Users everywhere have had to put up with U.S law for a long time. The laws and norms of the USA are more or less "fully baked in".
Try posting a nipple or copyrighted track, for example.
If Facebook had come from a different place, all songs and body bits might be Ok but perhaps discussion of government would be banned. I can't tell if that would actually be a better facebook than the one we got.
I think you don't give American companies enough credit when it comes to appealing to various countries laws and opinions. It is disingenuous to say Europe or the rest of the world does not care about copyright when they have historically and increasingly laws that are as strict if not stricter than the US' when it comes to preventing copyright infringement. [1][2]
Nipples do reflect American sensibilities although it is understandable that many companies do not want to go down that road as it could lead to becoming distributors of porn. I think you will find that many countries outside of Europe agree or don't think that these rules go far enough.
> It is disingenuous to say Europe or the rest of the world does not care about copyright when they have historically and increasingly laws that are as strict if not stricter than the US' when it comes to preventing copyright infringement. [1][2]
Those laws are to some extent pushed through by the US in international treaties on behalf of american copyright holders.
Equating nudity with porn is maybe understandable as a business minded precaution ; It's not less revolting to do so. The fact that many non-european countries would like to deny the freedoms hardly won decades ago is not something that american companies should be happy to share value with either.
Cultural relativism will have you banning much more than a nipple if you decide to go that way. Good for business, but not what we should thrive for.
There is a big difference between “treated as porn” versus “this part of anatomy is specially evolved to be inserted into the mouth of an infant, so we don’t care if you show pictures of that exact scenario”.
I agree bans on images of nursing are absurd, but I am not sure you can make an appeal to evolution - genitals also are 'specially evolved' but also not postable in many places...
If my sentence had just been “nipples are fine because they evolved”, that would be a reasonable counter; it is what they have evolved for that makes it weird to censor them as they are censored.
That's quite the problem we are in, as a global society. Obviously no one wants to give North Korea any say about what can and what cannot be published in the web. But between sovereign, free, democratic societies, different standards might exist. And if you want to do business with, say, the EU as, say, a US tech company you cannot expect US law and commons to apply everywhere. Then it becomes a race to the bottom indeed.
I don't know a solution to this problem. But I also do not want to live in a world, where free speech is effectively limited by Austrian defamation laws and US prudery for everyone.
> Obviously no one wants to give North Korea any say about what can and what cannot be published in the web. But between sovereign, free, democratic societies, different standards might exist.
The problem is that whether a country can enforce its speech restrictions against outsiders has very little to do with how much we agree with them. If you don't want to follow the law of North Korea, you'll lose access to the North Korean market. Which nobody cares about, so nobody follows them. But what happens when it's China?
The solution is for laws to apply to the location of the host and provide no assistance to anyone who wants to do otherwise. Then you can host your criticisms of politicians in the US and your violations of US prudery in Germany. That isn't a race to the bottom, it's a race to the top. It's the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it, as intended.
What happens is US companies quickly capitulate and start appeasing the chinese authorities! They still get access to the american market if they sacrifice core western and american values like freedom of speech and privacy but they lose the growing chinese market if they refuse to do so. It's an easy decision for them.
Lol. Companies are already “capitulating” for the US market. Nike will run ads for Colin Kaepernick but then use questionable ethics in their production line. Of course we as consumers eat all that up.
Why do you care if Nike wants to put on a fake face for their brand in China? They are already doing the same thing here and probably several other places.
Want to know why the Chinese market is growing? This very reason. A capitalist economy doing business at all with a communist regime economy of China’s flavor and caliber is a good recipe to have your wealthy business owners and politicians sell you out
The article used that wording, "a classic risk of a race to the bottom", but it doesn't feel entirely accurate to me.
A classic example of a race to the bottom is when jurisdictions compete to attract businesses by lowering their corporation tax rates and regulations. The end result would be zero taxes and zero regulations (unless a country offered a negative tax rate or other incentives).
For censorship, though, I don't see there being a "race" between countries. Just because Austria bans defamation doesn't mean that all other countries will try to out-compete Austria by banning something even less objectionable. What would "the bottom" even be in this "race"? Banning all speech from the internet? Internet companies would simply avoid having any assets or presence in any country that tried that.
Perhaps a better analogy would be "opening the flood gates" or "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link", suggesting that the strictest set of rules would be the one that ended up being implemented.
Is a tax or regulation incentive race to the bottom really a bad thing? The residents of those jurisdictions that end up without much tax income and the externalities of the lax regulations so they would suffer and pressure their government to increase the tax and make the regulations stricter. Eventually, it should reach an equilibrium where those things are "fair" as determined by all the participants in the market. Jurisdictions would also have the ability to tax or ban imports from places they don't like. Maybe this is too much of a libertarian view? It seems to be the default state of the world though. What are the alternatives besides something oppressive like using military power to prevent other countries from taxing their citizens too little?
Did Washington residents really prefer not to have Boeing at all rather than the tax-incentivized Boing they got? Wasn't it up to them in how they voted? Sometimes they do reject it, like how New York rejected Amazon.
> What are the alternatives besides something oppressive like using military power to prevent other countries from taxing their citizens too little?
Dropping the dogma of free trade and free flow of capital, and taxing any transactions involving tax havens to the point where it's not profitable to use them for tax avoidance.
You can only have countries' tax systems and regulations competing in global "free market" of jurisdictions if the countries are actually free to set arbitrary tax rates and tariffs.
I agree. If the US doesn't like tax havens, then the US can tax the local operations of companies that are incorporated there. No need for any hand wringing. Or maybe the US does like tax havens because they kind of keep the actual operations and money in the US which helps the economy despite a lack of tax.
I would argue that the internet as we know it today would not exist without the American 1st amendment. If that ever goes away, the internet as we know it today will no longer exist. The majority of the worlds hosting companies are here and there is a reason why people throughout the world use a vpn just to have simple online conversations that we freely enjoy.
I would argue that is wrong. We have free speech over in europe too and not because the US forced it on us, but it also is something we generally value. We just dont run around claiming its the most amazing thing ever.
Well, i think what will happen , is the implementation of adapter classes, eh companies, that represent and adapt a concept locally - and are for the local law responsible, while formally independent from the multi-national mother ship.
