
France passes law forcing online platforms to delete hate-speech within 24 hours - raybb
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/14/france-passes-law-forcing-online-platforms-to-delete-hate-speech-content-within-24-hours/
======
centimeter
How long until internet companies decide that relatively small and litigious
markets aren't worth their time and simply ignore laws like this?

If every country with an economy the size of 1 or 2 large US states start
making up their own censorship laws and trying to force companies to enforce
them, at some point this causes huge inefficiencies.

I can see two end states to this:

1\. If the censoring country has enough international legal influence,
companies will probably have to block users from that country from using their
services.

2\. If the censoring country does not have enough international legal
influence, the company ignores them and the government has to explicitly
censor its citizens' internet connections.

I kind of prefer the second because it's more visible and dramatic - I think a
lot of people probably aren't even aware when their country has censorship
laws.

This also creates economic opportunities for two classes of alternative
content distribution:

1\. Content distribution based out of legally friendly countries, a la the
Sultanate of Kinakuta. Expect to see the media start using terms styled after
"tax haven", like "cybercrime haven", for countries that don't enforce US/EU
censorship/copyright laws.

2\. Content distribution based off of peer-to-peer networks that are harder to
wage lawfare against. Bittorrent, IPFS, etc. fit the bill here.

~~~
nickff
There is a third possible 'end state', which is that each restrictive country
with a large market ends up in a 'sandbox'. This could look a lot like the
Great Firewall, but outsourced.

~~~
ScottFree
Isn't there already a de-facto sandboxing by language?

~~~
nickff
Not really, many countries share languages but not regulations. In addition to
that, many people move from one country to another, while staying in touch
with their old friends.

Facebook has also been working hard on their translation features to reduce
language barriers.

------
axegon_
Poor admins and moderators... I genuinely never understood what the fuss is
about. Hear me out here. I spent a good amount of time of my life living
abroad. Almost 6 years to be exact. And this was during a time when commenting
stuff online was relatively rare still. That said, an eastern European in a
western European country is inevitably going to face racism/xenophobia. If you
are a man it will hit you even sooner. And if you are in the late teen age
group like I was, I'd say give it 2 weeks tops, regardless of your background.
Sure, it was unpleasant but I felt far worse when someone from the crowds
stood up for me. I've lived in eastern Europe in the late 80s and 90s, do you
honestly think that some moron blabbering is making me feel insecure or
threatened? I'm more than capable of standing up for myself if it comes to
that, let them talk. If I'm not doing anything about it, chances are I've
worked out that this is the best course of action. If anything, that helped me
become who I am today and made me a lot more resilient. Fun fact, some of the
people who gave me the hardest time coming in are the ones who have me a hand
several years later when some dark moments hit me. And I can't thank them
enough till this day and though we live on the opposite ends of the continent,
we are now close friends.

And till this day, whenever I hear some "hate speech" as they call it, I don't
even bother registering it in my brain. "Yeah, cool story bro".

My point is that censoring and forcing people to work like machines around the
clock to hide comments is completely redundant. What this does is forcing
people to fragment the internet into decentralized echo bubbles, where the two
camps can ramble on about their own views and claim that that's how everyone
thinks. And historically that has never worked and thinking that it will now
is beyond absurd.

Threatening someone personally in public is one thing and it should be dealt
with accordingly. But the general "f {insert any nationality, race, religion,
etc.}"... Meh... Ok, whatever...

~~~
filoleg
Fully agreed. Just "hate speech" on its own seems like a non-issue.

If it gets to a point where it obstructs your way of life or people spewing
that kind of language are following you and such, it sounds more like
"harassment" or "threats", and we already have laws in effect that protect
people against that. Same with calling for harm to certain groups of people,
as that would fall under "inciting violence".

------
olivermarks
Hate speech definition: 'abusive or threatening speech or writing that
expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of
race, religion, or sexual orientation'.

How can this possibly be enforced? This is Bowdlerization of online debate.
(removing material that is considered improper or offensive from (a text or
account), especially with the result that the text becomes weaker or less
effective).

