Facebook and Twitter could pay the price for hate speech - by John Naughton
The German government
has published a draft law that will impose huge fines (up to €50m)
on social networks that fail promptly to remove hate speech, fake news and
other undesirable content from their platforms. Social media companies will be
required to explain rules and complaint procedures clearly to users and
follow up on each complaint. Content that is blatantly illegal must be taken
down within 24 hours, while other law-breaking content must be taken down or
blocked within seven days.
Behind the proposed
measure is a belief that the big internet companies aren’t taking their
responsibilities seriously. “Facebook and Twitter missed the chance to improve
their takedown practices,” said Heiko Maas, the federal minister for justice and consumer
protection. “For companies to take on their responsibility in question of
deleting criminal content, we need legal regulations.”
Stand by for howls of
outrage from said companies, free speech advocates and political activists,
together with conspiracy theories about how this is yet another example of
anti-American lobbying by Springer and other European publishers. Less obvious,
but equally vigorous, is the sound of lawyers rubbing their hands in gleeful
anticipation of lucrative employment for years to come.
This is a significant
moment in the evolving struggle between democracy and digital technology – or
more precisely, between democracy and the companies whose platforms
increasingly determine what people read, see and hear. As readers of this column will know, companies such as Facebook
and Google have grown and prospered courtesy of a single clause in an obscure
corner of the US legal code that enables them to pretend they are just conduits
along which information flows from one point to another, and thus have no
responsibility for the content that streams through their servers.
In the early days of
the web (the relevant legislation was passed in 1996), that might just have
been a reasonable proposition: it was a way of ensuring that the nascent web
could grow organically rather than at the pace of the slowest litigant. But
with the growth and dominance of the digital giants, it has become
unsustainable. A
Pew survey in mid-2016, for example, found that a majority of Americans
said they get news via social media, and half of the public turned to social
media to learn about the 2016 presidential election. This doesn’t mean that
people get all of their news from Facebook and Twitter (TV still matters),
but it does mean that the owners of big internet platforms have acquired some
of the power that has traditionally been ascribed to print moguls and
broadcasters. And with that power comes a responsibility that they do not wish
to shoulder.
They have sound
commercial reasons for shirking it. Accepting responsibility for the content
the internet giants carry would be irksome and expensive.. read more:
