> would you like to live in a world where someone could baselessly and maliciously accuse you of rape or other defaming acts without consequence
Yes, if the alternative is that I can be held criminally liable for hosting a web forum that doesn't require some form of government enforced ID system. How could it be any other way (genuine question)?
The alternative is how things currently work. Meta is not being held criminally liable here, and people are allowed to use the platform anonymously so long as they do not engage in criminal behavior.
Thats a false dichotomy. Many kinds of freedom actually result in less freedom. A society where you are free to sell youself into slavery is less free. A society where 10 year olds are free to work in the coal mines is less free. A society where you are free to ignore legitinate court orders is less free because people will turn to vigilante justice instead.
i find the fear vs freedom dichotomy to be a legitimate set of choices. you didn’t argue against fear, you argued against individual freedom vs societal freedom. which is not what the gp was going on about.
For example many countries have mandated seatbelt laws. In this case the freedom to not wear a seatbelt is exchanged for health and safety. Someone could claim this is done out of fear, and that's not completely untrue. And as you allude, fear can be totally rational and backed by data, thus fear vs. freedom is not an unreasonable exchange.
Apple is trying to keep your identity secret on your device so that they cant verify anyone only devices.
I'll use the exact same kind of argument to make the opposite point:
Facebook answering a legal subpoena isn't illegal.
> To be anonymous don’t reveal your identity to anyone on line.
They are not anonymous from Facebook perspective.
Exactly I'm not sure of your point. If an organization gets a subpoena they turn over what they know. If they don't know they can't hand it over.
I don't think you are making the opposite point but I will try to be open minded. From my perspective we agree.
Are we punishing those who wish to remain anonymous but do not have the technical ability to do so. Is there a right to anonymous in the EU?
If anonymity isn't allowed why can't advertisers track you in the EU without your consent.
What privacy are you in favor of? Identities should be private when in public? Until someone requests it and then it goes into the public record?
It is completely unrelated to a private citizen interacting with a private business in the eyes of American law, American business and Americans ourselves. The only free speech issue here from our perspective is "Is the government illegally restricting Meta's corporate right to free speech?" And no, making Meta identify a user is not a violation of their 1A free speech rights to us.
If you're speaking of a totally different European legal concept, it might be helpful for you to identify that.
In America, proving libel is extremely difficult and requires you to demonstrate real damages.
So in this case if it were American, unless the aggrieved party can demonstrate monetary damages, under American law there is no libel as we do not consider "hurt feelings" or "damaged reputation" to be libel. So in America we would demand that the offended party demonstrate that they have been financially harmed before we unmask the anonymous individual to fully investigate and adjudicate the claim.
If you're discussing libel under a EU or European nations context, it could be helpful to identify which version of libel law you are referencing, because this case from an American's perspective is no where near our extremely high bar. (And, as a side note, under American law all international libel convictions are automatically unenforceable here, to prevent tourism to areas who do not require sufficiently high bar)
2. I am not complaining at all.
3. In fact, I am replying to someone complaining that folks "don't know what <$GENERAL LEGAL TERM WITH REGIONAL DIFFERENCES> means" and I'm explaining: you're on an American website whose readership is majority American, talking about an American business, and you have the audacity to claim "people don't know this <HIGHLY LOCAL LEGAL TERM>?". And so I'm explaining WHY Americans would be confused by the seemingly low-bar for libel or confusion around free speech.
This case may be European courts and entities (and I asked for location specifics as the concepts can often vary country by country in Europe), but this website is not a European website and it's absolutely normal than Americans are here discussing this.
As far as I know, there are more Americans here than visitors from any other country, but the majority of people is still not American: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35568123
I feel like American readers are sometimes guilty of assuming everyone else is also American and understands their references, but the world is a bigger place than that.
Based on my poor understanding of US law, I think you are mistaken. Defamation per se recognizes that certain statements are so damaging to one's reputation that proving damages is not required. From [1],
> In an Alaska Supreme Court case, a woman accused a man of assault, battery, and false imprisonment, and he brought a claim against her for defamation. The court explained that because the statements imputed a serious crime, the man was not required to prove the damage to his reputation and emotional distress.
The case discussed in the article includes accusations that the plaintiff films women without their consent, allegedly in a sexual context (although that's redacted so I could be wrong). That could totally fall under category 1 of Defamation Per Se.
[1] https://www.findlaw.com/injury/torts-and-personal-injuries/w...
The era where you could fax ASCII art of a gun to someone without the Feds following up is gone. It was perpetrated not on any kind of justice theory of the power of the anonymous actor, but on a power inequality: governments hadn't caught up with what the technology enabled, so individuals using new technology could out-maneuver enforcement.
That is no longer true for most Internet users. The tools are in place for mass-surveillance and mass-enforcement. Governments can take down a website, governments can black-hole a DNS entry, governments can honeypot someone into trying to trade Bitcoin for criminal activity, governments can jail citizens indefinitely until they cough up passwords, and governments can require a corporation divulge privately-held information on penalty of loss of corporate privileges (including ability to exist).
The "golden era" of the Internet was a latency hiccup, not a new world order.
Anonymity is protected in special situations such as elections, communications, whistleblowing etc.
Do you have a source on that? I can think of FAR more parts of society that don't require identification than parts that do. It feels impossible that "almost all parts of society require identification" in a world of infinite possibilities.
