Kind of amusing how I keep reading and hearing about “the end of the Internet” because of the possible weakening of #Section230. Newsflash: that only exists in the US. Other countries have vastly different laws regarding platform responsibilities, and guess what - these US companies still operate in those countries, even though they *can* be legally responsible for their users content there.
@rene Then why aren't they bankrupted by people suing them for the speech of trolls?
@LouisIngenthron Probably because very few countries have a legal tradition similar to that of the USA, where the aim is to enrich oneself as much as possible from others. In those countries, it is the state's responsibility to deal with hate speech - not that of private individuals.
@rene Hate speech is entirely legal in the US, so that has nothing to do with this discussion.
Do these other countries not have defamation laws? Because, as I understand it, those laws tend to be *looser* than the US.
Moreover, if you acknowledge that we have this culture here, then why would you want to open the floodgates on it?
@LouisIngenthron Most European countries have much stricter laws (including a strict ban of hatespeech) while also putting the responsibilities of their user's content onto the platforms. It has always been this way, and yet Twitter and Facebook are operating just fine there.
@rene ...yeah, because those countries have very limited enforcement options for companies that are based in another country hosting data in another country.
They have two options: fine them, or block the entire country's access to them.
Those fines are probably just a cost of doing business for bigger companies.
But what about upstarts? Can they afford that?
And fines from the government is a whole different game from an endless deluge of lawsuits from private individuals. Nobody would ever be able to afford to compete with the big companies ever again.
@rene So, wait, you're telling me that if I sign up for an account on mastodon dot social, post some Nazi propaganda, and alert German authorities, they'll go arrest Eugen?
Because I have some serious doubts about that.
@LouisIngenthron No but he will have to remove that stuff within 24 hours after being notified of its existence or be liable for it.
@rene Oh, great, so any site I don't like, all I have to do is flood them with such requests until it becomes so much trouble it isn't worth running the site anymore. And the smaller the site is, the lower that bar will be. Thanks, Germany!
@LouisIngenthron This is not some theoretical thought experiment. We live in this reality, and it's not an issue. I don't know why that is so hard to understand.
@rene I never got around to making it, but I toyed with the idea of making a "Twitter thinks this guy is a Nazi" Chrome extension. It'd expose the "banned in Germany" | "Banned in France" flags that were part of the Twitter API so that you could, at a glance, tell whether, for legal compliance reasons, Twitter had flagged an account as pro-fash and was showing it in your country, but not those countries.
@mtomczak I‘m pretty sure something like that existed, at least I vaguely remember reading about it 🤔
@LouisIngenthron Mastodon is a clear example of why this is wrong. It's made by a German guy in Germany, and some of the largest instances are run on German servers by Germans. Twitter (pre-Elon) had special filter options for Germany because Nazi propaganda is illegal here. The law worked just fine.