> Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law.
This is kind of insane.
So if I offer a free website- a private company operating as I like- I would be forbidden from removing content from my own website that I don't like because the person who wrote it- again, not a paying customer- wants it to be there. Not only does that person have free speech, but I have to foot the bill for them to promote their free speech.
> does not break Polish law
This is the real key piece. Poland's government can just ban saying anything that goes against their own viewpoints. Now their supporters can't have their comments removed, and their detractors will.
Put another way: In the US at least, r/jailbait didn't actually break any laws (well, maybe some individual posts did, but the whole idea of that subreddit was essentially to ogle underage women/children but in a way that was not explicitly illegal). So with something like this law all social media sites would be forced to host the equivalent of r/jailbait.
That's exactly what makes it a great example. If we accept the premise that /r/jailbait was not illegal (but "merely" reprehensible), then under this new law, Reddit would have been breaking the law when they decided to ban the subreddit.
Its because real life is not black and white. Its shades of gray mostly.
And while its ease to spot and codify extreme cases on both sides, its impossible for a law to clearly codify a clear line where good turns to bad.
The 'original' argument for this type of conversation is: what makes a nude picture an art piece, what makes it porn. If we were given 100 photos we would probably agree in most cases whats art and whats porn, but try to write rules for distinguishing them.
Actually, r/jailbait was removed as a reaction to the FOSTA laws which explicitly carve out an exception to section 230 for content that could be considered related to sex trafficking, so in this sense it actually did create a new legal risk compared to other non-sex related subs.
Yes, as afuchs said, FOSTA wasn't passed to 2018, and that forced things like craigslist personals to close.
r/jailbait was closed many years earlier in response to an onslaught of negative media attention.
This has already been weaponized by subs like /r/AgainstHateSubs and other vigilante-like subs. Their tactics usually involve posting in those subreddits from sockpuppet accounts, using hateful or threatening messages. The few times the targeted subs mods aren't on the ball, they mass report the post for hate speech to try and get the sub banned, or the mods banned then later request the subreddit for themselves, something of a trophy I guess. On rare instances, they reach out to their freelance journalist friends to write a hite piece.
Do you need any evidence for this? Shouldn't this be handled in the same way you would patch a security hole even if you had no evidence it was being exploited?
I.e. shouldn't Reddit let a community exist, even if some users post content against the rules, as long as the moderators are putting a reasonable, good faith effort to ban such users?
(I don't know if what notadev said is true, or if Reddit bans communities just because users are posting bad content against the moderators will)
Is this not something that Reddit can show is happening? I guess you could avoid things like browser fingerprinting by using multiple machines as well as a VPN, however, if someone is going to that level of effort -- what's the end game?
If the site admins just want an excuse to get rid of a sub that doesn’t align with their political ideology, it’d be pretty easy to not bother investigating.
Don't those subs tend to produce enough hate on their own without having to have anyone fake it? I have a cousin who is down the QAnon rabbit hole, believes a race war is coming, and will happily make new accounts and post all day long to whatever subs he thinks are on the same page as him. He's been through several facebook accounts in just last year.
Can you please stop using HN for political battle? We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which politics they're battling for. We have to, because otherwise this will destroy the community. HN is a site for curious, thoughtful conversation, not hellfire.
Also, please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.
Sadly it's true, and not uncommon. It's possible your experience is different though, and I get that. My cousin always had issues this is just the latest thing he's latched onto.
It's especially insane because Polish law is not a superset of every other country's law. If a web site is forced to remove content because it violates a law specific to the country the site is based in -- boom, now they've broken the law in Poland.
Nitpicking: you would want it to be a subset of the laws of all other countries‘ for that as it needs to be the intersection of all to be compatible with all of them at once.
We can extend your point. A website used by kids may not want swear words, a website may not want sexists, racists, and another hate speech. In certain situations, disallowing content is the site owner's way of expressing their point of the view. This law bans this site owner from doing so. It limits site owner's ability to express their views on what their own property should be. By the way, we should also keep in mind that a site is the private property of an entity, just like an object or a piece of land. If this law is enacted, when a site owner sees speech on their own site that goes against their values, they can only condemn them with words, but the actual act will still happen on their property.
Plenty of countries pass laws stating the the truth is propaganda - the US equivalent would be calling it Fake News, only they'd actually legally prohibit anything the gov says is fake news.
The law is stupid of course and an attempt to fight for their point of view(that is: xenophobic, racist and intolerant), but history is a subject rather widely discussed in Poland with all the sides being represented in media.
There are some who like to call Nazi death camps 'Polish death camps' because they were located in Nazi occupied Poland. This, of course, is frowned on by Poland. It is seen as a way of blaming Poland for Germany's crimes, while the people who do it play innocent and claim they are merely stating 'true facts' about the locations of the camps.
You're also not allowed to refer to camps like Zgoda or Jaworzno - which were labour camps operated by poles on behalf of the communist regime - as 'Polish concentration camps'.
It's a bit of a mess. If you're given a task of running a camp from occupying forces, I can't imagine you have much real choice (or you end up in one yourself). Then again, "just following orders" is not a great defence either. I wish people didn't try to make that black&while.
Or to add a different story, a family member sent to a Soviet camp told everyone not to retaliate against neighbours who testified against him - because they were likely forced to do so.
Or think of Nazi-run weapon factories in occupied countries where locals were forced to work. (And sometimes managed to sabotage production quality)
I'll tell you a secret. Poles are exceptionally adept at duplicity and censoring their history. Chopin, Konopnicka were likely gay? LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU! Józef Bem converted to Islam and still acted like a Polish patriot? Let's talk about something else. Such and such poets or composers etc were jewish? You're either a Jew or a Polish Catholic, obviously. Poland never attacked any countries. Poland didn't initially try an alliance with Hitler and annex a part of Czechoslovakia. The word "pogrom" doesn't come from Polish, no no. And before "pogrom", "tumult" wasn't used as an euphemism. Aggression towards immigrants doesn't contradict Christianity. Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was perfect and it collapsed only because it was attacked by neighbors. All countries bordering with Poland love Poland. Poland is the fountain of innovation, it's only a coincidence the most famous Polish people lived outside Poland.
There's literally a common phrase "Poland is the Christ of nations." - Mickiewicz, the chief poet. You can only be the Christ if you're without fault.
edit: this post is getting downvoted :D. I was never good at Polish doublethink, cared too much about facts.
it's getting downvoted because you said this in the most racist sounding way possible.
"Various polish governments have done XYZ" vs. "polish people lie". It's similar to "Israel does XYZ to Palestinians" vs "Jews want XYZ to happen to Palestinians" (to use a common antisemitic trope trying to justify antisemitism)
Incidentally, Poles are one of the purest or most inbred nations in Europe, and you have no one else but Adolf Hitler to thank for it. You see echoes of that in Witcher 3, I know it caused some controversy overseas because of how uniformly white everyone is. No malicious intent there, just modern Poles projecting their world back in time. Between WW1 and WW2, percentage of people identifying as Poles was less than 70%. Today it's 97%.
There's a point after which you can say there's a pattern and not just a bunch of samples. When we're talking about populations we're talking in terms of averages and distributions, and the average in Poland is much like I described. In my opinion history of Poland is the second state religion, after catholicism, 91% as of 2018. And if you say many young people don't actually go to church, you're making my point (duplicity and appeasing peer pressure).
97% and 91%. Maybe it's you who don't know what you're talking about?
I only found out recently that you need to go through a lengthy process back in the church where you were baptised in order to renounce yourself from the Catholic church here in Poland. Just being an atheist, not attending church, not believing, not supporting the organisation is enough. You need to go to your place of baptism, have multiple talks with the priest there, then fill out some forms, wait some time, etc.
I wonder if people actually know this, and how many actually go through the pain of "de-registering" themselves from this organisation.
I also wonder how this affects things like "official statistics" of Catholics in the country.
Regarding Witcher 3 there is a very simple reason for nearly all the people being white. It's because the region is in turmoil and there's a war going on. So all the people (of different skin colour, different race) that can leave have already done so.
The process is why I don't bother. I was baptized when I was little and I don't consider that a proper contract. If they want to use bad input data, I'll let them deceive themselves. Going to the church and pleading is not only somewhat humiliating, it validates the contract between a little child and a very large organization.
"Colorful" people leaving because of a war implies a racist society where unusual people are merely tolerated at best of times. History is more complex than that. Duke Mieszko I, the first recorded ruler of Poland, gifted a camel (according to Thietmar) to Otto III, future emperor. That was in A.D. 986.
Not necessarily that colourful people leave, but that outsiders leave. For one because they can and have somewhere else to go to, but the other because if they stay they will be viewed with suspicion and bad things might happen to them.
The Witcher series has been full of fearful populaces wary and hostile to outsiders/other races (Dwarves and Elves in this case).
These laws are in response to people, some of them misguided but many of them doubtlessly neo-nazis, calling Auschwitz a 'polish camp'. The law has unfortunate edge cases but I think it was well motivated. If you tally up all the Poles who knowingly and willingly collaborated with Nazis and compare that with the number of Poles murdered by the Nazis, I think it's clear that calling Auschwitz a 'polish camp' is monstrous. And while the matter of Zgoda should be taken seriously, it should also be kept in context. Less than two thousand people died at Zgoda, which is certainly a horrible crime. But that number represents what, a few hours at Auschwitz? It was more at Jaworzno, but still less than a single day at Auschwitz. It is any wonder the matter of these camps was overlooked in the formulation of a law targetting neo-nazis who want to disassociate Germany from Auschwitz?
It's not what I'd call a great law. But I think it's a law with a wholly reasonable motivation.
> The bill was proposed by the country’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) and calls for up to three years in prison or a fine for accusing the Polish state or people of involvement or responsibility for the Nazi occupation during World War II
The law has since passed, tho it was later amended to remove the prison time portion.
No one sensible is accusing "the Polish state" or "the Polish people" of being involved with the Holocaust, and the Wikipedia page itself doesn't state anything like that. The law is aimed at hateful idiocy like talking about the supposed "Polish death camps", as opposed to the tragically real Nazi death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The wikipedia page I linked to clearly points out that polish people WERE involved in the holocaust. Not all, in fact I believe the vast majority of poles were not collaborators... but that doesn't mean this law doesn't make it legally sketchy to talk about the poles who were collaborators
Polish people were exterminated on a daily basis by German nazis. Over 5 million Poles were brutally killed. It is hard to miss German attack and occupation of Poland aim was also to depopulate it from polish people.
Collaborators were punished because they were traitors and everyone seen and sees them like such.
Below is a link to a Wikipedia where you can learn more:
> Especially in the early weeks of the German offensive, many thousands of Jews were murdered by members of local communities in the western parts of the previously Soviet zone, such as the Baltic countries, eastern Poland, and western Ukraine.
I am absolutely not trying to paint a complex situation in black and white. The article you linked to also points out how many non-jewish poles were killed, how many non-jewish poles helped jewish poles at great risk to themselves, etc. but the idea that you can “other” collaborator poles out of being poles is denying the reality.
I visited a Nazi extermination camp in Poland where you could literally see the adjacent town from inside the camp fences. It's absolute lunacy to pretend there weren't Polish collaborators.
It's an absolute lunacy to think that because a group of people lives nearby a place where something bad is going on, it is certain that among them are people helping with it.
Of course that is illegal in Germany, but it's also illegal to make certain true claims that are contrary to the official narrative imposed on Germany after their defeat.
Don't put it past Polish law and order to rule pornography illegal soon. (And contraception probably sooner) I wouldn't be surprised at attempts - they're quite conservative.
You already need to go see a doctor and get a prescription for anything contraception related, and they can decide not to give it to you. This includes "the pill" as well as "the morning after pill".
Also the recent rulings on Abortion almost caused a revolution. So they might be more careful in the coming months.
I'm not a lawyer, and at the risk of sounding ignorant, but I don't understand how a Polish law can be enforced on a company/service/piece of hardware under US (presumably, but could be any other) jurisdiction.
At the end of the day, the data is sitting on a piece of hardware somewhere, isn't the "owning" place the one that dictates what laws can be enforced on it?
It can be enforced in a lot of ways, including fines on the company's operations in the country, charges against local employees and banning the site from the country's ISPs.
If you want to do business in a country, then you have to follow the laws of that country. Polish courts would enter judgment against the company for violating Polish law, premising their jurisdiction on the activities of that company within their borders (e.g. accepting payment in polish currency, selling ads to polish businesses, charging for polish views/clicks). They can then seize the company's property in Poland to enforce that judgment. They can also introduce that judgment in foreign courts to do enforcement actions there. Those foreign courts would examine the validity of the Polish judgment (e.g. by reexamining jurisdiction) before issuing orders to enforce it.
There's nothing novel about this. This is how civil judgments are enforced across borders every day.
IANAL but as I understand it, most governments will consider something to be in their jurisdiction if the user is within their jurisdiction, even if the server is not. See GDPR, which applies to all EU citizens globally- even one residing in the United States using US web services.
It is a bit more complicated: the EU considers the protection of personal data a basic human right (charta of fundamental rights article 8). As such there are cases where the EU considers itself to be the responsible authority, even if the company is not within the EU, as long as the data subject is.
There are limits to that due to contract law, but there are also limits how many rights one can sign away, especially when dealing with predatory corporations.
To give a less digital analogue: if you are robbed, your local police is the authority you talk to. They are not going to tell you that you need to find out who robbed you and talk to the police in their home town.
This status quo is US companies gets to decide wait is fair speech. Obviously this is untenable for all other nations as it should be in the US as well.
The second part is reminiscent of how “net neutrality” is pitched in the United States. I’ve never felt that definition was true net neutrality due to the reason you outlined.
