Wow, someone has not been keeping up with the news coming out of the UK. Lots and lots of people been arrested and charged for saying, not actually hate speech, just "mean things" on Twitter. Usually it's just obvious jokes, perhaps of bad taste, that someone decided to take literally and then claim they felt "harassed and intimidated" (the magic phrase which causes the police to investigate).
If you want more, check out count dankula's (mark meechan) second YouTube channel, he covers pretty much all these high profile "offensive tweet" cases. Most of them are ridiculous.
The UK seems to have gone off the deep end here. I hope that this kind of behavior by law enforcement is not something that the public will find acceptable, and that it will be rejected and ridiculed as it should be.
Some of this stuff makes me uncomfortable about where to draw the line here. I, frankly, don't know. What makes me even more uncomfortable is not that the USA draws the line differently (better? worse? Just right? I don't know) but that so many USA'ians are so utterly cocksure that their way is right and everywhere else must be wrong if they do it differently (Edit: extensively in online posts such as here; in american's I've known I've very rarely found it). There seems no possibility in that mindset for any self-reflection or questioning, and that's dangerous.
I find myself absolutely perplexed that there is available policing capacity for this, but not for solving things like scooter phone thief gangs and stolen motorcycles.
“Hate Speech” is going to become a catchall for authoritarian regimes, just as “terrorism” did post 9/11. It’s instructive to examine how the USA’s use of terrorism to pursue, first the perpetrators of 9/11, and then whoever we felt like, gave permission for the world to do the same. Note how Putin describes Ukraine as filled with terrorists.
"Terrorism" was the justification to allow US forces to torture detainees. It's not just the people they go after, it's the structural changes they justify.
I hate to interrupt your regularly scheduled dose of anti-Americanism, but "Hate Speech" was being punished across Europe long before the "War on Terror" began in the United States. Europeans did not, and do not, need prompting from the United States to act like fascists. All tyrants invariably seize upon whatever pretext is available to them to engage in plausibly-deniable acts of tyranny.
there's a subtle difference between saying what you want and publishing what you want on a global platform that potentially can show it to billions of people.
Say it in a bar with your friends if you wanna make a stance or a joke, avoid global social networks.
Maybe UK is simply showing its true face, but exposing in public your ingenuity has never ended well.
There's a reason why McDonalds writes "Caution: Contents Hot" on their hot beverages.
Long story short: if you know sth can happen, you should try to prevent it, or you'll be considered part of the problem, even if only partially, the consequences could be bad.
EDIT: as explained here[1], the true story is a story of underestimating the risks.
Free speech on social private networks is not the same thing as free speech in person and it's absolutely not risk free.
People know that, but keep thinking "it won't happen to me" despite the fact TOS say very clearly what can and cannot be said and that a big "report" button is there for anyone to use.
nobody has ever been arrested for saying horrible things at the pub with their friends.
Nobody would have ever said the same things on national TV.
But suddenly we started thinking social networks are like the pub while they are more ubiquitous than the TV.
McDonalds caused a woman severe skin burns by providing dangerously hot coffee to try to keep customers from immediately drinking it and getting refills.
Articles like this make me want to kiss a copy of the US constitution every night before bed.
These raids are now happening in places like the UK and Canada too, places with a history of protecting speech.
It seems unless your legal system has enshrined free speech as unassailable at the highest levels of law, you will slowly have those rights removed one step on a slippery slope at a time.
I don't know about Canada, but I've never considered the UK to have "a history of protecting speech", or indeed a culture that particularly values free speech. They seem very keen on censorship and surveillance.
The elected governments of the UK or Canada could choose to pass laws to make anything legal or illegal, but they don't.
That suggests to me that the people and their representatives want these laws to be in place.
Just like the people and their representatives in the USA don't want to change the constitution to remove the first amendment.
The constitution in the US protects so much only because its government is otherwise dysfunctional - nobody ever has a majority large enough to change things. This doesn't happen in other countries - the current UK government has had a sizeable majority since 2019.
Civil rights should never be left up to the whims of the public. That’s what the US constitution gets right.
As for all the Europeans that like to call the world’s oldest democracy dysfunctional - the fact that it’s hard to do things nationally without widespread support is a feature, not a bug.