Your statement about North Korea strikes me as a very discriminatory, as it implies your judgement about NK is somehow objective, and it's political system is a condition justifying them being denied equal treatment in various situations.
No, their judgement about NK is subjective but widely shared.
It is perfectly reasonable to discriminate against political systems that you disagree with. It's pretty much the basis of international diplomacy, such as it is: a system of bargaining and coercion that usually prevents outright war.
The basis of international diplomacy isn't discrimination against systems you disagree with, it's about getting most power and resources possible.
Caring about political systems is just spin used as an excuse.
Indeed, the US at the same time went hard after Japan whose political system (even though in practice is barely it at all democratic) it created, but courted the Chinese one-party state.
Omg are you serious? Do you have any good things to say about NK political or judicial system? Would you defend Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia the same way?
The correct person to ask would be a patriotic citizen of one of those countries. People are usually biased towards their own system and have trouble even conceptualizing the motivations behind radically different ones, especially when they don't even try because they've already internalized the belief that they're automatically bad. But the people who supported those systems had their own experiences motivations and in many cases it did work out well for them compared to the alternatives or what came before.
The title should be rephrased to "A Court Ruling in Austria Could Censor Internet Platforms Worldwide".
The Ruling applies to Facebook as a legal person and has no direct effect on other publishers.
A contrary example: The Gutenberg Project was ruled illegal (due to a select number of books still in copyright) in Germany and is blocking German IPs ever since, until the issue is resolved.
Here the company has chosen another approach. Facebook could decide to withdraw from the Austrian market (which it won't). So it has to stick to Austrian court rulings or pay the sanctions.
The problem is not the application of a law. The problem is the current centralization of public speech on huge platforms on the internet.
Or compliance, because having already taken the corporate position that certain electoral messaging is so misleading and damaging it needs content warnings, shadowbanning or even deletion, it would be frankly weird for Facebook to sacrifice its Austrian business on the altar of insisting that actually a series of courts are wrong and memes accusing a leading Green Party figure of being a fascist are not libel but an important truth the world must know.
the Austrian green party is fishing for right-wing voters who are disgruntled by the FPÖ many scandals. their policies are strange since they seem to want to appeal to the right according to their conservative policy a lot more than to the left. This is counter the tradition of what is "normal" for a Green party in other countries. their ultra conservative approach gobbles up previous FPÖ voters that are disillusioned with the Ibiza scandal and the crowd that screams "ban burkas" or are obsessed with foreigners not "integrating themselves properly" especially brown people (it's ok to live there as a native English speaker you will never feel any of it).
Austria is the most West of all the Eastern EU countries so a lot of things that are not normal in Western Europe are so in Austria. The right is cosying up to Putin (who often gets invited to private events like weddings by Austrian politicians) and as close to Russia as Poland is to the US. Many Austrian high-end properties from skiing resorts to Vienna is in the hands of Russians, ... there is a good reason Austrian secret service was dropped as an ally to share information with from other FVEY-allied countries: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-austria-security-idUSKCN1...
That you agree with the anti-Green posts is not relevant. Pretend the ruling was against a Green politician for doing the same thing to someone you like.
I see a problem in a generalization of the kind done in the title of the article.
Facebook is not "the Internet". The Austrian court rule does not apply to "The Internet" at all. It applies to Facebook and Facebook only. If someone published the same content on another platform then the court would have to rule again.
I see the real problem in Platforms like Facebook becoming the only means of speech on the Internet for the majority of people. Censorship on Facebook happens on a global scale without any state intervention already. (Edit: And that is not because Facebook is evil but because some content is bad for business. And that will be true for any service that aims to be a somewhat neutral and profitable platform.)
Facebook is not Internet, that is right. But the decision that applies to Facebook can apply to anything on Internet within the reach of the Austrian state and, piece by piece, that means almost the entire Internet. Saying it is just a Facebook incident is very short sighted, many people could not care less about FB.
I did not say it's just Facebook and I said that the court can rule many times. I did say that the court would have to rule every single time. And if speech on the internet wasn't centralized the way it is today then the court would have to make as many decisions as there are people making the same statement. That would not work effectively if the expressed opinion was backed and expressed by many people in many places.
And let's not forget that the content of the opinion in question is not one on which a fruitful political debate can be built, you f ps ;) If it was, the court may have come to an entirely different conclusion.
I do not want to defend the court's ruling here and I have too few insights into the Austrian political landscape to understand how (in-)adequate this decision might be. But the fact remains: If I live outside of Austria but my website is reachable from Austria, I can write whatever I want and have nothing to fear from an Austrian court as long as I am not trying to take my website-business to the Austrian market.
They may decide to block my IP inside Austria but that would hardly be global censorship (even if it's still an issue worth fighting over).
The whole "people couldn't care less about FB" talk really takes this to the wrong place and is making me tired as long as you misinterpret everything else and repeat my own statements as if it was a counter-argument.
Just: This ruling is not about censoring the internet. It's about keeping a huge actor from publishing a type of content.
My point was that it is a problem that so many people are dependent on the standing of this single player. If Facebook it outlawed somewhere, this silences everyone on the platform.
And not to forget that it gives Facebook the ability to promote or censor content as much as they want. But they wouldn't, because they're all about free speech. Phew!
Which I don't really understand, it's an attempt at global censorship, that's the concern. But as it's a ruling against Facebook the general impression I get is casual dismissal
Facebook is actively ignoring EU privacy laws by shipping private data out of the EU. You can not reflect this on the whole internet, but on facebook only. As many have said already
> The case started with an April 2016 Facebook post, in which a user shared an article featuring a photo of Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, then-chair of Austria’s Green Party, along with commentary labeling her a “lousy traitor,” “corrupt oaf,” and member of a “fascist party,” apparently in response to her immigration policies. This is core, protected speech in the United States. But it was deemed defamation under Austrian law.
This reminds me of the reporting done regarding Larry Pozner[0], a father of a Sandy Hook shooting victim that was subjected to constant accusations, doxxing attempts and death threats from conspiracy theorists for years and decided to take legal action.
Fundamentally, I believe that everyone has the right to not be subjected to death threats and systemic harassment from hate and conspiracy groups, especially those who've lost children to such senseless and brutal killing. American individualism so often deflects the responsibility of dealing with such trauma on those who are subjected to this kind of harassment because it's not impacting the vast majority of the population ("not my problem").
It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech. In fact, has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US?