I don't think all legal nuances are visible in one sentence resume probably hastily translated from Polish, but in any case there's nothing unusual about it. Many countries already have anti-discrimination laws which can seriously limit what you can do with your private property when it's open for public interaction. I'm sure they will use it as a blueprint.
It is equally insane to say forbid hate speech as is can be interpreted as anything. Likewise, I assume they want to keep social media from deleting anything not aligned to the current zeitgeist.
The real problem are still people that want content removed that mostly doesn't even concern them in the first place.
But you are correct, a literal usage of this law is insane.
Hahaha, a lot of people who are Slavs or of Slavic descent know exactly what you mean, universally. The first word is known well across Slavic languages, the second is an acronym for Poland’s far right ruling party.
Oh, but Zbigniew Ziobro (the minister) IS kinda insane in other aspects. He's a hardcore conservative.
His childhood/teenage hero was Janosik, a highlander bandit along the lines of Robin Hood. Being a fan of vigilante justice is not a good sign if you're a minister of justice.
He's bothered by independent courts and independent prosecutors. He puts pressure on judges ruling not along his will, he harasses them, stripped one of immunity for investigating a break of parliamentary statute. If you do something he doesn't like, he might relocate or harass you under a pretext. Make an example out of you. His actions are clearly aimed to produce a chilling effect. But priests accused of pedophilia get silent protection, including getting a peek into court documents. He also likes to micromanage court cases, especially in flashy cases where it's easy to get an emotional reaction from people, such as accusions of rape, pedophilia (except by priests), murder.
He gets in bed with Ordo Iuris, a para-legal branch of the Brazilian catholic sect TFP, condemned by bishops in Brazil in the 80's. They are absolutely against abortion and openly seek goals like forbidding divorce.
He's a mediocre lawyer.
He objects to the idea that European Union cares about law-abidingness and asked the consitutional court to check if the idea is compatible with constitution. Political goals and "good of the nation" are more important to him.
He's a paranoid, petty and vindictive person. Also, very power hungry.
> does not break Polish law
The ruling party intentionally creates ambiguous law that can be applied in an arbitrary manner. Be on the party's good side.
Current Polish government is a lite version of authoritarianism, and getting more so over time. It doesn't control all aspects of life like a totalitarian party would, yet. But it's trying, for example religion, against sexuality(including basic sexual education), edits history textbooks, paints new people as heroes and erases old ones. Doctors and experts don't have much to say in matters of the pandemic. One party official openly stated they have no use for experts because they refuse to implement the party policy.
Don't miss the fact no ruling party member congratulated Joe Bidden on winning the election. The closest they got was congratulating him on a "good campaign", echoing the statements of those like Vladimir Putin. They are very much fans of Donald Trump. NATO's new focus on "defense of democracy", EU's attention to law-abidingneness, Biden's ostensible emphasis on values and democracy are all dark clouds for the Polish ruling party.
The bottom line: for the pro-West, pro-EU Poles, Ziobro is an awful person.
He is overall very sympathetic towards Poland, speaks the language quite well, and thinks people should learn more about it. Timothy Snyder is another one. I like non-Polish historians because they have a different view.
Ben Thompson, of Stratechery, had an interesting way of talking about Facebook that might help with a future definition of "social media services."
He (and podcast co-host John Gruber[0]) talked about the idea that Facebook isn't the same site for any two people. Due to the algo, everyone has their own personal version of the site. Therefore, there's no individual snapshot of Facebook at any given time.
I found this an interesting concept to point out. If one needed to distinguish between a website and "social media services," perhaps a law could be drafted such that such a condition was true.
HN, for example, would be a website because commenting and voting is user-based. I suppose that might mean Spotify and Netflix would be swallowed by the definition. The definition would then need additional language about user-submitted content.
Technically Facebook/Twitter are not websites, but "social" applications (web/native). You need to have a user account to see (FB) or post (FB/Twitter) anything.
Well all this wouldn't have been possible if not for the precedent Big Tech set in handling opposing ideologies. Now why cry over balkanization of the internet when that is what was pushed for by the leftists in these Big Tech companies? What do you think would happen if Big Tech kept censoring something it did not like? You would obviously have a reaction to it. I view the Polish laws as a reaction to the ridiculous ideological censorship stance taken by the Big Tech. First polarize the population, then cry why opposing laws are being framed that shatters your idea of what internet should be. I won't be surprised if many other countries follow the same path. Those who experienced censorship know it first hand what it's like. Looking at you being shocked at this legislation just shows how wide the split is. That one bubble is completely oblivious to what the other bubble is experiencing.
I say this to reinforce what OP points out. If the government disagrees with something, they can now simply rewrite a law to enable their censorship. That is scary, given they don't have a definitive law protecting people from government censorship.
As someone hiding behind a throwaway account in an effort to avoid doxing and harassment, and getting my more legitimate online presence removed due to hysterics:
I welcome the idea of this change. Though I think it is wrong the way it is implemented. I do not speak Polish, and maybe perhaps the Polish law is more nuanced than the article describes.
There should be a law that says you cannot produce a unilateral terms of service (you know, the shit everyone skips over when they sign up for a website to get their data harvested) that says your account can be terminated at any time for whatever reason. It should be a bilateral agreement:
-I agree to follow the rules of your service
-You agree to not arbitrarily remove me from your service
There are dozens of examples and minutia to digest that have lead us to where we are today. Voices are being silenced because feelings are too easily hurt. Misinformation too easily spread, and egos too easily bruised. People are specifically being targeted for hearsay, and because they lack a megaphone in the Court of Public Opinion, they lose catastrophically with real world consequences.
Hiding behind monopolistic corporations with snide remarks about "private platforms can do what they want" is genuine cowardice. For right now you are nothing more than a jester, and one bad joke away from your head rolling off, gleefully oblivious of your own downfall.
You have to be careful there, too, though: Amazon is claiming that Parler (to use the most currently relevant example) did violate their terms of service, because their terms of service are so vague and broad that they can be used to apply to almost anything.
I haven't used Parler, but from what I read there were loads of people actively calling for violence. Sure, there's no set line, but Amazon shouldn't have to support that if they don't want to.
> You agree to not arbitrarily remove me from your service
Per basic contract law, this is only going to fly if money is changing hands. You and Facebook sign a contract with these stipulations and you pay them for the privilege of using their platform, and now if they remove you you have damages that can be enforced. Absent you paying them they have no obligation to host any of your content. Are you willing to pay Facebook to use it in exchange for these rights?
I'm not sure that's true. Typically (and of course other jurisdictions vary anyway) there doesn't have to be money; there just has to be a consideration, which can be money. Something of value flowing both ways. A lot of contracts end up with a consideration on one party of something nominal like a dollar or a pound, but it doesn't have to be money.
"You get my details and my attention and can harvest my data and make money from it" certainly sounds like it could be argued as having value.
You're out on a bit of a shaky limb here. There's clear precedent in contract law for damages when money is changing hands. But non-compensated access to data? I'm doubtful. Do you have any established case law in this vein you can point to?