Your copy of the Constitution is worth what five people meeting in DC say it is worth.
It sounds like you and they agree on a lot of stuff. Great. There are a lot of other people who find that rights they believed were guaranteed are in fact not. And I would not be so sure you will continue to agree with those five people indefinitely.
I get where you're coming from but free speech is pretty much sacrosanct to Americans of all parties and way beyond the reach of 5 judges to "reinterpret" and infringe on, both sides depend on free speech. Think about the courage(and restraint) it takes for an African American police officer to defend a clan rally: https://time.com/3963726/south-carolina-kkk-rally-black-cop/
"After sharing images circulating on Facebook that carried a fake statement, the perpetrators had devices confiscated and some were fined."
I don't even know what I would do if the government "confiscated" my devices. First, probably freak the fuck out. Then, try desperately to log out of every service I was logged in to? Hope they aren't interested in my nudes? Go crawling to HR and explain that our entire codebase, and probably a couple sensitive keys, are now at some police department until, who knows when? And then go buy a new $1000 phone and $3000 laptop.
"Confiscating devices" sounds like such an ordinary, routine thing, but it is so incredibly, profoundly invasive and would upend my life as much as being throw in jail for a week, only it would cost me a lot more. The bar should be ridiculously high for that kind of government intrusion.
They're still taking all your 2FA devices away. Getting back into your Gmail account when you don't have any devices signed in, you've lost your TOTP, and the cops have your SIM card is a pain. If you've got anything that's only stored locally, well, sucks to be you.
I'm currently of the belief that this doesn't stop them, or they wouldn't so happily image your devices and send you on your way at US borders.
Considering we didn't know governments were using and abusing Cellebrite until recently, and didn't know about the 0-days they hoard until recently, I'm going to assume they can decrypt phones/disks until proven otherwise. The government has a _lot_ of resources.
Laws probably need to be updated on this front... a computer nowadays could fulfill some combination of the roles of diary/journal, store of personal records, de-facto proof-of-identity for many services, not to mention main work tool.
> "Confiscating devices" sounds like such an ordinary, routine thing, but it is so incredibly, profoundly invasive and would upend my life as much as being throw in jail for a week, only it would cost me a lot more. The bar should be ridiculously high for that kind of government intrusion.
In Germany it is quite normal nowadays. The legislation for protecting your own home has been weakened over the course of a decade to a point where you have to expect it if you share anything online that is not 100% clean, especially if it goes against current administration.
In the article it sounds like they argue that this is to prevent another Nazi Germany, but it sounds a lot more like fashism what they try to achieve here. You can happily spread misinformation and hate about politicians of non-established parties. You might get sued under civil law, but your home is certainly not invaded, you get arrest and your stuff confiscated.
Another case that exemplifies this is "Pimmelgate" where a Twitter user said to a Andy Grote (senator of Hamburg at that time iirc) "you are such a dick/cunt"* (Du bist so 1 Pimmel) and found himself in the same situation as the guy in this article.
Hate speech legislation is especially stringently interpreted when it comes to higher officials.
*: I'd say the harshness of the insult is in between those words. It's slightly more than nothing.
Speech like credible threats to life, plotting violent assaults, and so on, should invite investigation. But this sort of thing? No. Where's the harm? Or even the potential harm?
The other thing is, do we really want a sacred caste of people who can't be criticized? This gets uncomfortably close to the incredibly oppressive lèse-majesté laws that some jurisdictions have.
> The other thing is, do we really want a sacred caste of people who can't be criticized? This gets uncomfortably close to the incredibly oppressive lèse-majesté laws that some jurisdictions have.
That's effectively what a supreme court justice said should be the case last week.
"“All of our opinions are open to criticism,” Roberts said in remarks to judges and lawyers. “In fact, our members do a great job of criticizing some opinions from time to time. But simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for criticizing the legitimacy of the court.”"
Were you thinking of a different quote from your source? This quote, which seemed closest to your intent, does not at all say what you were suggesting.
I don't think that's what it being said there. Conservatives on the Supreme Court are being whiny babies about the criticism that their obviously biased rulings are getting (and if we ever get an unbiased court, these rulings will all be thrown out ASAP), but none are actually suggesting that that criticism should be illegal as far as I've seen.