Hate speech will just be pushed underground, it doesn't solve anything or make
anything go away but it does reinforce 'the establishment view', something the
French ENA currently have a tight control on.

~~~
superflit
This is a very broad term on this law.

"prejudice against a particular group."

So if I call Trump supporters "ignorant red necks and backward people," Will
it be considered Hate speech?

Or when people say:

"White people are <slurs> <negative adjective>"

Will that be considered hate speech too?

Disclaimer: I am a "protected" minority, but I am in favor of free speech.
Even if what you say is ugly or garbage.

PS. I consider downvotes here as offensive and "hate speech".

~~~
henearkr
From what you can see in France or more broadly in Europe, the hate speech is
only characterized when you really offend the minorities (or some persons
belonging), and more specifically when you do so by yielding a kind of
wanting-to-sound-objective argumentation to harm them. This is worse when you
call to harm them.

In your examples, which are clearly mere slurs, you do not try to sound
objective in your bad depictions of them.

In my experience of what can be seen in the news, your risk something more if
you are telling, for example, "white people just damage all the books they
touch in bookstores, because they never care how they handle them".

~~~
superflit
Yes,

But this broad _" yielding a kind of wanting-to-sound-objective argumentation
to harm them"_ is where the devil is.

I can consider the downvotes "hate speech" because they were targeted at me as
a "protected minority," and it does not consider my emotions. I felt very
depressed about it, and HN did not make accommodations to make me feel safe
expressing it without any prejudice.

And I demand it to be removed.

How about when people use master and slave names on Tech? ->
[http://antirez.com/news/122](http://antirez.com/news/122) I feel sick because
of my past as a slave descendent.

We can find offense and hate in anything if we care to look deep enough.

It is more about "WHO" will be censored than about the message. Will it be
used to repress science? News? What if News become "hate speech"? Or science?

~~~
henearkr
But the first example is just unspecific, and attributing the downvotes to
some reason is difficult without real replies.

And the example of master/slave is at most insensitivity, not at all hate
speech.

Hate speech is really more characterized than that. Besides true insults and
slurs, those are for example the theories that make some minorities the cause
of societal problems by blunt reasoning, often using abusive generalisations
at each of their sentences...

I understand your point though, and I agree, the law itself should be a lot
more specific, explicitly.

~~~
superflit
_" But the first example is just unspecific, and attributing the downvotes to
some reason is difficult without real replies."_

That is hate speech, can you see? You can't see it because you are
__privileged __.

That is the reason only me as a "protected minority" can relate and say what
is or not hate speech against us.

You simply can't understand our life experience.

\--> by simple "twist" I can bend your intent and make you a _hater_

Does the Law have space for replies? Don't think so. Who will decide a reply
is good enough?

 _" Besides true insults and slurs, those are for example the theories that
make some minorities the cause of societal problems by blunt reasoning"_

I think it is more of "think about the children" slippery slope.

You sell it about a "good excuse" then later abuse it.

The countries that seems to implement it are doing it most in a way to curb
criticism to some govt policies than protecting "groups". Then every criticism
about govt policy is "hate speech".

E.g: govt decides to give iPhones to X group.

If you complain that will be "hate speech"?

Again this is very lax and prone to abuse.

We as good intended and polite can see it has to be more specific but the
"govt" _does not_.

Are we smart than people that make laws everydays? I don't think so.

Then I rather not have it.

Better hate people for what they think/say than for what they hide.

~~~
henearkr
Yes, but the point is whether the judge will buy that or not. There already is
a crime of hate speech in France, and until now the tribunals do not fall in
the traps of the kind of manipulation you emphasize. Of course I hope it will
stay this way...

------
sneak
Who decides authoritatively what is or isn’t “hate speech” within the 24 hour
period?

The conclusion TFA makes seems likely: these services will just err on the
side of “delete first, ask questions later” to protect themselves from
liability, making all sorts of legal expression impossible.