I don't know what the exact solution to these problems is, but I truly people need to be responsible for what they post online. We as a society also have a responsibility to demand that of our peers because big tech has already shown us that they're not up to this challenge. The worse that harassment gets online, I believe the more segmented and walled off and commercialized the internet will become.
> It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech.
They are though. You must not have been paying attention.
In the UK we are locking up 7 people a day over "hate speech". The most egergious example is the Chelsea Russell case.
These laws were sold to us under the guise of "Locking up Islamic Extremists". Now we are putting ankle braclets on 17 year old girls for posting gangsta rap lyrics.
We also have the "Non Crime Hate Incident". Where you can be put on a naughty list for saying the wrong thing on twitter. These can stop you from finding employment as you will show up on a background check. You have broken no law but you are treated as if you have.
Do you really think the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 case is egregious? The punishment is meaningful, but hardly life or career changing. Just because something has been said in rap lyrics does not mean it's OK to say in all contexts. Do you know the context and what she said? Surely it's conceivable that what she said really was harmful to community. Consider why free speech exists: to protect public debate and essentially hold up the light of transparency to power - clearly there's no trivially obvious line to draw that will protect only that speech, nor a trivially obvious line to draw that will protect all non-harmful speech. So when a society, in a healthy debate not too different to the one we're having now chooses to draw the line somewhere between those too extremes: that's just fine. Personally, I think the US protects speech that simply undermines society (and the US), and that doing so is at worst self-destructive, and at best irrelevant. Yes, we need to protect speech - but we don't need to pretend the line between constructive speech and hate speech is terribly subtle, nor that there is going to be some kind of chilling effect from rules like this. Do you feel threatened by this court outcome? No, right?
I do agree that some of the laws are bad, for instance the law in Germany that protected Turkish politicians from well-deserved criticism. As I hear it, they think that in Germany too: this law isn't some new development by thought-controller wannabe's, it's a bad law on the books that's rarely enforced and that's quite-old; pre WW2. Put in on the pile of failings of the Weimar republic. It's not a small pile.
Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares. If anything, the real threat isn't Orwell's 1984, it's A Brave New World: a populace that chooses to close its eyes to the truth by simple social feedback loops that reinforce groupthink as opposed to critical examination. If you like literary references, we need to remove our machine-learned equivalent's of Dr. Strangelove's CRM 114 discriminators. To protect discourse, we need to shape the environment it happens in to steer those feedback loops away from outrage-inducing echo chambers that filter our perception of the world to distinguish us from politically others -and instead towards truth-enhancing critical thought. Ideally, all without a central, abusable source of power: sure! But the alternative shouldn't be that we're all forced to inhabit balkanized bubbles of media, carefully curated to be free of all of those pesky facts that might undermine a firmly held opinion.
> Do you really think the https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 case is egregious? The punishment is meaningful, but hardly life or career changing. Just because something has been said in rap lyrics does not mean it's OK to say in all contexts. Do you know the context and what she said? Surely it's conceivable that what she said really was harmful to community.
All you are doing is rationalising putting an Ankle braclet on a 17 year old girl because she posted some rap lyrics to face book. There wasn't a violent act, theft or anything that is actually harmful happened.
This nebulous "harmed the community" can be used as an excuse to curtail any of your freedoms. You could say "These homosexuals are harming the community, therefore we can remove them from it".
> Consider why free speech exists: to protect public debate and essentially hold up the light of transparency to power - clearly there's no trivially obvious line to draw that will protect only that speech, nor a trivially obvious line to draw that will protect all non-harmful speech. So when a society, in a healthy debate not too different to the one we're having now chooses to draw the line somewhere between those too extremes: that's just fine. Personally, I think the US protects speech that simply undermines society (and the US), and that doing so is at worst self-destructive, and at best irrelevant. Yes, we need to protect speech - but we don't need to pretend the line between constructive speech and hate speech is terribly subtle, nor that there is going to be some kind of chilling effect from rules like this. Do you feel threatened by this court outcome? No, right?
We didn't choose to draw the line though. The legislation was pushed through in the mid-2000s because of terrorists bombings (by Islamists) in the UK.
The law keeps on being expanded to include more and more trivial things. IIRC A man was arrested for looking through a shop window too oddly.
Once you allow any curtail of speech there will be calls to curtail more of it for the "public good".
> Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares.
They are locking people up for speech and investigating jokes. So yes they have.
Communication can do harm. It can also do good. That's kind of the point of protecting it - it's got power. If it were powerless, then fraud, misinformation campaigns, copyright infringement, insider trading, leaks of classified info, selling trade secrets, and online bullying etc would be irrelevant, but they're not; they have impacts. To be clear: I'm not saying that all of those are worth preventing regardless of circumstances.
I'm not weighing in on the BBC reported case because all the relevant details are omitted. But in principle I support the notion those that do harm should be held to account; and without knowing the details, the 8 weeks of curfew don't sound necessarily implausible. Of course, laws can be excessive; that's for sure, but even if this one were (I don't have the details, and a sample size of 1 isn't something to draw conclusions from regardless) - that's merely an argument to be more reasonable, not to leave all harm entirely unpunished. Superficially: sure, it sounds unreasonable to give a teenager 8 weeks of curfew and a considerable 500 pound fine for something they said online. But I don't know the details; so I'm not sure what to make of that.
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> We didn't choose to draw the line though. The legislation was pushed through in the mid-2000s because of terrorists bombings (by Islamists) in the UK.
Yeah, that's society deciding to draw the line. Your use of the passive voice is notable, but I don't think think it's wise to think of this as a passive choice - a democratically elected parliament chose to write that act, and subsequent parliaments left it in place, by choice. It may well be a bad law - and many such laws are terrible; as are many other laws. But they're fundamentally the people's responsibility, and failing to own up to that responsibility is essentially giving up on democracy.
It would be lovely if we could live in the world in which all speech was good and none harmful. That would make all this super easy! But harms from communication do arise, and we need to deal with them.
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> > Regardless, though bad laws should be repealed the larger point stands: these countries have not devolved into Orwellian nightmares.
> They are locking people up for speech and investigating jokes. So yes they have.
The point of an Orwellian police state is to exercise (draconian) control. It is not enough for some isolated incident to occur.
