(no subject)

[pauamma]

Came across https://twitter.com/atossaaraxia/status/862730597386653696, and wondering: what kind of contingency planning would large corporations need to make that kind of judgement unenforceable as far as the "worldwide" bit? (Much as I dislike Facebook, I do hope they planned for that.)

ETA: It gets worse. According to https://theoutline.com/post/1507/an-austrian-court-ordered-facebook-to-censor-speech-worldwide, the "hate speech" in question was calling the politician a “lousy traitor of the people” and a “corrupt klutz”.

Comments

[sophie]

Wow, that's... a really broad ruling. It actually stinks of blackmail to me. I'm not a fan of hate speech at all, but no court should be able to dictate something as unilateral as this worldwide on something which isn't actually illegal.

(Is there any information on which court ordered this and in which case? The only information I'm seeing online is from the media, with no real details at all - not even the court name. That seems problematic to me.)

To talk about your question... I see the article says:

The court added it was easy for Facebook to automate this process. It said, however, that Facebook could not be expected to trawl through content to find posts that are similar, rather than identical, to ones already identified as hate speech.

That seems to suggest that they want to remove all posts that are identical to those "already identified as hate speech". Even the much-hated DMCA doesn't allow for this; a DMCA takedown request needs to list each specific location that contains the infringing content separately, as I understand it. (I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.) And don't forget that the DMCA is intended to be used to allow taking down content that's already illegal - copyright-infringing content!

We don't know what the exact posts are in this case, and that's really important to remember. We don't have the full story, and that alone is really problematic. (To be fair, though, I can understand a news source not wanting to link to hate speech.) That said, the article does mention that the case was "brought by Austria's Green party over insults to its leader". The article also makes it sound like there's nothing there that would actually be illegal anywhere. That being the case, it seems very odd that a court could compel Facebook to do this. Of course, they can do this technically by simply blocking Internet access to Facebook from the country - and that's why I say this sounds like blackmail.

As to how they could prevent this... I'm not sure. The court is probably right that this would be easy for Facebook to automate, if all they're looking for is to remove identical copies of posts. That's the sort of thing that, assuming you own all your servers and have control of them, you probably can't really get away from, I suspect.

For example, rather than searching the entire database and risking bringing the database to a halt, you could add code to the "display this post" process that checks the post text and, if identical text was found, submit a request to delete the post and refuse to display the one found. This immediately prevents the post from being displayed and staggers delete requests so they don't all happen at once. The downside, of course, is more processing time spent checking posts, which in turn means rising costs. The point, though, is that it is technically doable, even if the implementation might be tough.

So... for a company like Facebook I'm not even sure how you'd make it unenforceable. That's a tough question - one that you'd want a very clever (and tech-savvy) lawyer to answer, I think.

(Again... I'm not a lawyer myself. If there is anybody reading this who is, and has knowledge of this domain, I'd love to see what you have to say!)

[pauamma]

Sorry, it looks like I was unclear. By "unenforceable", I meant for Facebook to be in or shift to a position where it can safely say "Sorry, Austrian govt, you don't have the reach to enforce your court's judgement." (IANAL either, but it seems to me Facebook might be able to do so thanks to the US SPEECH Act, depending on the circumstances of the case.)

[sophie]

Ah, unenforceable on a legal level, rather than a technical level. That's something I know even less about, unfortunately. :/

[pauamma]

According to https://theoutline.com/post/1507/an-austrian-court-ordered-facebook-to-censor-speech-worldwide, the "hate speech" in question was calling the politician a “lousy traitor of the people” and a “corrupt klutz”. Words fail me.