EU's top court sees no problem with telling Facebook to take content down globally The European Court of Justice (CJEU) on Thursday ruled that Facebook update its filters and allow member states to remove content that's been deemed illegal, not only for Facebook users in the plaintiff's country but everywhere. The decision follows a complaint by Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, the leader of Austria's Green Party, …
Social Media Mogul. — we operate in lots of countries with lots of different laws, so, we do not need to comply with any of them.
Big Wigged Judge — you operate in lots of countries with lots of different laws, so you should obey all of them,
The first option (the current situation) allows a Tsunami of hate, libel, misinformation and fraud. To propagate.
The second option would suppress legitimate content because North Korea, Russia or Saudi Arabia objected.
I think the critical part is if it complies with international law.
If it just contravenes local law, the scope can only be in the country of origin, or in the case of the EU, possibly the whole EU. If the local law has an international equivalent, it then applies worldwide.
Or option 3, which incidentally is what both the EU and the USA does with other areas of law.
Social Media Mogul. — we operate in lots of countries with lots of different laws, so, we do not need to comply with any of them.
Big Wigged Judge — you operate a local office in our jurisdiction, so you follow our rulings worldwide or your local office gets the penalties until it a) goes bust or b) pulls out. In either case any executives visiting our jurisdiction will be held accountable upon arrival at the border so either a) your executive is incarcerated until you comply or b) you never visit, including holidays, or transiting.
Essentially your option is to comply, or abandon the market and never enter the area personally again.
"Essentially your option is to comply, or abandon the market and never enter the area personally again."
You left out at least two more options:
- quietly comply with requests and hope the actions do not become public and pretend it never existed.
- fight the actions with as much publicity as possible hoping the media attention will make the legal system/law enforcement alter their course of action
I'm not suggesting they are good options...
So I guess those EU judges would be fine with China forcing Facebook to remove anything relating to Tianamen Square or Hong Kong's riots, Russia removing anything anti-Putin, and never mind the Sharia law level of censorship some Muslim countries may want.
I'd say Facebook would only have cat pictures left, but there are countries who might not want people seeing cats as "cute" lest it hurt the business of street vendors who sell them as food.
The people who get harassed, stalked, attacked and or lynched, who suffer real consequences because people who DO participate read the false rumours and lies spread about them would certainly care. That is the point. You don't need to participate to suffer the consequences of anti-social media!
Did you say the same when Apple/Microsoft stood against the US requests for access to information held outside the US?
There's a reason that sensible legal systems confine themselves to what they can control rather than pretending they have powers that they do not. Showing that you are powerless tends to be exploited...
If they were so stupid to store them on YouTube, they deserved it. If you need an archive for whatever purpose, build you own, or find one apt for the purpose. Don't store them on a general ad-slinger site with videos as decoys.
Anyway the real issue is here. Facebook & C. are designed to keep people on their site to sling ads to them. For this reason they are stinking, rotten cheeses with a lot of black holes. Their very business model is rotten, and there's no way to fix it.
Big tech argues they have too much content to moderate, but they have no problems sharing it and monetizing it. Another classic example of private profits, socialized losses.
This is not a sustainable, long term model; barriers to distributed content publishing will come down, just as they are for messaging. Gaming platforms like Discord will go mainstream and shared media outside of YT will get richer. They're already sharing dash-cam videos on Twitch.
Maintaining an archive of 100,000 videos is not cheap but is viable.
Making those available in an easily accessible form as a body of evidence for analysis, review and publicising a serious issue takes substantially greater resources. Using a site such as Youtube that already has the necessary infrastructure and mechanisms in place doesn't sound unreasonable.
If you have a copy you can publish them elsewhere - and give direct access to people needing to study it - but do you really need YouTube fire hose to publish such material? Or maybe was a way to monetize other people's suffering?
If you feed the Moloch, and the Moloch devours you, don't complain.
There is a US law I believe that makes it illegal to force someone to commit a criminal act in another country.
Ultimately it comes down to a matter of extradition, which unfortunately is political and changes all the time, usually in the favour of the more powerful state. The only answer is to not put yourself in the position of breaking laws, because it's a gamble if long term, you get away with it.
As this ruling requires that there is an international law to apply. Right to be forgotten is an EU only law and not part of general worldwide agreed treaties. Therefore it applies locally. This judgement states that if there is a relevant international law found to be breached then the locally applied for an won court ruling should be enforce globally.
The "Right To Be Forgotten" is not about unlawful material. It's about not being punished your whole life for something no longer relevant happened in the past - and for which lawful sources exists.
It asks just to make some material less easy to find and not prominently displayed - not to delete the sources.
This is about unlawful material - which should be "destroyed" and no longer available.
For example, the news that someone was arrested while walking drunk and naked around Trafalgar Square could be requested to be de-linked after many years. Still the news were a lawful report.
But if the same person was photographed naked in his or her home without consent, the photos should be destroyed - it was an illegal act and there's no lawful right to keep them.
is platforms doing things on the cheap - as the failed filters shows. Automation still can't cut it, so the reality is you need to employ people to do the job properly.
After all, it's not like Google, Facebook et al can't afford to.
Incidentally, if you can't tackle what should be a pretty basic job for a human with "AI", maybe you're not ready to run the world with it quite yet ?
(Adds "content filtering" to list of tests for AI before I - or my boss - spends a penny on it).
[quote]Automation still can't cut it, so the reality is you need to employ people to do the job properly.[/quote]
The problem is the size, they have over a 1 Billion users. Lets say If each one posted on average one item per day and it took 10 seconds on average to deal with employing staff working 8 hours a day you would need about 347222 people to do the job. It could be said to be impossible maybe until they can prove they can police the mess they should be banned :O
With respect, the problem is NOT the size, revenue grows with it.
The problem is their profit margin which dictates a race to the bottom in support and monitoring until the point where it is cheaper to pay the fines or lobby your way out of trouble than to do things right. That's why the fines are IMHO *WAY* too small - the cost of fines should exceed the cost of doing the job as it should be done.
While I'm at it, whoever came up with the idea that customers helping themselves in forums is an excuse to stop offering support altogether or only via a maze of options so complex that people give up deserves to be locked up in the same cell as Trump when they finally nail him, with 27 level voice menu system that frequently hangs up halfway through they will have to use every time they want food.
[quote]The decision follows a complaint by Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, the leader of Austria's Green Party, over a post she claimed was defamatory that was made to her Facebook account.[/quote]
If the item in question was posted to her Facebook page why could she just not delete it, surely you should have control over what posts appear on your page.
I received a flashed up "you have posted inappropriate content" message of some extremely slow and inadequate Facebook filter on Saturday - an old black an white photo of some Nazi Salutes with 'hands up if you read the daily mail' in lolcats style text. Whilst I admit it's in poor taste it was kinda funny. I assume the the filter was on Nazi's and It can't read or understand irony. Doesn't bode well for 'automatic filtering'. Or criticism of the Daily Mail...
Hands up if you read facebook?
I'm more curious as to how any company will block "equivalent" posts. If I say politician X is a fat head and the equivalent has to be blocked how would posts like:
the politician has a big head
the politician has a large gourd
the politician has a gigantic melon
be handled? What filter could determine this accurately? How big of a staff would be required if it isn't automated? This seems unworkable.....
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