In fact, I'll argue the opposite: that the world you would effectively help to create by rejecting such laws categorically is much closer to Orwellian than one in which we to work to avoid harmful statements. Because one central theme of the book is doublespeak, and in general the creation of alternative truths, and the hiding of real truths via misinformation. And that's exactly the world we're descending into. We should aim to prevent that, not to work toward that goal all while honestly, yet ironically claiming to be protecting free speech. It won't end well.
When you argue that some laws restricting speech have harmful consequences, I'll vigorously agree. When you argue that a free and open debate is one of the essential components of a functioning democracy, I'll vigorously agree. You're totally right!
But I also want to re-emphasize that the choices are not binary, nor trivial, nor that we should be aiming for centralized control of speech. I don't want to live in a police state, any more than you! But just because some laws aiming to prevent harmful speech miss their mark does not mean laws aiming to protect it cannot also miss their mark. Ideally, we'd acknowledge that we have a problem, and look for solutions that mitigate the doublespeak and disinformation while being difficult to centrally control, and avoiding draconian punishments too. We should be looking for self-reinforcing positive feedback loops, not direct control - that prevents most of the risks of direct punishment of speech, while hopefully still achieving some of the aims. And the first step along that process is having a frank discussion about this problem in the first place, and that's what we're struggling with as a society now.
> Communication can do harm. It can also do good. That's kind of the point of protecting it - it's got power. If it were powerless, then fraud, misinformation campaigns, copyright infringement, insider trading, leaks of classified info, selling trade secrets, and online bullying etc would be irrelevant, but they're not; they have impacts. To be clear: I'm not saying that all of those are worth preventing regardless of circumstances.
You protect communication by letting people communicate freely. As for "misinformation", well free speech has you covered. You can use your voice to correct that mis-information. As for "online bullying". You know how you stop online bullying? You log out of social media and it ends.
The others you have listed already have existing legislation that covers them. It doesn't need speech controls or controls over lines of communication.
> I'm not weighing in on the BBC reported case because all the relevant details are omitted. But in principle I support the notion those that do harm should be held to account; and without knowing the details, the 8 weeks of curfew don't sound necessarily implausible. Of course, laws can be excessive; that's for sure, but even if this one were (I don't have the details, and a sample size of 1 isn't something to draw conclusions from regardless) - that's merely an argument to be more reasonable, not to leave all harm entirely unpunished. Superficially: sure, it sounds unreasonable to give a teenager 8 weeks of curfew and a considerable 500 pound fine for something they said online. But I don't know the details; so I'm not sure what to make of that.
What you should make of it. Is that you can be fined, prosecuted and even put in prison for shitposting on facebook. That is ridiculous. Anything else is apologetics for laws that shouldn't exist.
People won these freedoms over hundreds of years of social progress. But lets throw it all away because might have upset somoene else online.
> Yeah, that's society deciding to draw the line. Your use of the passive voice is notable, but I don't think think it's wise to think of this as a passive choice - a democratically elected parliament chose to write that act, and subsequent parliaments left it in place, by choice. It may well be a bad law - and many such laws are terrible; as are many other laws. But they're fundamentally the people's responsibility, and failing to own up to that responsibility is essentially giving up on democracy.
I have no idea what a "passive voice" is. All you are doing it making a case against democracy in my eyes (Democracy is considered by some to be soft-communism, but that is on the extreme side of libertarism/anarcho-capitalist circles however this view isn't without some merit). If you rights can be simply be voted away by your representatives that doesn't preserve liberty.
I am soo sick of people like yourself that will just excuse away rights violations because represntatives voted for it.
If everyone voted to kill all the Jews or Homosexuals in a country does it make it okay? Obviously not. What you are doing is more apologetics for laws that shouldn't exist.
Everyone should be allowed to say what they like. The only exceptions I might grant you are calls to violence.
> But I also want to re-emphasize that the choices are not binary, nor trivial, nor that we should be aiming for centralized control of speech. I don't want to live in a police state, any more than you! But just because some laws aiming to prevent harmful speech miss their mark does not mean laws aiming to protect it cannot also miss their mark. Ideally, we'd acknowledge that we have a problem, and look for solutions that mitigate the doublespeak and disinformation while being difficult to centrally control, and avoiding draconian punishments too. We should be looking for self-reinforcing positive feedback loops, not direct control - that prevents most of the risks of direct punishment of speech, while hopefully still achieving some of the aims. And the first step along that process is having a frank discussion about this problem in the first place, and that's what we're struggling with as a society now.
There is no such thing as harmful speech. It is a made up thing with no proper defintion that is used to suppress dissisent of the populace against the state (which normally collude with the rich). Speech is not violence and never will be.
A passive voice is just grammatical term to describe phrases in which the acted-upon is primary, as opposed to the actor; i.e. "Freddy was tackled by Hank" is in passive voice, where "Hank tackled Freddy" is in active voice. (for a better explanation, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_voice)
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Misinformation is harmful because it people can either believe it, or decide to try and stop believing honest communication more generally because they know they don't have the chance to distinguish fact from fiction. This basic principle motivates things like fraud and libel statutes, and why it's illegal to e.g. lie to congress, a judge, and sometimes even the police.
You can not correct misinformation simply by using your voice; essentially that's equivalent to a shouting match, and people are already shouting as loud as they can. Additionally, since it's easy to lie (no need to make any effort to actually find supporting data, after all), and since lies tend to be remarkable and shocking, they're amplified by media (social media in particular).
Similarly, you cannot prevent online bullying by just signing off social platforms; to the contrary, that's submitting to the bullying, since such platforms are of value to their users. Victims should take reasonable precautions, sure, but clearly they don't deserve the sole responsibility for being bullied.
I think your arguments might make sense in a world in which freedom of speech implied the freedom to force others to listen to reponses; perhaps in that (itself pretty nighmarish) hypothetical society you really could correct misinformation by reponding - but it's not a place anybody would want to live in, right? In the real world, freedom of speech does not provide an antidote to misinformation.
If you believe there is no such thing as harmful speech, why do we punish fraud? Why punish those leaking classified state secrets? Why punish those committing libel? Is fraud harmless? Why have truth-in-advertising principles? Why prohibit lying to a judge, police officer, or congress? Why even limit trademark infringement?
> has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US?
None of those people are in jail. And that regime, despite its best efforts, is being peacefully removed from power.
America is the world’s oldest [EDIT: large, old] extant democracy. I wouldn’t lightly consider toying with something so basic as free speech. Several European and Asian democracies are already teetering towards authoritarianism, the first step of which is curtailing public debate.
> America is the world’s oldest [EDIT: large, old] extant democracy.
Nothing about our history guarantees our future as a democracy, this is hot hand fallacy at its finest. If there's one thing that's consistent across human history, civilizations always fail at some point.
> I wouldn’t lightly consider toying with something so basic as free speech. Several European and Asian democracies are already teetering towards authoritarianism, the first step of which is curtailing public debate.
Free speech existed prior to the internet, it's not like Tim Berners-Lee changes the world and all of a sudden free speech exists. Canada has much stricter free speech laws than the US and their political discourse seems to be just fine. Plus there are already plenty of restrictions baked into "free speech" online. You can't threaten to shoot up a school on social media without consequences, why can't the same principles be applied to people who make death threats towards individuals? Companies already have the ability to lock you out of your account for no reason whatsoever without any defined arbitration system. What about the internet is so truly sacrosanct that we permit such inconsistency from corporate governance while railing against legal protections mandated by governments? Free speech is already being messed with; it's being used to automate the virality of hate speech with ruthless efficiency.
Hot hand "fallacy" is only fallacious if cross-event outcomes are unrelated. Back in reality, neither hot hand nor reverse gambler's are actually fallacious.
The U.S. Constitution is the oldest constitution still in force. But we're still pretty young as democracies go. Hell, we haven't even been around as long as one of the first libertarian states, the Icelandic Commonwealth, was.
I just don't see the equivalence here. I agree that platforms have a responsibility not to enable harassment and death threats, but calling a politician "traitor", "corrupt", "fascist" is neither of those things. What are you supposed to do when a politician is corrupt or fascist, if you aren't allowed to talk about it?
I closely associate calling someone a "traitor" with a threat of death.
Its history up to the modern day makes it equivalent to a statement that your opponent should be killed for their opposition. National politicians will certainly see that as a specific threat.
Jo Cox (UK Member of Parliament) was murdered in 2016 by someone repeating claims that she was a "traitor".
That makes sense. I don't have that association, since the term "traitor" gets tossed around all the time in American politics, but I can definitely see how it would come across as a threat in an environment where it's not commonly used.
> What are you supposed to do when a politician is corrupt or fascist, if you aren't allowed to talk about it?
In the same country (Austria) a court actually ruled that a
certain right-wing politician can be said to be close to nazi
ideology due to the existing evidence.
So, you are allowed to talk about it, but you might get problems
if you don't have a basis for your claims.
This isn't specific to politicians. Calling someone a fascist in
public(meaning 10+ witnesses I think) is considered defamation
and, yes, if you cannot prove such claims it can have
consequences.
Note that this does not apply to just any kind of insult as you
say. It's for cases when it's considered harmful for one's
public image, as usual with defamation. I've never heard of a
simple "Idiot!" leading to any consequences. I don't know
why it's "incredibly fascist" to win a defamation case when
someone called you a fascist in the open. Though I do admit that
it's hard to draw a clear line with these things, and there are
arguments for both sides as long as it doesn't steer towards
censorship.
When courts gatekeep criticism of politicians, that is fascist. Austria's history of fascism makes this even worse, since they of all people should know better.
The issue here is whether courts in Austria have the right to constrain people's public statements to some standard of demonstrable truthfulness, or not.
That's simply not true; including in the US. Libel statutes make distinctions between true and false statements, and between knowingly misleading statements and honest mistakes. Do you think truth should be irrelevant? I don't think society is stable under those conditions, but certainly that's not the law now.
There's no meaningful slippery slope here either; because the vast majority of cases don't involve anything questionably true, they clearly involve statements that have evidence or do not, and where there's doubt, the protections are generally fairly solid (this is in the news often enough too; witness how Musk's knowingly false and clearly negative "pedo guy" comment was still not ruled defamation).
What's worse is the fact that you don't need to win a defamation lawsuit to punish someone if you're much wealthier than the defendant, because too many jurisdictions let each side pay their own legal costs - such that those wanting to stifle dissent can often simply threaten legal action, even knowing full well they'd lose. The point doesn't need to be to win, the point can simply be to impose costs that are felt unevenly.
These things could easily end up in ECHR, because a "fascist", just like an "idiot", could be considered an opinion, judgement, not a fact and so it cannot be false, unless it means something very specific in Austria.
It doesn't mean anything else in Austria, but do keep in mind
Austria as well as Germany is still sensitive about such topics
due to their past, which is also why denying the holocaust or
doing the Hitler salute is illegal.
Which doesn't mean there aren't some stupid, backwards laws that
have no place in today's society, like for example the blasphemy
law which weirdly still exists. There will always be room for
improvement and it's never wrong to question established rules.
The law forbids knowingly making false and defamatory statements that could lead to persecution of the accused person.
So for example, you can't accuse someone of being a rapist, for example, if you know that the accusation is not true.
Similarly, you can't accuse a politician of being corrupt just because you don't like them if you don't have any reason to believe that your accusation is true.
But it's absolutely allowed to publically insult a politician. And you also have the right to call a politician corrupt if you have a reason to believe that they are.
For example, I know that calling our former finance minister a corrupt self-serving asshole is not going to get me into trouble because there have been multiple news reports about him taking bribes.
I think for Americans it's just hard to believe that we don't protect made up lies as "free speech" around here.
Public insults for the sake of insulting someone should be punished in an age where common sense is almost gone. Even more so when appellatives that can seriously ruin someone's image like fascist, racist, antisemitist (etc) are thrown around.
Politician or not is irrelevant.
In an age where common sense is almost gone, I'm pretty reluctant to say that insults should be punished. Because, you know, that punishment is going to be applied without much common sense. So it's going to be applied much more broadly than it should, and in situations where it doesn't fit, and it's going to ruin peoples' lives.
> It's clear that much of the Western world have had much stricter free speech laws than the US does for decades, but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech.
Funny to see this comment in a thread about a European regulator attempting to censor, worldwide, criticism of some politician.