Regarding the majority party of the coalition which he is governing with.
The party has caused what constitutional law scholar Wojciech Sadurski termed a "constitutional breakdown"[58] by packing the Constitutional Court with its supporters, undermining parliamentary procedure, and reducing the president's and prime minister's offices in favor of power being wielded extra-constitutionally by party leader Jarosław Kaczyński.[46] After eliminating constitutional checks, the government then moved to curtail the activities of NGOs and independent media, restrict freedom of speech and assembly, and reduce the qualifications required for civil service jobs in order to fill these positions with party loyalists.[46][59] The media law was changed to give the governing party control of the state media, which was turned into a partisan outlet, with dissenting journalists fired from their jobs.[46][60] Due to these political changes, Poland has been termed an "illiberal democracy",[61][62] "plebiscitarian authoritarianism",[63] or "velvet dictatorship with a façade of democracy".[64]
Yep the government has for a while been dismantling any opposition by stacking the courts, replacing critical state media, attacking journalists and so on. The support for this kind of law is actually just consequent because social media is the platform that lends itself most to riling up a mob.
It's simple majoritarianism, rallying a hyper-loyal voter-base and disadvantaging scholars, intellectuals, scientists and so on.
A similar stupid law was proposed by a Romanian minister some years ago but with the goal of stopping you calling people (basically ministers) idiots on website comments.
They eventually realized it's not enforceable and it just created some fuss.
The reason that died as it started is because there's no way how such a thing ever work or be enforced.
Does it not matter where I host my site?
What can Poland do about my website hosted in UK (or any other country)?
At worst this just destroys any hosting services that operate in that country.
Gay marriage has a popular majority in the UK and Ireland in both polls and referenda. Is it that different in the US?
Interpreting old documents is hard, and where there is silence or substantial ambiguity it seems right to err on the side of popular opinion.
7 of 27 EU states have a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. The EU Human Rights Court has not stepped in to overturn those bans: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... In 2016, it held unanimously that the European Convention on Human Rights doesn’t protect same-sex marriage. In the EU countries where it has been legalized, that was done by statue.
In the US, those issues are handled through court cases, regardless of where public opinion stands. For example, elective abortions (without health risks or something else) in the second trimester or later is very unpopular in the US and the EU. Only about a quarter of people think it should be generally legal after the first trimester: https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-.... That matches up with the law in most of the EU, where the limit for elective abortions is 10-14 weeks. (As I recall, the UK is the exception at 24 weeks.)
The US constitution doesn’t say anything about abortion, or anything that could really be construed to be about abortion, but the Supreme Court has interpreted it to protect abortion up to viability, usually 22-24 weeks. So the Supreme Court has interpreted the constitution, which says nothing about abortion, to create an abortion right so broad France or Germany’s or Denmark’s abortion laws would be invalid in the US.
The topping on that cake is that the US is that the US is the most religious developed country in the world, more so than countries like Poland.
Which is why Supreme Court appointments get so heated here.
Gay marriage had a popular majority in favour before it became legal (though obviously a popular majority doesn’t necessarily mean much in the US system.) Compare this to interracial marriage which was not approved of by the majority of the population for many years after it was made fully legal across the country .
Most cases that reach the US Supreme Court aren't about whether X is good or bad (let's say X is abortion or gay marriage) but whether X is so good that the Federal government should compel states to allow it, or so bad that it should compel states to forbid it.
> Most cases that reach the US Supreme Court aren’t about whether X is good or bad (let’s say X is abortion or gay marriage) but whether X is so good that the Federal government should compel states to allow it, or so bad that it should compel states to forbid it.
No, most of them aren’t about good or bad, which is a policy judgement generally reserved for the political branches, at all.
Its about whether X or Y is consistent with the law (including, as the paramount law, the Constitution of the United States.)
There's a straightforward argument for gay marriage based on bans essentially being discrimination based on sex:
A woman may marry a man, but a man may not.
Chief justice Roberts made this point during arguments in obergefell v. hodges.
And you're incorrect about the timeline. Gay marriage was approved of by a majority of Americans somewhere around 2011-2012. The supreme court decision was 2015. See my other comment in this chain for polling data.
“Rights” are what other human beings agree to recognize. That’s just the nature of law as a construct. What the federal courts in America have done is set themselves up as a tribunal of elites for deciding moral issues that other countries decide democratically.
This unsurprisingly causes a lot of friction. Same sex marriage actually wasn’t one of those areas—US opinion and that in other developed countries wasn’t far off, and it was legalized after it hit majority support. And Obergefell has a much stronger basis in law than other Supreme Court social decisions. There is a long line of precedent recognizing that marriage is a “fundamental right” protected by the constitution.
But abortion and religion in schools are examples of where the court is significantly out of step with both the letter of the law and public opinion. Public opinion in America supports abortion in the first trimester and or after that. That’s the same moral balance as reflected in the laws of say Denmark, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy (where abortion is generally illegal after 10-14 weeks). But under Roe abortion cannot be banned until the end of the second trimester. So our elite tribunal has imposed an abortion regime in the US that’s inconsistent with what more liberal Europeans have.
Same thing for religion in schools. 2/3 of Americans oppose the ban on school prayer. By contrast, instruction in public schools is a legal right in much of Europe, including the UK and Germany.
Being out of step with the public can be justified if that’s what the letter of the law requires. What’s most perplexing about Roe in particular is that it’s out of step with public opinion (broader than what the public wants) and also has no basis in the constitutional text. What’s the source of the court’s authority in that context?
> What’s most perplexing about Roe in particular is that it’s out of step with public opinion (broader than what the public wants) and also has no basis in the constitutional text.
This is false, Roe doesn't have “no basis in the Constitutional text”. It is true that the derivation of the understanding of rights articulated in Roe from the text is indirect, but that does not make it absent; it is a judicial understanding built on prior judicial understandings each of which directly or via even more intermediary judicial understandings derive from the text.
> What’s the source of the court’s authority in that context?
“The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this Constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made, under their authority”
A difference between us and Europe is that our country was founded on maintaining a separation between the state (which runs the schools we're talking about) and religion, and Germany wasn't. The entire premise of the Constitution --- really of any constitution --- is to insulate those kinds of governing principles from public opinion.
> House’s final version: “Congress shall make no law establishing religion.”
> The Senate responded with: “Congress shall make no law establishing articles of faith or a mode of worship.”
> The Conference Committee came up with the final version, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The Committee’s addition of “respecting an” was not explained at the time but has been the subject of a great deal of recent commentary. In its own time, however, the clause generated none of the heated arguments that had accompanied church–state issues in the states.
> where there is silence or substantial ambiguity it seems right to err on the side of popular opinion
If “it seems right” is a good way to run a country, why do we even have laws?
I don’t think abusing silence and substantial ambiguity is a coherent approach to legislation. If something important in the law is ambiguous, the correct approach in my view is to make it unambiguous by the usual legislative process.
