that a crime or civil offense has been committed?
that's what i mean by deputized. if the law doesn't say the company is required to take an action, the company should be mostly indifferent to the law's interaction with third parties. further, it's a bit silly for a law to say that a company should make assessments of criminality or civil offenses, especially if they aren't provided the same legal privileges that police receive for doing the same thing.