I put some pants on 10 minutes ago without identifying myself. Then I left my house without telling anyone. Then I walked down the street and never had to identify myself. The mall I visited didn't require ID. Finally, the McDonalds I went to accepted cash and I didn't have to prove who I am.
Which one of these activities do you think I'm lying about and required ID?
Sometimes a right must necessarily exist for another right to function. Anonymity must exist to allow freedom of political speech, which is the most important kind of free speech. I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone ever argue that people have a right to be anonymous all the time, but only in context of other rights, and often this is quite narrow. Some examples: political press, political speech, voting (that I voted in the Us is public, my ballot is anonymous).
A better comparison would be the Twitter user that was tweeting Elon Musk's jet flights. This was before twitter was purchased, and Elon Musk was not able to get the court to order Twitter to hand over that information.
In Europe, police usually have a right to request information from companies and people. This is codifed into law, there's not necessarily any legal procedure for how it needs to happen.
There are some standards on how inter-country information is requested.
Agreed, except that Ireland en England are part of Europe.
Also (and I'm not sure on this part) in The Netherlands we have WvSr aka Sr (Wetboek van Stafrecht, criminal law) and there's privaatrecht (aka burgerlijk recht, civiel recht). Subpoenas would be vordering(srecht). Government issue these as well, but it seems to fall under civil law.
Yes, there is a civil/criminal divide, this is not so much related to being civil/common law
(and just because this is HN, see the graph at the bottom of the page for a French example - though they call it civil and penal jurisdiction https://cours.unjf.fr/repository/coursefilearea/file.php/105... )
There absolutely is in many European countries. The divide is just along different lines than in US.
https://www-librededroit-fr.translate.goog/quelle-est-la-dif...
The Twitter user is pseudonymous at best, and was posting objectively true data, publicly available, regarding a notable, public person in these United States.
The FB user in TFA was anonymized by group membership, and posting allegedly defamatory and untrue information about a private person.
The first order effects seem pretty benign, even salutary - but I’m not sure the court really thought through all the implications here.
Is the Dutch legal system inviting themselves to become a party to every single he said/she said drama on Facebook?
What will Facebook need to do to extricate themselves from such an odious entanglement?
Normally, you wouldn't need Facebook to disclose any names because Facebook isn't anonymous 99% of the time. There are plenty of anonymous and pseudonymous forums that would be at risk and yes they too have to follow warrants should the court decide against them.
If Facebook wants to stay out of such cases, they should either leave the jurisdictions where such warrants are possible (so planet earth, probably) or they should enforce non-anonymous posts so plaintiffs can sue each other without involving a court warrant first.
How do you propose they leave?
Why is the responsibility on Meta to make sure users in a jurisdiction don’t sign up for their service? Surely some of this responsibility could fall on the user.
But they can't play it both ways.
They have an office in Amsterdamm, they control a large part of the ad market in the Netherlands, and probably host there or nearby on EU soil.
They can't seriously expect to not be subject to dutch law.
That's not what's happening here. Facebook has a Dutch subdivision (Facebook Netherlands B.v.) and an office in Amsterdam. They're absolutely subject to Dutch law. They could leave, but the EU means that they'd be subject to this kind of order from a Dutch court unless they left the EU entirely, which would make it harder for EU companies to pay them for advertising, hurting their profits.
I agree that they are subject to the laws of the countries they operate in. I do not agree that a company should own all of the responsibility in making sure no Dutch citizens access their services. The idea that the internet would be different depending on where I access seems anti-internet.
When your business model relies on user data to generate profits, you have to collect it and that makes it discoverable.
That's GDPR for you, though.
I know the UK and USA definitely do these prosecutions regularly, even though both countries would throw a hissy fit if Iran started prosecuting every tourist who visits and was known to not wear a headcovering outside Iran.
I'm pretty sure the Dutch subsidiary exists just to avoid taxes, the Irish branch is the main company most EU citizens interact with.
If you're the person having their reputation smeared by anonymous cowards it maybe doesn't seem so "petty" as you dismiss.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do; have the person slandering somebody anonymously brought into the light where there is a level playing field in which they can present their case.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ugly-battle-over-shtty-media-m...
Some cases were probably well desreved, but anonymity allows easy score settling and revenge.
There's no recourse against an anonymous accusation, there's no way to defend yourself, and there's no way to prove you are innocent.
It's a court order!
Just because this would be a civil matter in your jurisdiction does not mean it is a civil matter under Dutch law where this lawsuit is from.
Legal action is very expensive. While vexatious litigants exist, the total volume of legal proceedings being commenced is not particularly large.
I like how websites are special. Like no-one ever says "I am shocked that a hotel provided information to the police about a guest wanted for murder"
> Meta faces a penalty of one thousand euros per day, up to a maximum of one hundred thousand euros, if it fails to comply with the court's decision
Only 100K to completely ignore the court's ruling... Easy.
Like other companies, Meta routinely comply with subpoenas for user identity, post history etc in the US too. In fact they give their requirements here[1] so law enforcement know what sort of order to bring and how to serve it on them. This has even been abused by bad actors forging court orders etc to obtain user data[2]
[1] https://about.meta.com/actions/safety/audiences/law/guidelin... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/us-law-en...
I was under the impression that this is routine.