The current state of online publishing is really sad, and getting worse. Very
few modern services used for hosting can be used to publish legal yet fringe
or controversial opinions, which should terrify you even if you don’t agree
with those things.

We’re moving toward a world where a dozen large companies will be the final
arbiters of what can or cannot be published, regardless of what the law says.
If you can’t see why that’s a grave threat to society, I question your
imagination.

...and that’s just in peacetime. Imagine the special wartime requirements that
will apply to these services if their hosting nations ever feel legitimately
threatened.

~~~
trianglem
Being made fun of for anything that people biologically cannot change is hate
speech. It’s not some complicated quagmire of laws you are trying to make it
out to be.

~~~
sneak
If only content moderation and human expression were that simple. Alas, it is
not to be.

If you read it carefully, I just “made fun of” people who are unimaginative.
Is that an innate trait? Should my content be censored?

Should a comment on a video of a tall person that says “how’s the weather up
there?” be censored using criminal liability?

This criminalizes even hosting the discussion about what beliefs along these
lines are or are not correct. Someone posts about their (mistaken) beliefs, in
essence asking about a disproven theory correlating race and IQ. Other people
correct them, educating them as well as any other lurkers. Should the
sysadmins go to jail for not deleting the entire thread?

Being wrong on the internet should not be illegal.

There is absolutely not a bright line, and it is somewhat naive or perhaps
even dishonest to claim otherwise.

~~~
im3w1l
> If you read it carefully, I just “made fun of” people who are unimaginative.
> Is that an innate trait? Should my content be censored?

Given that reddit is banning the word "retard"... the answer may soon be "yes,
it should".

------
aspenmayer
'There are multiple levels of fines. It starts at hundreds of thousand of
euros but it can reach up to 4% of the global annual revenue of the company
with severe cases. The Superior Council of the Audiovisual (CSA) [0] is the
regulator in charge of those cases.

'Germany has already passed similar regulation and there are ongoing
discussions at the European Union level.'

[0] [https://www.csa.fr](https://www.csa.fr)

~~~
qball
>there are ongoing discussions at the European Union level

I suspect that if the EU really does implement this, the US will likely make
it against US law to obey media censorship requests from other countries
against speech that the First Amendment protects. They probably should have
done that a little while ago (curating content under the request of a foreign
government should be one of those things that revoke your Section 230
privileges), but better late than never.

Other countries dictating what can and cannot be said on US services is
already a big problem, and will only get worse, and the EU's bargaining
position is much weaker than China's given that the vast majority of EU
citizens use US services.

~~~
akersten
It is not constitutional for the US to make it illegal to remove content.
Regardless of why you would remove it.

The 1st Amendment cuts both ways there - you can't be punished for _removing_
something from your billboard. That's your freedom as a US entity to decide
what you express. The reasoning behind why you removed content (a violation of
your website's terms, a request from a foreign government, contractual
obligation with McDonalds to not host Pink Slime videos in exchange for $1MM a
year) doesn't matter from a constitutional perspective. So the US government
revoking a protection of an existing US law as punishment for an expression
(removing content) would be an unconstitutional violation of free expression.

~~~
qball
They can certainly make it illegal to pay any fines, though.

Also, >you can't be punished for removing something from your billboard.

Sure you can, you can just be treated as a "curator" rather than a "publisher"
and thus liable for your curated collection. That's the whole point of S. 230,
after all.

~~~
tzs
There is nothing in S. 230 that distinguishes between curators and publishers.
It says:

> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as
> the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information
> content provider.

"Information content provider" is:

> The term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is
> responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of
> information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer
> service

In fact, the point of S. 230 was to allow sites to block and filter offensive
material without that making them liable for the material that their filtering
or blocking did not remove. There's a decent history of how this came about on
Wikipedia [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act#History)

------
toron123
But what in case of the abuse of the system? Administrators will end up
deleting whatever is reported. Not to mention it can be used in political
fight.