This comment misrepresents the situation by failing to indicate that the 'Constitutional Crisis' started before the current Law and Justice government took power by the previous governments anti-constitutional actions of trying to appoint Constitutional Court judges ahead of the end of their terms.
For a summary of events: [1]
Imagine if Barack Obama / George Bush decided to go ahead and punt some SCOTUS members ahead of the end of their terms, because they were afraid they were going to lose his upcoming elections? Imagine what what the consequences would be.
'Law and Justice' , after having won elections came in and did some nasty things (which you point out) and were sanctioned by the EU for it, however, it's hypocritical that the group that initially broke the law on a very fundamental issue were not also sanctioned.
I don't remotely support any of this, but it's important to consider that this didn't just happen out of thin air.
This 'free speech' bill is an interesting political issue, I wonder how much of this is pointed at the local population, or how much of it is trying to obtain some populist goodwill in other EU nations ... or if it's trying to gain some kind of 'moral high ground' leverage in their current 'issues' with the EU.
> This comment misrepresents the situation by failing to indicate that the 'Constitutional Crisis' started before the current Law and Justice government took power by the previous governments flagrant anti-constitutional actions of trying to appoint Supreme Court Judges ahead of the end of their terms.
It was the Constitutional Court, not Supreme Court. Also, no, not really - that didn't start the crisis in any reasonable meaning of that word. In a correctly functioning democracy that would simply be blocked by Constitutional Court, and that's in fact exactly what happened. The problem started when currently ruling party replaced not only the extraneous judges, but also those judges who were lawfully supposed to be appointed by previous government. Of course the Constitutional Court deemed that unconstitutional, but that didn't stop the ruling party at all, and the rest is history.
"Also, no, not really - that didn't start the crisis in any reasonable meaning of that word."
The entire world disagrees with this.
The issue, in public, is very clear - actions by the the previous government in the summer of 2015 were declared anti-constitutional, and later actions highly undemocratic.
There is no doubt that this was the 'start of the crisis' by any objective measure.
It doesn't matter how much we may not like certain 'current authorities' - History is History - people should stop trying to rewrite it to suit their narrative. Suppressing these unfortunate events is not going to help anyone's cause in the long run.
> ruling party replaced not only the extraneous judges, but also those judges who were lawfully supposed to be appointed by previous government
The problem is that previous government broke the law in more than one way:
1. They appointed more judges that they were allowed to.
2. They did appoint all those judges by means of single parliamentary resolution, despite the fact that Polish Constitution clearly requires voting for each judge separately.
Given those two points NONE of the judges was appointed lawfully, and there was no other way forward than repeal the whole resolution, therefore removing all 5 unlawfully appointed judges.
> and there was no other way forward than repeal the whole resolution
That's not what happened though. The Constitutional Court ruling[1] deemed the appointment of three judges constitutional, and two of them unconstitutional - and, according to the Constitution, those rulings are final, immutable and to be immediately published. However, president Duda didn't swear any of the new judges, despite of being legally obliged to (the president doesn't have the right to decide whether the judges were appointed legally or not, it's the Constitutional Court's job) and once PiS appointed five new judges (instead of two they were legally able to) the president swore them all.
Uh, whose interpretation is that? Constitutional tribunal ruled itself that three judges were correctly appointed by previous parliament. (case K34/15)
So in keeping with the law at the time (well the law they passed), they elected 5 justices to replace up coming vacancies. Later it was ruled that 2 of those nominations were unconstitutional (I think because they were for justices who's terms expired after the new legislature was seated), but the newly elected Law and Justice government refused to seat any of them and elected their own slate of 5 justices. When the constitutional tribunal refused to include those 5 justices until the dispute was resolved, rather than back down the new government raised the threshold to conduct business so that the new justices would have to be included and even worse chose to interpret a clause requiring a majority to mean a supper majority and gave themselves the power to remove justices.
The constitutional tribunal ruled this new law unconstitutional, but because that ruling was not made under the new rules introduced by the again according to them unconstitutional law the new government ignored it.
It's one thing to pass unconstitutional laws and quite another to pass unconstitutional laws and refuse to listen to listen when you're called out on them
This is all fine and good - but the previous governments 'changing of the law' governing Judicial appointments, and then controversially 'stacking the court' to 14 out of 15 appointments in their favour, is clearly the first salvo in a constitutional war.
There is no doubt.
It doesn't matter that 'we don't like the jerks in charge' or that 'they've done bad stuff' - the fact is the crisis was obviously initiated before they came to power.
Much like pretty much everyone here hates Trump (I certainly do), but he was unfairly castigated in the press with the 'Mueller investigations' which de-facto absolved him of any Russian shenanigans. It doesn't matter that he lies about election results - he was not colluding with Russians.
If either side in in the US tried to pull what the previous Polish government did - it would set off major events, possibly conflict, worse than what we're seeing today for sure.
The previous government action was unconstitutional, but it was hardly a crisis. We had all the tools needed to handle such case and those tools got used as they should. Only after later actions of the current government those tools became inadequate to handle the situation, causing the crisis.
We don't call every unconstitutional bill "a crisis" and I'm pretty sure of that as there were quite a lot of them already.
Also, I'm by no means a supporter of the previous government, so you can stop building your strawmans.
BTW:
> 'stacking the court' to 14 out of 15 appointments in their favour
Most of them were appointed with votes from both previous and current ruling parties. Just sayin'.
> which de-facto absolved him of any Russian shenanigans. It doesn't matter that he lies about election results - he was not colluding with Russians.
This is quite literally the opposite of the stated conclusion of the Muller investigation. It's not clear to me how you get "absolved him from any Russia shenanigans". There were clear links between the campaign and Russia (up to and including Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian Lawyer for "dirt" on the Clinton campaign), likely in return for changes to the Magnitsky act. That's all plainly stated in the muller report.
He ultimately didn't charge them because while there may have been intent to collude, it didn't pan out.
Well Obama did ask Bader-Ginsburg to step down when democrats had control of the senate (I think she’d only had cancer once at the time), but I guess you’re referring to something stronger than just asking judges to step down.
I feel like the US Supreme Court nomination system only works through a combination of frequent changes of power and most judges believing in the system and following the unwritten part of the constitution, and that the US example isn’t really a good one to copy in other democracies.
What happened is roughly this: in Poland's Constitutional Tribunal (which is as close of an equivalent of US Supreme Court as you can get in a country with a civil law system), the judges are not elected for life, but only for fixed term. As the term of the elected government was coming to an end, so were the terms of 5 of the justices in the Tribunal. However, two of these terms ended within the elected government's term, and three after it ended. As a result, the ruling party (PO) had a clear right to nominate 2 justices, and hardly any right to nominate the other three. It decided to nominate all 5 nevertheless.
The party that won the subsequent election, PiS, refused to recognize any of the 5 justices nominated by PO, and nominated 5 of their own. What happened afterwards you can read in the Wikipedia article.
As far as I can tell, neither of these actions was based on any “loophole”. However, the nature of the rule of law is that it only works as long as everyone plays by the rules. When the government decides it does no longer has to play by the rules, there isn’t much that can be done to oppose them, as they still hold all the power, and are presumed to hold political authority.