For example, imagine that online discourse on some fringe website that has a few hundred thousand members devolves into a theory that some house in your neighborhood is harboring a secret dungeon full of children underneath it. There is no direct threat to you per se, but a few hundred thousand people think that a house - maybe your house - has a basement full of unspeakable horrors. As the rumor spreads and grows the chances of your house being broken into by one of the believers goes up exponentially. Suddenly nobody in your neighborhood is safe anymore as random weirdos keep scoping out your houses and following you to and from the grocery to see if you're the one with the dungeon beneath your house. Eventually one of these weirdos pulls a gun on your neighbor and demands to see his basement and while there was no dungeon the firearm accidentally went off and killed your neighbor. Your neighbor's death would trace directly back to the spread of this rumor.
Is there a more intellectually dishonest idea? That someone somewhere could misconstrue your words as a call to violence by virtue of the large number of people in the world? And what better way to enforce censorship than to selectively enforce this idea on the topics most important to the party in power?
As another comment suggested, the sticking part of the whole topic is the blatantly unequal treatment and enforcement around these types of rules.
It’s appalling that one can justify these rules as needed because of the harmfulness of the content while simultaneously allowing their chosen target to be fair game.
You'll get your door kicked in if you call a state's secretary of state "a dick" on Twitter. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's not so much about keeping the internet civil so everyone can partake in the debate.
It also seems that they're quick to act (and with surprising force) if politicians or the police are the targets of "hate speech", while it's generally ignored if it's your average citizen.
>The authorities in Germany argue that they are encouraging and defending free speech by providing a space where people can share opinions without fear of being attacked or abused.
What they are claiming to be preventing is exactly what they are doing. Is there a general rhetorical term for statements like this?
Readit News
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10668005/Man-avoids...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43864133
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/john-scriven-pla...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11066477/Veteran-ar... - literally arrested for a tweet that "caused anxiety".
If you want more, check out count dankula's (mark meechan) second YouTube channel, he covers pretty much all these high profile "offensive tweet" cases. Most of them are ridiculous.
Some of this stuff makes me uncomfortable about where to draw the line here. I, frankly, don't know. What makes me even more uncomfortable is not that the USA draws the line differently (better? worse? Just right? I don't know) but that so many USA'ians are so utterly cocksure that their way is right and everywhere else must be wrong if they do it differently (Edit: extensively in online posts such as here; in american's I've known I've very rarely found it). There seems no possibility in that mindset for any self-reflection or questioning, and that's dangerous.
Just my tuppence ha'penny.
That’s a crystal clear threat of violence.
https://preview.redd.it/mmksakh888t21.jpg?auto=webp&s=f4dc90...
Say it in a bar with your friends if you wanna make a stance or a joke, avoid global social networks.
Maybe UK is simply showing its true face, but exposing in public your ingenuity has never ended well.
There's a reason why McDonalds writes "Caution: Contents Hot" on their hot beverages.
Long story short: if you know sth can happen, you should try to prevent it, or you'll be considered part of the problem, even if only partially, the consequences could be bad.
EDIT: as explained here[1], the true story is a story of underestimating the risks.
Free speech on social private networks is not the same thing as free speech in person and it's absolutely not risk free.
People know that, but keep thinking "it won't happen to me" despite the fact TOS say very clearly what can and cannot be said and that a big "report" button is there for anyone to use.
nobody has ever been arrested for saying horrible things at the pub with their friends. Nobody would have ever said the same things on national TV. But suddenly we started thinking social networks are like the pub while they are more ubiquitous than the TV.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33145066
These raids are now happening in places like the UK and Canada too, places with a history of protecting speech.
It seems unless your legal system has enshrined free speech as unassailable at the highest levels of law, you will slowly have those rights removed one step on a slippery slope at a time.
I don't know about Canada, but I've never considered the UK to have "a history of protecting speech", or indeed a culture that particularly values free speech. They seem very keen on censorship and surveillance.
That suggests to me that the people and their representatives want these laws to be in place.
Just like the people and their representatives in the USA don't want to change the constitution to remove the first amendment.
The constitution in the US protects so much only because its government is otherwise dysfunctional - nobody ever has a majority large enough to change things. This doesn't happen in other countries - the current UK government has had a sizeable majority since 2019.
