Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)

Re:Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Fre... by froh on Thursday January 28, 2021 @02:16PM (#25947393)

Maybe it also stems from the global diversity of the employees in said companies.

To the European eye the idea of allowing any and all public utterance feels like a free ticket to disaster.

Deliberate and carefully crafted representation of "reality", and indirect communication via various "trusted channels" is part of winning elections anywhere.

The carefully and orchestrated use of mass media in the 1920s and 1930s, skillfully crafted to lead the electorate to certain political choices, was later used to even accept certain political atrocities (internment camps in the beginning, war and industrial mass murder later).

So to protect the electorate (!) from being grossly misled, many European countries in the aftermath of the 1940s decided to counterbalance the freedom of speech with rules what is not freedom of speech.

And yes, the details are tricky and courts have to decide.

Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable limits to free speech?

Here is a fairly straightforward example from the German penal code:

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__130.html

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Re:Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Fre... by pdonis on Thursday January 28, 2021 @03:47PM (#25948953)

> The carefully and orchestrated use of mass media in the 1920s and 1930s, skillfully crafted to lead the electorate to certain political choices, was later used to even accept certain political atrocities (internment camps in the beginning, war and industrial mass murder later).

This is true. However, the part nobody wants to talk about is that it didn't just happen in Germany.

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Re:Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Fre... by ameister14 on Thursday January 28, 2021 @02:56PM (#25948095)

>So to protect the electorate (!) from being grossly misled, many European countries in the aftermath of the 1940s decided to counterbalance the freedom of speech with rules what is not freedom of speech.

That's a very generous way of looking at it. In the West, I would say that it would be more accurate to look at it through the lens of the cold war, though. Communism and radicalism were to be prevented and so freedom of speech was necessarily curtailed. In the East, it was likewise curtailed, ostensibly to 'protect the youth' and 'prevent disinformation' but with more potential for immediate consequences.

>Is that ever in the public debate in the USA? Reasonable limits to free speech?

Sure. It's been debated a lot, actually. Laws have changed significantly over the last hundred years, almost entirely to the expansion of free speech side.

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Re:Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Fre... by retrac on Thursday January 28, 2021 @03:59PM (#25949108)

Here in Canada, we have laws which don't originate from cold war paranoia. They're just attempts to cool the heatedness of elections. For example, you can't campaign before the official election season begins, and there are limits on how much you can spend, and how much people can donate, there are limits on polling close to the election, it's illegal to reveal early results in the eastern parts of the country (where polls close earlier) to the western parts until all polls are closed, and so on.

Many Western democracies have laws like this, which would be incompatible with the American First Amendment, but which are basically intended to foster democratic health, and aren't particularly authoritarian.

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Re:Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Fre... by ameister14 on Thursday January 28, 2021 @04:20PM (#25949400)

There are limits on campaigns like that in the US as well. That's the problem with the Citizens United ruling - it broke some of that for us.

The rules he was talking about though are more to do with the limitations on speech that can be considered insulting, transgressive or hateful. They also include constitutionality of political parties in general, disparaging the president, and many other things.

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