The law in question doesn’t change what happens to be illegal speech. Saying that “we shouldn’t shield Muslims from criticism” is not only illegal given German law but “blatently illegal” seems to be without basis . There are valid ways to critcize the law, but this isn’t it.
The problem with the law isn’t that it’s government censorship. The problem is that private social networks like facebook are encouraged to do more censorship than they are currently doing because they get some legal responsibility for the content they host.
Yes, a Facebook editor decided to delete a comment containing “we shouldn’t shield Muslims from criticism” but he wouldn’t have to do so. Given the volumne of comments that Facebook is moderating you could find plenty of bad moderating decisions before and after the law.
I don’t see a reason why you would get a better result if you pressure Facebook to do the reduce speech by nonlegal pressure on it. On the other hand, there’s a good chance that Facebook censorship through nonlegal pressure would be less transparent then with a law that forces Facebook to be public about it’s activities.
I think ozymandias’ point is that this law give incentives to social media companies like Facebook to err on the side of censorship by punishing non-censorship of things that should be censored and not punishing censorship of things that shouldn’t be censored.
The law in question doesn’t change what happens to be illegal speech. Saying that “we shouldn’t shield Muslims from criticism” is not only illegal given German law but “blatently illegal” seems to be without basis . There are valid ways to critcize the law, but this isn’t it.
The problem with the law isn’t that it’s government censorship. The problem is that private social networks like facebook are encouraged to do more censorship than they are currently doing because they get some legal responsibility for the content they host.
Yes, a Facebook editor decided to delete a comment containing “we shouldn’t shield Muslims from criticism” but he wouldn’t have to do so. Given the volumne of comments that Facebook is moderating you could find plenty of bad moderating decisions before and after the law.
I don’t see a reason why you would get a better result if you pressure Facebook to do the reduce speech by nonlegal pressure on it. On the other hand, there’s a good chance that Facebook censorship through nonlegal pressure would be less transparent then with a law that forces Facebook to be public about it’s activities.
I think ozymandias’ point is that this law give incentives to social media companies like Facebook to err on the side of censorship by punishing non-censorship of things that should be censored and not punishing censorship of things that shouldn’t be censored.