I mean, I'm sure there are many things about Austrian politics which are less than ideal, but I'm not convinced a lawsuit and series of appeals taking three years to decide that a claim that a Green Party member was a fascist and a traitor was defamatory was quite the dystopia Orwell had in mind. (And Orwell lived in a country with strong libel laws, which his publisher was constantly worried about his own writings falling foul of and he was very happy to encourage his publisher to worry about more when the libellous comments were made abut him)
> has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US?
There have been probing tests of the nature of free speech laws in a number of countries outside the US in recent years, notably the potential transgender pronoun compulsion laws that landed Jordan Peterson in trouble in Canada, as well as a number of tried or in trial cases in places like the UK[0] and Australia[1]. It's a difficult line to draw, as threats of violence and general harassment clearly shouldn't be allowed or tolerated. I'm not sure the trend that these other Western nations are attempting to follow is necessarily good either though, as some veer dangerously close to thought policing.
> notably the potential transgender pronoun compulsion laws
Which, in my opinion, go clearly a step farther than just
censoring offensive language. I can understand the latter to
some degree, but forcing people to replace certain words in
their communication only differs from Orwell's dystopia in the
size of the dictionary.
It's a dilemma: huge communities like Facebook cannot really be
moderated effectively and are a fertile ground for disinformation,
conspiracy theories and spreading hate. At the same time we
don't want to limit speech more than absolutely necessary.
To me it's clear we simply are not (yet?) mentally prepared for
information exchange and communities in this global magnitude.
It can be positive when followers of a niche hobby can get
together, but the same mechanism is dangerous in contact with
targeted disinformation campaigns and cults.
you know what else is fertile ground for disinformation and conspiracy theories? literally every single protest i have ever attended. and yet we recognize that the right to assembly far outweighs the impact of a couple schizoid burnouts talking about tower 7 and the zog. the same is true of the internet.
a censorship regime will not make people any more prepared to handle free and open discourse, it will only enable those in power to further marginalize those who aren't. imo what is vitally needed is education on media literacy, this should be considered just as important as history or civics. give people the tools for growth.
But they absolutely can hurl the N-word at each other. It is
frowned upon for good reason, but it's not illegal.
What I was talking about was the proposal to actually force
people to refer to others by their preferred pronouns. I am not
against new pronouns, but the government should not enforce such
a change in how people communicate. Language evolves naturally
with society, not the other way around. Also there's enough
evidence that banning bad words does not work and people always
find a new way to piss off others. After all it's the symptom,
not the cause.
In my country, you're not allowed to use the N-Word on purpose as an insult.
In Canada, you're not allowed to misgender people on purpose to harass them. You can not use their pronouns at all, or you can use wrong pronouns by accident, but you can't use someone's wrong pronouns repeatedly on purpose to harass them.
It's not anymore compelled speech than disallowing people from using the n word for the purpose of harassment.
taboo words and acts are defined by the moral majority.
15 years ago that same moral majority believed i didn't deserve the right to be married, we are still well within living memory of a time when it was entirely acceptable to call someone a nigger but two men who kissed were liable to lose their jobs.
free speech is the most fundamental tool we have for ensuring equal rights and dignity. that is worth far more than getting rid of a few marginal edgelords.
For many of us beeing not allowed to blame people with specific (usually way to generalized) slurs does not exactly lessen our ability for free speech. Imo this perception is only drawn on us by americans.
Fundamentally, I believe that everyone has the right to not be subjected to death threats and systemic harassment from hate and conspiracy groups
I've thought about this problem and there may be solutions (and even profitable business) based on existing harassment laws, but AFAIK no one has tried it. Imagine scaling the Hulk Hogan lawsuit using "copyright troll" style tactics. This could create a "scared straight" deterrent effect on harmful social media.
> but (...) truly people need to be responsible for what they post online.
I strongly disagree. Anonymity is an important and integral part of the internet and the free speech it enables. Moving towards this sort of thing will only be used for abuse and censorship. It saddens me how much this has become an accepted position, even on hn, and I'm quite tired of all the justifications for giving up important rights, anonymity is closely related to privacy for example, just because of some scarey boogeyman of the day.
Anonymity offers the ability to criticize entities (governments, corporations, people), to communicate in ways more freely than otherwise, to discuss personal issues without fear, to have a presence online without stalkers or other abusers attack, it also avoids the most common rhetorical abuse I see, which is overreliance on argument from authority by separating the identity of the person making the argument from the argument itself, and I could go on. I could go on...
Do you really think the vast amount of negatives that come with your proposal would be worth the tradeoff?
1. "In 1995, there was a debate at Harvard Law School – four of us discussing the future of public key encryption and its control. I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It’s where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making Internet policy for the Obama administration.
On the other side was the then Deputy Attorney General of the United States and a lawyer in private practice named Stewart Baker who had been chief council to the National Security Agency, our listeners, and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became, later on, the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and has much to do with what happened in our network after 2001.
At any rate, the four of us spent two pleasant hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end there was a little dinner party at the Harvard faculty club, and at the end, after all the food had been taken away and just the port and the walnuts were left on the table, Stuart said, “All right, among us now that we are all in private, just us girls, I’ll let our hair down.”
He didn’t have much hair even then, but he let it down.
“We are not going to prosecute your client, Mr. Zimmermann," he said. “Public key encryption will become available. We fought a long, losing battle against it, but it was just a delaying tactic.” And then he looked around the room and he said, ”But nobody cares about anonymity, do they?"
And a cold chill went up my spine and I thought, all right, Stuart, and now I know you’re going to spend the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and we’ll see how it goes.
And it’s going badly. We didn’t build the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake. Now we are paying for it." -Eben Moglen
The arguments that the kind of speech referred to in the article is worth defending are really weak. Sure: there is no question that free speech in general is a useful tool in increasing transparency and thus public enlightenment - thus protections in general aren't in question. Yet the defenders of absolute or unconditional protection repeatedly - as in this article - make remarkably poorly supported claims.
The first poorly supported claim is that because it's supported in the US, it's worth supporting. This is just weird; frankly. If US laws were perfect, society would be a lot more stable, and you might as well abolish congress. Clearly, laws are not perfect; and where there are regional legal differences, you should not assume the US protections make sense - nor in fact that either approach makes sense. It's frankly irrelevant what US law is on the topic of what protected speech should be.
