[derekmhewitt]

Good article, was informative.

Germany isn't the only country considering laws like this, and companies with large online presences need to find some way to get a handle on the user created content they're propagating. The fact that it's open season as far as what users post is going to eventually lead to the companies doing the propagating: Facebook, Google, etc, being the ones called before the state to answer for it. This ultimately isn't fair and is terrible for business, but the situation we have right now isn't fair either, especially to the individuals who are being slandered with no recourse.

[spc476]

It's legal in my country to mock religious figures like Jesus, Moses and Mohammad. In other countries it is illegal to do so. If I post an image portraying Jesus, Moses and Mohammad as lovers (admittedly it's in poor taste) to MyFaceGoogleLinkedSpaceBookPlusIn, does MyFaceGoogleLinkedSpaceBookPlusIn have the legal authority to delete my post since it might be seen in a country where it's illegal?

[danbruc]

That's obviously a complex problem that emerged because the Internet on itself does not respect traditional juridical boundaries and I doubt that there is already any general consensus on how such things ought to be handled. But in your example it seems reasonable to me to just block the post where it is illegal. If it is illegal in the home country of MyFaceGoogleLinkedSpaceBookPlusIn or if making the post were illegal in your home country, then deleting seems appropriate. In reality things are probably even more complicated, if something is illegal may for example depend on where you are when you are doing it but may also be tied to your nationality and be independent from where you are. Or think about companies operating from several countries.

[humanrebar]

> But in your example it seems reasonable to me to just block the post where it is illegal.

From a technology perspective, that's a much harder problem than it sounds. To the degree it's even possible, it's a good way to make sure that social networking gets consolidated into the hands of a few companies and that never get challenged. Or that social networking breaks back up into country-specific sites, making the "world-wide" part of the WWW more of a technical possibility than a practical reality.

[germanier]

Sure, it’s probably impossible to have this block 100% effective. However, this is a bad excuse for giving up trying at all. Even the simplest technical measures will stop most people.

Also, the discussed German law (which I'm not particularly fond of) addresses the problem you raised: it only applies to the largest companies giving startups enough time before needing to solve these issues.

[humanrebar]

It's still regulatory capture, but you're probably right about the small company exception. The biggest effect is probably to make it easier for a German social network to thrive over a foreign one looking to move into (or stay in) Germany.

So, again, it's probably going to reinforce information bubbles as places to share thoughts and ideas will stay tied to a nationality and/or small.

> ...this is a bad excuse for giving up trying at all.

I think all of Western Europe is struggling with information bubbles as surprising election results have been happening one after another. Is it "giving" up to not double down on that phenomenon?

[jasode]

>But in your example it seems reasonable to me to just block the post where it is illegal.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "just block the post" but it seems the algorithm for writing:

  is_illegal(image, country)==true

.... is currently not possible to write with accuracy. (Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1425/)

If it's a large-scale service used by a billion people posting user-generated content, you have to rely on algorithms to filter it instead of depending on users manually flagging posts. Users themselves don't know their own country's laws and would flag things like the Vietnam naked girl photo as "illegal" when it really wasn't.

Even if a machine learning algorithm can be trained to flag a specific cartoon of 3 religious figures having sex as illegal, there are near-infinite variations of other drawings showing the same thing that would get passed as "legal". In fact, it doesn't even have to be a totally different comic by a different artist... just changing 1 pixel might do it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15577885