> Imagine if Barack Obama decided to go ahead and punt some SCOTUS members ahead of the end of their terms, because he was afraid he was going to lose his upcoming elections?
Imagine if Barack Obama had Supreme Court appointments blocked by Republicans on constitutionally flimsy grounds that were immediately ignored when the Trump administration was in identical situations.
Would any "nasty things" done by a future Democrat administration then be laid at the feet of this original malfeasance, forevermore, or would it be misrepresentation not to mention it?
That is sort of inevitable. Remember the cartoons mocking Muhammad?
It is not as if there is a worldwide consensus on whether mocking him is even legal. Some people consider it a crime worthy of death and others their natural right. You can't get much bigger polarization than that. Compared to the Cartoon Question, differences between R and D are not that big.
What is a lie? I think it’s highly unlikely that Facebook and Twitter will be used worldwide in say, 2040. They had first mover advantage, but as it becomes easier to create a social network and the law catches up, I’d expect to see a lot of local/regional alternatives.
If the EU said tomorrow, in 1 year we are banning Facebook and launching our own version, what can Facebook do about it?
If they don't agree they don't have to use it. It's dishonest because the characterization suggests that sovereign nations are beholden to tech companies, but they aren't.
> They also don't have to allow foreign tech companies to operate in their country without following local laws.
Exactly right. So it's wrong to say that these governments are beholden to the tech companies, they could simply block them if wanted to, and perhaps they should, but either way it's obviously wrong to say that these governments are beholden.
> Facebook could easily sway an election if it tries.
So could the people being banned by Facebook. What's your point here?
There is a step between banning and giving a free for all which is requiring that social media follow local laws with the threat of being banned for non compliance.
Correct. So if anything Facebook/Twitter are beholden to these governments, not the other way around, they could simply block these megacorps if they were inclined to do so. I'm sure that would make many Polish tech founders very happy.
Where's the money for creating non-American websites?
Yes, I'm still bitter after 10 or so years that the local business directory website/start-up I was working on got part of its data copied by the up and coming Google Places. We folded, of course, Google Places "transferred" its data to the whole Google ecosystem. I was telling my boss at the time "they can't let Google do this, is theft", they let Google do that, and then some.
They have a worldwide monopoly. If countries can't enforce their law on these platforms they will likely ban them on their territory. No Nation want to forgo their sovereignty to US corporations and delegate to them what is fair speech. Expect their algorithms to be under scrutiny as well.
I think US megacorps have more malleable ethics than you are giving them credit for. these corps already have the ability to federated their services, and don't seem to have an issue with meeting the demands of less-than-savory governments like China's
That's exactly the argument for GDPR is. If an American megacorp doesn't want to respect the rights of non Americans then it shouldn't be allowed to profit at all from them. You can't just ban some and profit from the rest.
I think it's perfectly reasonable for non-American countries to impose laws on the tech businesses if they want to do business in those regions, but it's a dishonest characterization to suggest that what happens on a handful of American websites "determines what is appropriate", they don't have any such power.
You say that like it's a bad thing. The web used to be much less centralized than it is today, and not to its detriment. If we're talking about breaking up the physical Internet, that's clearly bad, but having alternatives to the Facebook/Twitter/etc monolith would be a clear net-win.
even government of sovereign states are afraid of being cancelled too
the big techs have brought this upon themselves, their social media has become the battleground for narratives using propaganda and political correctness, these "fact check"(censorship) will only get uglier
> Trolling ... may not be against any law but it is in the public interest to allow platforms to remove such content.
Is that really true? When Slashdot was the popular "news for nerds" site, many site regulars intentionally set their threshold to -1 to read the troll posts, because they were often inventive and funny. Yes, a moderation system can filter them out for users who configure the site thusly, but plenty of people would resist banning them outright because they are occasionally enjoyable to read.
> it is in the public interest to allow platforms to remove such content
This is not always true, and that is the issue. If the government is going to, for instance, tell us we can't gather on public property, there has to be some way to guarantee that a digital commons will remain.
When the livelihood of those businesses depends entirely on their ability to track their users to deliver better ads, I would say that’s so much worse than letting conservative people express themselves freely.
This can, and IMHO should, be addressed the way HN does it (at least by default): content that's downvoted is not visible by default, but not actually removed.
"Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law."
Sooo hop on a topic specific group. Get my off-topic posts removed. Being off-topic is not a crime in Poland. Get my shitposts reinstated.
The bill better be more specific than the article is.
I presume that depends on who removes these posts. If the posts are removed by group owners or moderators who are not affiliated with the social media service itself, I think that should be totally fine according to that law. It's the social media service itself that's not allowed to do that.
I'm guessing it would be more practical to make a method by which dang could easily reinstate a users' messages/account after receiving the required legal documentation. I also assume it only applies to Polish citizens, filing the complaints with their courts.
I think it would be better if internet went not in the direction of removing stuff but in the direction of providing users with tools to avoid the content they don't wish to engage with.
We shouldn't rely on security through obscurity when it comes to dangerously stupid ideas.
If you are in the super market buying food, and people are giving out free trials of crack cocaine -> addiction city.
You can very regularly see Nazi apologia which is so dressed up and benign sounding. "Teach the facts", "did this really happen" - the debunking of which requires access to people used to debunking it.
The same rule applies to a variety of topics.
Simply put, the average person is not prepared for lawyer level rhetorical devices in the wild.
So either we remove content like that, or we live through whatever disasters a world of reality distortion creates. Most likely the survivors of that world will simply lock down the news down hard.
>Simply put, the average person is not prepared for lawyer level rhetorical devices in the wild.
This boils down to "censorship is okay because people might believe the wrong thing", and down that path lay a well-greased and well-trodden slippery slope ending in the maws of dragons.
It's incredibly paternalistic. It is not your job, nor the government's, nor anyone else's to protect people from reading/thinking/etc. the wrong things.
It actually was my job, I saw exactly what letting things alone did. I know how many ways your ideas are incorrect, because I worked from that same starting point.
If you believe that ideals are going to do the job, please feel free! There's 100s of subs that need mods. Take the time to find the most gnarly politically active sub and apply your ideas. Find the places where people actively deal with propo and indoctrination.
If you can solve what everyone else has failed at, every firm, regulator and moderator under the sun will cheer you on.
Till then, this is what works. Not because I like it, or because it's "paternal" - but because it conforms to how humans actually behave and how content performs online today.
IT is what it is, and we can only improve by knowing reality first.
Those attitudes and behaviors are merely engineered traits to make Reddit engaging and active, sad to see who seems to be an otherwise happy person being wasted like that.
I'll keep my idealism, thanks. I've seen what censorship does, and I find it to be a far worse monster than any of those spawned by the free exchange of ideas.
> Simply put, the average person is not prepared for lawyer level rhetorical devices in the wild.
Maybe we should figure out how to educate people to prepare them?
Can we really build our safety on our ability to keep stupid people ignorant of stupid ideas?
I think that's the kind of security through obscurity that is currently failing us so hard. Stupid people are finding stupid ideas anyways, sharing them, building upon them. Trying to keep them away from stupid ideas is like trying to keep your body perfectly germ free. You can't really do that. Not in the long term. You are better of figuring how to boost your immunity.
People aren't code. Plus you dont see people exposing themselves to prions or the plague.
More pertinently, you could argue that we shouldn't worry about sociopaths, and that if they convince or charm someone - that's just bad luck, and it boosts people's immunity.
Why did we worry about lootboxes or attention manipulating algorithms?
Because when its not a fair fight, the outcome is not fair.
If I sent you up against professional Nazi denying content, and you knew jack about the Nazis - I guarantee you would think they had a point. There are supremely persuasive books saying the numbers are wrong, or that the data doesn't add up.
There are some ideas that are simply that toxic - handling them without training is a sure shot way to radicalize someone.
=------=
Sure, I would love to have classes like their are doing in some countries.
First - I doubt that flies in America, where Fox news is one of the largest networks.
Second - even if you did start classes for kids and teens - it still leaves your adults vulnerable.
I don't even know if it is possible to de-radicalize the already radicalized. If you don't stop the radicalization, you will simply have more of such people.
So sure, get those classes going, but its only one part of the solution.
>People aren't code. Plus you dont see people exposing themselves to prions or the plague.
Aren't vaccines kind of this: deliberately exposing people to something harmful so they'll have more immunity against a stronger version if they encounter it later?
And yet we program them to read, write, do calculations, know some narrations about history of their civilisation and some narrations completely made up by fellow humans. Even know some things we discovered about our physical reality and some things we constructes.
> Plus you dont see people exposing themselves to prions or the plague.
Because they are way more lethal on consumption than any idea is. We still eat cows though and talk to each other. Just made it bit harder to expose ouselves to plague and prions on daily basis.
> More pertinently, you could argue that we shouldn't worry about sociopaths, and that if they convince or charm someone - that's just bad luck, and it boosts people's immunity.
Oh. You should worry. And figure out how they are created and let everybody know what made them this way, and exactly how stupid it was. And about hownto recognized you are getting charmed and what are the limits of your knowledge and how to expand them. And this exposure will boost the immunity.
> Why did we worry about lootboxes or attention manipulating algorithms
Because we should worry why people out of their free will make stupid decissions.
Remember Farmville? It looked like a very dangerous stupid idea. Are we safe from it because we banned it or because we got bored with it? Because we learned to recognize the lie?
Before we ban loot boxes whole generation will learn how stupid they are, even without any concerted effort. Will the next generation know that? If the ban is successful then no. And they will be vulnerable to the nexy gambling scheme that comes along in their life.
Who will be better prepared to face gambling as an adult? Person who got bored with lootboxes? Or person who never seen them because they were perfectly protected?
> If I sent you up against professional Nazi denying content, and you knew jack about the Nazis - I guarantee you would think they had a point.
You are making my point for me. You will encounter nazi denying content in your life no matter how hard you ban it. Better be prepared to recognize fake points. Same goes for antivaxxers, flat eathers and such. Those things being exposed and ridiculed for what they are done way more to harm attractiveness of those stupid ideas than any ban we imposed or might impose.
> There are some ideas that are simply that toxic - handling them without training is a sure shot way to radicalize someone.
Someone, sure. But they don't immediately die or kill from internalizing toxic idea. There's a window to act, and there are ways to boost resistance to stupidity.
> First - I doubt that flies in America, where Fox news is one of the largest networks
Isn't that the core of the problem? That advertisers are allowed to slap their ads on such stupid content and boost it with their money and make avoiding it extremely hard?
Instead of banning specific ideas we should regulate advertising.
How much harm could be done if youtube slapped ads on everything corona-related as it trended because of pandemic? Instead they demonetised anything that even mentioned corona. It had sobering effect on youtube creators.
If there was a law that could demonetise Fox, how long would they last and how much impact would they have? How long would Alex Jones last if he was not allowed to lie while advertising his supplements?
To combat problem of stupid ideas you have to incentivise things that make use better at recognizing them and disincentive things that shove them in our faces at high power.
> Second - even if you did start classes for kids and teens - it still leaves your adults vulnerable.
Yes. Adults are harder. Maybe antivaxxers and nazis should be something that only kids and qualified adults are allowed to talk about on adveritser financed content. ;-)
I don't know exact solutions but we won't figure them out if toxic ideas are made legally taboo. Same way that banning specific drugs left us very slow to understand and deal with addiction and completely opened for opioid abuse epidemic.
> I don't even know if it is possible to de-radicalize the already radicalized. If you don't stop the radicalization, you will simply have more of such people.
It is possible. I'm in the process of de-radicilizing my mom from antivaxxers propaganda and I'm doing in by educating myself on what are they saying and why exactly it's stupid (specifically and as an example of wider misinformation patterns) and relating it to her in ways she can understand. It's work, but it gives results.
Why do I have to do it? Because she was nearly 60 when she first found this level of advertiser supported promotion of something this dangerously stupid. And she lived through state mandated communist propaganda with way less personal and intelectual harm.
> So sure, get those classes going, but its only one part of the solution.
You can't get classes going if you make the subject forbidden knowledge. Just limit shoving propaganda in peoples faces till they properly learn to recognize it. Make possible to avoid it and make harder to encounter it without accompanying critique.
Best solutions imho appeared where Facebook couldn't ban Trump. They had to factcheck him and annotate his stupidity with truth.
Unfortunatle since they no longer fear him they swiftly shed the buden of educating people and reverted back to lazy solution of just banning him from the platform and happily promoting other dangerously stupid ideas (that are not under such strong public scrutiny as Trump). And people cheerfully allow them to avoid resposibility for the power of their platform just like that.
We are all acting as if ideas drivr this recent way of stupidity but what drives this is advertiser money.
Sorry mate, these are assertions - I too have held them.
I simply have tested them, at length.
Which is why I encourage you to go ahead and join the fight, go volunteer earnestly as a mod.
If you survive burnout, you will see the contours of the battlefield - our human neurological weaknesses, the resources strung out on either side, the fragility of the structures we need as a society.
I repeat - all of these are simply assertions, and as a forum of techies, we should be testing these ideas - people here created tech which allows us to do this like no generation before us.
In the spirit of science - go for it.
I’ve spent years studying this, even wrote a dissertation on the subject space. I’ve had these discussions many times, I’ve seen what happens when people decide I am wrong and set out to prove it.
I have always wished people who take that task on, the very best. If you reach a different conclusion, I will be the happiest person in the world.
Props to you for putting the work in and I don't deny your conclusions. Researching this must br very hard.
I just believe that there could be hope on epidemiological scale, even though we have to accept that many, many cases are irrecoverable.
I believe that average resilience of people to stupid ideas could be improved. And I believe so because social networks degraded it with very specific mechanisms (like mere exposure effect), not just by putting people in touch.