The second, and more fundamental error in reasoning is that somehow a slippery slope applies, or by extension that you can't expect a court (or other control mechanism) to be able to tell harmful speech from constructive speech. Obviously, there will be some corner-cases where decisions will be essentially arbitrary - but that applies in any system, including the US. But what's not at all obvious is that those close calls actually happen very often, nor that they matter much when they do. There's usually wide, clear distinction between what's essentially malicious deception (as in this case) and possible truths that deserve protection. In practice it just doesn't happen all that often that something is possibly both. Here too: you could argue whether or not the posts in question are harmful enough to deserve a ban; but there's no argument that they were truthful and worth protecting; they clearly were not. To summarize: the idea that legal controls on deception or defamation will to a meaningful extent do collateral damage to free speech which increases transparency simply does not appear to be true. Sure, a despot could do both, but a normal society can choose not to do that just fine too.
The third (implicit) reasoning flaw is that what we have today is actually free speech. This misunderstanding rests on several pillars. Firstly we should not ignore harms caused by libel laws, especially in a country like the US, where legal costs can be punishment alone, regardless of legal victory, and where legal standards differ by state allowing jurisdiction shopping. Secondly, we should realize that speech needs protection from power in general, not specifically government alone. Much later modern-style free speech developed into a roughly modern form, corporations evolved. Corporations may deserve some protection from the government, but they themselves wield enormous power too, and speech needs protection from their interference too. Finally, the protections we do have are quite... abstract. They're not sufficient to protect speech in practice, not by a long shot - just witness how abominably whistle-blowers are treated. Rather than the essence of communication and transparency being protected, we protect technicalities. We may not technically live under a massive censorship regime, but that's just because we've interpreted self-censorship and corporate control as being something fundamentally different - and that's dangerous, because we're not protecting speech as some kind of academic exercise to create aesthetically pleasing laws; we're doing it to protect public discourse and transparency. And we're not doing that as is.
We really need to move towards a healthy debate on free speech itself. The principle is clearly sound, but our implementation of it is equally clearly not sound. And that holds true just as much in other countries; this isn't some US-specific problem - because pretty much anywhere in the west it's OK to lie about (say) vaccine dangers without any repercussions even though evidence-free conspiracies of that kind do real harm to everyone in society. Yet if you defame someone - just one person! Well, that's apparently not OK, we need to protect individuals from libel? Even if there's any sense in that (I doubt it), it sure doesn't appear to do us much good regardless. There's a reason why e.g. plutocrats such as Putin thought it was worth interfering in foreign public opinion: precisely because he thought freedom of speech does not work well in the countries he tried to manipulate; freedom of speech would not prevent malicious lies from spreading through the public. And you know what? Putin's right.
As such, while it's fair contrast the US approach to that of others, I think doing so is akin to worrying about really marginal issues (e.g. exactly where to draw the line between defamation of a politician vs. protected opinions about that politician just doesn't matter much: there are lots of possible lines, and most are just fine). The more fundamental issues are broadly similar - and deeply unhealthy - in all western countries.
> American individualism so often deflects the responsibility of dealing with such trauma on those who are subjected to this kind of harassment because it's not impacting the vast majority of the population ("not my problem").
It's not individualism, it's constitutional rights. The idea of american individualism is not true. We are a collectivist people - racial, native vs foreign born, protestant vs catholic, confederates vs union, etc.
> but somehow they don't devolve into the Orwellian nightmare that we always fear when we talk about limiting free speech.
Don't they arrest people for their dog's salute or symbols right? Europe is far closer to orwellian nightmare than the US I'd say.
> In fact, has there been another Western democracy more tested and compared to Orwell's 1984 in the last 5 years than the US?
"Last five years". And what happened?
> The worse that harassment gets online, I believe the more segmented and walled off and commercialized the internet will become.
No. As sneaky politically driven people use the death of children to demand censorship, that's when the internet will become more segmented, walled off and commercialized.
People like you are why there is ever more censorship, segmentation and commercialization. Clutching your pearls and screaming about the children while you only care about political censorship. Do you ever clutch your pearls and cry over the millions of children who are killed in wars? Or do you only cry for them when they serve your political agenda? It can't be an accident that in the last few years, a small but vocal contingent has used dead children at every opportunity to push for more censorship.
I’m particularly worried about the requirement that posts with the “same essential meaning” be detected. Should this become precedent, must every startup now run Content ID systems... based on NLP and word embeddings? Can a company be held liable for not setting the threshold correctly and allowing even the slightest negative sentiment about a subject through? Can a politician sue to have all references to a certain cartoon bear be removed on the grounds that the references’ very existence is offensive? Can HN be sued for failing to detect my oblique reference above? This is a dangerously slippery slope.
If I host my own website in the United States and post writing which is non-protected speech in Australia, might I be required to block Australian IP addresses from accessing it, or even to remove it altogether? Even though I don't have any Australian presence, my content is available in Australia, which might meet a standard for offering a service in Australia. I know this is not what this ruling is about, but it does bring reality closer to my hypothetical.
Secondly, why should local laws be enforcable globally? Should Australia really be able to globally forbid speech which is prohibited in Australia? Facebook's initial response was to follow Australian rules in Australia, and geoblock the contested posts. According to this ruling, this is insufficient, and Facebook is required to block these posts, and "equivalent" content, globally.
edit: I did indeed misread "Austria" as "Australia" throughout the entire article
This seems symmetrical to me to all the cases where EU copyright violators or varying US national security threats would get extradited to the US for a trial.
Australia can and will block your website locally. That's the pressure for you to conform to their laws. You don't have to but they don't have to let their citizens access it either. If Facebook ignored other country's laws, they would find themselves excluded entirely, such as has already happened in places like China.
I am getting a little tired of the continual equating of FAANG companies with "the internet". This article is predicated on the assumption Austria asking Facebook to ban some comment about a greens politician means all such posting are banned from the internet. Clearly, they aren't. At worst, that comment might be banned from web sites owned companies operating in Europe. Obviously, there are a lot of web sites out there owned by people who won't care what Europe thinks. If you don't like any of them create your own.
The "internet" is bigger than one site, or country, or even the EU. If you doubt that, just ask the MPA how they are going with eliminating links to pirated content from the internet. If you asked them in a bar, after a few drinks and out of earshot of their paymasters, I reckon there is a good chance you might even hear them say "it isn't possible". Or you could ask some UK pollie whether they think it's possible to prevent kids from seeing hard porn. I don't have to guess their response - they tried, and gave up.