~~~
di4na
there are things in it to punish people abusing the system too

~~~
koenigdavidmj
To use a US example, I doubt there are many perjury charges prosecuted related
to DMCA takedowns.

------
henearkr
I bet this will induce deplatformization.

You do not react the same way if you are a platform (in which case you just
deactivate or delete the contents as soon as it is flagged by anyone), or if
you are yourself responsible for your website (in which case you will fight to
defend that you don't need to take down the contents).

My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system,
considered a platform under this law?

Just asking because, even if I am ready to be 100% independent from platforms
when they mean FB or Youtube, I certainly am not ready to get rid of cloud
hosting...

~~~
akersten
> My big question is: is AWS, or any other cloud-based hosting system,
> considered a platform under this law?

They'll probably go after the first point of contact they can find in the
chain hosting the text they don't like.

Facebook would clearly be hit with the demand before Level3 would. A peer-to-
peer message board that is mostly decentralized, but has a homebase in AWS to
coordinate the swarms? Yeah, probably AWS is going to be told to do what they
can to take it down.

To soapbox for a second - this kind of policing is ridiculous on its face from
my perspective as a US citizen. (And that's coming from someone who has no
issue with companies themselves moderating their websites, I think that's a
natural solution to cultivate the online community that the site operators
desire. But the government compelling them to do so is beyond the pale.)

~~~
henearkr
Uh... okay, then, if you are truly self-hosted (meaning, there is a big
whirring, heating server in your living room), then would your internet
provider company be compelled by the law to cancel your subscription?

Because, this is only the continuing of this logic...

~~~
akersten
Probably. Or they'd subpoena your ISP and send you a letter to take it down if
they could identify you personally.

But who knows. Dumb laws like these are rarely thought out to a meaningful
degree of detail.

------
wiml
Following some links back from that article reaches this:
[https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/actualites/remise-du-
rapport-d...](https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/actualites/remise-du-rapport-de-
la-mission-de-regulation-des-reseaux-sociaux/)

(there is both a French and an English PDF at the bottom). Interestingly to
me, one of the main concerns of that writeup is the non-transparency of the
editorial function of social networks, e.g., the secret algorithmic choice of
what posts/tweets to show you and what order to present them in.

This kind of suggests that a service can avoid some amount of censorship
attention simply by acting more as a neutral carrier, instead of the current
tendency of the large players to present a filtered and adjusted view.

------
VWWHFSfQ
france is such a weird place. In some ways it's a very free society. In other
ways it's not free at all. Don't most of the euro countries have weird laws
about hate speech like this?

~~~
Joeri
It can be argued the U.S. is the “weird” country for not restricting hate
speech. It’s not just the EU, most countries regulate hate speech. This is not
perceived as restricting freedom, because it protects the freedoms of the
group the hate speech targets (one person’s freedom ends where another’s
begins).

~~~
kansface
> it protects the freedoms of the group the hate speech targets

Which freedoms would that be?

~~~
jshevek
I can think of no freedoms that I lose if I am simply mocked, insulted, or
criticized. To lose freedom, we have to mix in something else, like for
example a targeted harrassment campaign.

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
I think it was a long time coming. Ever since Yahoo ruling ( also in France ),
the internet was in a downward spiral. I am not arguing it is a good thing,
but the trajectory was clear for a while.

------
Causality1
It's easy to forget these days that we in the Western world are not all one
big house with the same rules, and reality checks can be jarring. It behooves
us to remember the differences, lest we be overly shocked when we see a diner
in an American restaurant carrying a sidearm or a European getting arrested
for teaching a dog the Nazi salute.

------
m0zg
I wonder what'll happen to postings by gilets jaunes now. That's still ongoing
BTW, coronavirus notwithstanding.

------
trianglem
Good. I would much rather have a good amount of censorship then let bigots
hide behind the “free speech” argument.

~~~
drenvuk
I hate bigots as well, but I hate your kind of thinking even more.

~~~
Causality1
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the
first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."