Freedom of speech is also freedom from compelled speech. This kind of law means the government can compel any private party to speak what they want and punish them for not doing so.
This is also demonstrably damaging to the effected party. It costs money to host content. Forcing a business to host content costs them - is poland going to fund this? No.
If the polish government has a problem with it then they should make their own government backed social media platform. Not violate people's rights.
Yes, exactly. It's a very restricted and strictly formatted form of compelled speech on specific products. Like other limitations on free speech, it exists because lawmakers have judged the benefits to be greater than the downsides of limiting manufacturers' free speech.
Now imagine a law that forces anyone with a website who ever had an unmoderated comment section to host and display those comments forever. That's the Polish law. Isn't that on a completely different level of compelled speech?
Consumer protection laws are written in blood. You can't leave arsenic out of your ingredients list any more than I can call myself a doctor and tell you to start eating roofing tar.
All warning or informational labels are forced speech.
But, it's worth remembering that people used to do things like add morphine to products without labeling it. Most countries limit free speech when it can harm others directly.
As all laws there are limits to its use. Nutritional labels are comprised of factual content to the product. The government can't force political or other government opinion onto it. Or at the least politically fueled labelling should not be allowed. For example forcing a company to host images on their cigarette packs. This should be unconstitutional.
General opinion especially political is protected, or at least is meant to be. People can make political products, but they have to be factual in their contents.
This isn't very related to the issue of social media - the posts are from other people including the government. You can't compel a company to host your opinions. You could compel them to list factual information about its content/origin though.
The freedom of individuals is more important than the freedom of corporations.
When the freedom of people to speak clashes with the freedom of corporations to not allow that speech, it's better to side with more speech (i.e. the side of the people).
There's a bizarre doublethink at work here, where people claim at the same time that social media companies should not be held responsible for speech on their platforms, hence section 230, but also that that speech is "their speech", hence forcing them to host speech is compelled speech. If it's their speech, they should be held responsible for it. If it's not, it's not compelled speech to force them to host it.
The entire rationale for section 230 was to allow online services to exercise editorial control over user-generated content — to not be a neutral host of all legal content — while also not holding them civilly liable as a publisher with certain narrow exceptions (but also leaving them criminally liable for anything that would carry criminal liability.)
So what you are suggesting is so e kind of doublethink blending support for 230 with something conflicting with 230 is, instead, exactly just support of 230.
But the choice to sell books (e.g., distributors) has, like the situation of online UGC service providers, always carried lesser liability than publication, but the choice to carry or not carry particular books is still a First Amendment activity. The idea that it's not your own free expression if it doesn't have exactly the set of legal liabilities traditionally associated with the publisher role is bizarre and indefensible.
> The entire rationale for section 230 was to allow online services to exercise editorial control over user-generated content — to not be a neutral host of all legal content — while also not holding them civilly liable as a publisher with certain narrow exceptions (but also leaving them criminally liable for anything that would carry criminal liability.)
I don't disagree with that and I don't see how it refutes my comment.
> But the choice to sell books (e.g., distributors) has, like the situation of online UGC service providers, always carried lesser liability than publication, but the choice to carry or not carry particular books is still a First Amendment activity.
Unlike online UGC service providers, bookstores can be forced to remove defamatory books[1] in the US. There's a reason there's a law specifically for UGC service providers, and you cannot defend this while at the same time demanding that they get treated like book stores when it comes to compelled speech.
> Unlike online UGC service providers, bookstores can be forced to remove defamatory books in the US. There's a reason there's a law specifically for UGC service providers, and you cannot defend this while at the same time demanding that they get treated like book stores when it comes to compelled speech.
Sure I can, since the plain text of the law in question only removes publisher (which are not notice-based), not the notice-based obligations and liability of a distributor. As the article you cite here argues, the extension of 230 beyond what it says on its face to also remove those distributor-style liabilities is a strained interpretation that some courts have adopted that lacks support in the text of the law and is explicitly at odds with it's legislative history and rationale.
So it's quite easy to support the law that exists for UGC service providers and demand they get treated like bookstores and other distributors as regards notice-based removal of defamatory content because that's exactly what application of the law as written does.
The debate over 230 is not, mainly, about this one area where some courts have applied it out of line with it's plain text.
Them not being legally responsible for other users content does not mean their speech isn't compelled when they want to remove content but cannot. You're telling a company they have to pay for someones speech on their own platform.
So they just don't have to operate in Poland if they don't like the laws. Block polish IPS, prohibit poles from using. If the removals are so important to them.
> It costs money to host content. Forcing a business to host content costs them
We force businesses to do a lot of things. The compliance costs here, for example, are a rounding error compared to GDPR compliance costs (especially around the ability to look up your own data), or right-to-be-forgotten compliance costs.
It's possible this is a bad law, but this is a sorta weak argument.
It would be compelled speech if I pretended my racist tweets are the official stance of Twitter. I don’t see how keeping them up is forcing Twitter to say something when they are just moving bytes around.
Oh that’s stupid. Companies will end up with some creative solutions - if it can not be removed it can be made hard to access. Honestly it looks like stupid people in power are sad that their antiLGBT posts are removed.
Companies will end up with some creative solutions - if it can not be removed it can be made hard to access.
Courts usually don't like to be jerked around like that. Sure, there are always loopholes, and it's difficult to tell whether authors will have the tenacity to keep patching the law but Ziobro's party (very surprisingly, I mean even their supporters barely believed this) managed to really clamp down on various VAT evasion schemes.
> Jones, however, told the Washington Examiner that she is not advocating for all children to be put on such medications.
> "I was not making an argument that all youth should be given puberty blockers. This was not an actual proposal, and it is not something I advocate or endorse," Jones said.
> "This was an argument that claims of trans youth’s unreadiness to give consent to puberty blockers, if followed consistently, lead to the conclusion that all youth are likewise not ready for the experience of puberty itself. Because that conclusion is absurd — again, this was not something that I advocated or endorsed — the argument that trans youth can’t consent to puberty blockers is faulty," Jones added.
With all due respect, in this situation you’re claiming that a fringe view in the US (which even the alleged proponent says was not an actual proposal) is the accepted norm, and that anyone who objects is called a transphobe. That’s not the case at all.
This looks good at the surface, but given the current Polish government I would not be so sure that it is created with good intentions in mind. Let's wait for how it is applied before deciding if this is a good or a bad thing.
This has good intentions. Many laypeople view social media posting as free speech and don’t want it to be moderated. Social media just needs to be different than it is today.
This is kind of insane.
So if I offer a free website- a private company operating as I like- I would be forbidden from removing content from my own website that I don't like because the person who wrote it- again, not a paying customer- wants it to be there. Not only does that person have free speech, but I have to foot the bill for them to promote their free speech.
> does not break Polish law
This is the real key piece. Poland's government can just ban saying anything that goes against their own viewpoints. Now their supporters can't have their comments removed, and their detractors will.