As for all the Europeans that like to call the world’s oldest democracy dysfunctional - the fact that it’s hard to do things nationally without widespread support is a feature, not a bug.
Citation needed.
Dead Comment
It sounds like you and they agree on a lot of stuff. Great. There are a lot of other people who find that rights they believed were guaranteed are in fact not. And I would not be so sure you will continue to agree with those five people indefinitely.
I don't even know what I would do if the government "confiscated" my devices. First, probably freak the fuck out. Then, try desperately to log out of every service I was logged in to? Hope they aren't interested in my nudes? Go crawling to HR and explain that our entire codebase, and probably a couple sensitive keys, are now at some police department until, who knows when? And then go buy a new $1000 phone and $3000 laptop.
"Confiscating devices" sounds like such an ordinary, routine thing, but it is so incredibly, profoundly invasive and would upend my life as much as being throw in jail for a week, only it would cost me a lot more. The bar should be ridiculously high for that kind of government intrusion.
You do something (full disk encryption) before the government confiscates your devices.
Considering we didn't know governments were using and abusing Cellebrite until recently, and didn't know about the 0-days they hoard until recently, I'm going to assume they can decrypt phones/disks until proven otherwise. The government has a _lot_ of resources.
In Germany it is quite normal nowadays. The legislation for protecting your own home has been weakened over the course of a decade to a point where you have to expect it if you share anything online that is not 100% clean, especially if it goes against current administration.
In the article it sounds like they argue that this is to prevent another Nazi Germany, but it sounds a lot more like fashism what they try to achieve here. You can happily spread misinformation and hate about politicians of non-established parties. You might get sued under civil law, but your home is certainly not invaded, you get arrest and your stuff confiscated.
Another case that exemplifies this is "Pimmelgate" where a Twitter user said to a Andy Grote (senator of Hamburg at that time iirc) "you are such a dick/cunt"* (Du bist so 1 Pimmel) and found himself in the same situation as the guy in this article.
Hate speech legislation is especially stringently interpreted when it comes to higher officials.
*: I'd say the harshness of the insult is in between those words. It's slightly more than nothing.
The other thing is, do we really want a sacred caste of people who can't be criticized? This gets uncomfortably close to the incredibly oppressive lèse-majesté laws that some jurisdictions have.
That's effectively what a supreme court justice said should be the case last week.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/29/supreme-c...
Were you thinking of a different quote from your source? This quote, which seemed closest to your intent, does not at all say what you were suggesting.
Since 1948, all people are due the basic human right of dignity. Sacred caste or not.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Hum...
The harm is in stochastic terrorism. You can make up lies that are intended to spur people who feel they have nothing to lose into action.
https://csl.mpg.de/en/projects/philosophical-and-public-secu...).
It's similar to the concept of blood libel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel
For example, imagine that online discourse on some fringe website that has a few hundred thousand members devolves into a theory that some house in your neighborhood is harboring a secret dungeon full of children underneath it. There is no direct threat to you per se, but a few hundred thousand people think that a house - maybe your house - has a basement full of unspeakable horrors. As the rumor spreads and grows the chances of your house being broken into by one of the believers goes up exponentially. Suddenly nobody in your neighborhood is safe anymore as random weirdos keep scoping out your houses and following you to and from the grocery to see if you're the one with the dungeon beneath your house. Eventually one of these weirdos pulls a gun on your neighbor and demands to see his basement and while there was no dungeon the firearm accidentally went off and killed your neighbor. Your neighbor's death would trace directly back to the spread of this rumor.
Is it possible to accurately define this in law and policy, such that actions against it can be fairly enforced?
Is there a more intellectually dishonest idea? That someone somewhere could misconstrue your words as a call to violence by virtue of the large number of people in the world? And what better way to enforce censorship than to selectively enforce this idea on the topics most important to the party in power?
It’s appalling that one can justify these rules as needed because of the harmfulness of the content while simultaneously allowing their chosen target to be fair game.
It also seems that they're quick to act (and with surprising force) if politicians or the police are the targets of "hate speech", while it's generally ignored if it's your average citizen.
What they are claiming to be preventing is exactly what they are doing. Is there a general rhetorical term for statements like this?