The multinational tech companies are EXISTENTIALLY motivated to weaken and dissolve national identity for this very reason. Every country they operate in they will algorithmically and politically oppose any nationalist movement. The tech companies moved quickly and captured the vast majority of the world-- their greatest terror is that, like china, countries will realize that allowing an american company to monitor and manipulate their population might not be in the best interest of the people. The multinationals will do their best to influence and when necessary but off political leaders around the world. The war is just beginning.
1. If it happened to FB it can happen to anyone else, especially to small companies or people with less financial power to fight in court. It means it can apply to the entire Internet presence in Austria.
2. If any country can do such a ruling, then the entire Internet (see #1) is either abiding to all rules, being reduced to almost zero, or cut out extreme countries. This means Austria should be excluded from Internet? In the end Internet interlinks come from neighboring countries and an Austrian court cannot force them to connect the country to the rest of the world.
Not very sound logic, but the conclusion is quite scary to me.
Yeah, I've got emails from CNIL telling me that I needed to remove information I collected on french citizens and seeing how I wasn't operating in their jurisdiction, I just ignored them.
This really has nothing to do with Facebook. They just happen to be the website that got used to set the precedent. This can now happen on any of those hundreds of millions of websites that have any presence there.
So you are not concerned about massive Facebook censoring but is really worried about Austrian court decision which apparently takes 3 years per case?
To be clear I am not saying there is no problem, I am saying the Austrian court decision is really the least of it.
But honestly enabling any psycho to shout whatever for the whole world to hear is also a problem.
"...enabling any psycho to shout whatever for the whole world to hear is also a problem"
How can I be sure that it's not you that is the psycho? How do I know that your "nothing to see here folks" comment is not sponsored by the re-elected leader of Belarus? I prefer to read your comment and decide for myself to ignore it rather than have it blocked upstream by court, i.e. government, order. But yes, I am concerned also by massive Facebook censoring as well.
3 years is not so long, sadly. In Switzerland, an deadly accident from a young worker, took such a long time to even start in the court, until it was barred.
Your statement has a nice ring to it only because it takes advantage of the very confusing English word "free". In the "free speech" context, it's free as in liberty. In the "universal, free education" context, it's free as in beer; the implication being government funded and managed (and mandatory, implied by "universal"). So while your statement seems to be all about freedom, it's really about predicating one freedom on the restriction of another.
Here's how I would rephrase your statement:
"It's a mistake for the government to let people speak freely before they have been educated by the government."
Depends on who gets to choose the curriculum...don't assume it's people you like or fundamentally agree with.
And, if you do put hard limits on the sort of things that should be taught - and from what perspective - then it really sounds like you're saying that in order to have free speech, people should be taught to agree with you.
Edit: to be clear, I like both ideas. But coupling them, saying we shouldn't have one without the other, is dangerous.
What a nonsensical article. Such power of courts already exists, but it mostly boils down to US law as most of the platforms are in the US. Think about the debates on photos of breastfeeding, a fully natural act that happens to show a part of the body that all humans possess. But as the US has a double standard where female nipples are sinful and obscene - and male nipples totally fine - a mom in Germany or France or Austria will not be able to upload such photos (similar to e.g. some regions in Africa where going topless is not unusual for women).
Similarly if you dare use content of a US media organisation you'll get a global DMCA takedown. Even if you do e.g. a critique or it's playing as background in a video recorded in a public space, all of which are protected under most countries' legislation. Hell videos of families singing Happy Birthday are DMCAd as one of many american troll companies claims to own the copyright to the lyrics.
On the other hand, gruesome and deeply intrusive/personal videos of e.g. murder or violence are tolerated on Facebook and similar sites as those are in the US context not undedstood to be harmful.
In germany public holocaust denial can be punished with five years in prison (although it very rarely goes so far), but Facebook serves as wonderful breeding ground of conspiracy theories about Jewish world conspiracies and the holocaust being a lie. Cause "free speech" is final, even blatant falsehoods.
I don't think a regional Austrian court should be the judge for the internet, but the only reason it is trying to take this role is because these sites' host country applies absurd laws (what's more harmful for a 15 year old to see, a beheading or some lady's nipples?) and the sites refuse to apply common sense. This lady was harassed quite intensely and Facebook refused to take action - that's the case here.
So what's the solution? Some global court system? Agreed minimum standards? Companies localising content more? I have no idea, but its pretty clear that the US giants have a harmful effect not just on US but global public discourse as they refuse to address misinformation, lies, harassment, holocaust denial, etc etc
This has come up again because a terrorist attacked the center of the capital Vienna.
The thing that makes this so incredibly ridiculous, is that the authorities actually knew the person tried to attend a IS training camp in Syria. They stopped him. So they knew very well about his intentions. Then a nearby state Slovakia told the Austrian authorities that this person was there and bout ammunition. The Austrian authorities did not further investigate and at the end he went to the center of Vienna and started shooting at people. The thing is, he also showed pictures on instragram or facebook with him holding guns.
Now the EU representatives demand more censorship and want to end End-To-End encryption for the state by implementing a general key so that they can see any kind of encrypted messages. The proposed law also demands from platforms to implement a sort of filter to remove any kind of uploads that might be IP or maybe even offensive.
I actually really like the ideology behind the EU. I think growing together and bringing the states together to strengthen the EU is great. But what is happening right now is pure authoritarian act that will hit anyone for the failure of authorities that would have had enough information and power from the beginning.
> This has come up again because a terrorist attacked the center of the capital Vienna.
No. Please read the article. This is about a law suit which has been going on for a few years. The case itself has absolutely nothing to do with recent events. Also, Austria does not have a case law system. Courts don't make laws (the constitutional court in Austria can strike down laws, but that's about it) and are not bound by previous court decisions. The fact that the supreme court ruled on it just means the decision on this case is final (as far as the Austria judicial branch is concerned).
Besides, do you seriously believe a court could act based on something that happened 11 days ago? Have you ever dealt with a court?
That said, I mostly agree with your ramblings, but that has simply little to no connection to the case and resulting problems discussed in the article.
Try posting a nipple or copyrighted track, for example.
If Facebook had come from a different place, all songs and body bits might be Ok but perhaps discussion of government would be banned. I can't tell if that would actually be a better facebook than the one we got.