[starbugs]

Could anyone shed some light on which problem this is supposed to solve exactly and what triggered it in the first place in Austria right now?

Have there been any issues caused by anonymous posts recently? Maybe I'm just living under a rock, but my feeling was that the main issues we're currently facing stem from political distortion caused by populism misusing platform mechanisms to spread misinformation. I don't see how this is supposed to help.

[rmu09]

This was triggered by a defamation lawsuit where a former female MP was being harrassed via facebook, made the harassement public via twitter, and subsequently sued by the owner of the facebook account. She lost the lawsuit and was ordered to pay damages. The court found that the owner of the facebook account is not necessarily the harasser, so making the harassement public is libel.

Of course this case was only a welcome trigger to implement some law to cause FUD. Austrian government is completely illiterate in all things regarding internet, but in this case (and the case of the copyright directive), I would go as far and presume malicious intent (not just stupidity).

[abrowne]

Maybe they were inspired by her case, but the former MP does not support it:

> Criticism also came from the former Green Party politician Sigi Maurer, whose fight against sexist posts was cited by the government as proof that the law was needed. "The government abused my case to propose this censorship law," Maurer wrote in a tweet last week. "Not in my name."

https://derstandard.at/2000101677286/Government-Seeks-to-Eli...

[pjc50]

That seems like an absolutely nonsensical outcome from the court. Does anyone have the court transcript? (yes I'm aware of the risks of reading machine translated legal German, but it would be interesting to know)

(I see that Facebook's ineffective harassment policy is at the root of this again)

[yorwba]

The decision was apparently invalidated by a higher court and the trial has to be repeated: https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2019-03/sigri...

[peletiah]

The first court decision has been overruled by the higher instance. However I don't agree with rmu09 that this was the trigger for this law.

[namlem]

Are civil cases not based on preponderance of evidence in Austria? It seem like a fuck up of the court than a problem of internet anonymity.

[peletiah]

The case was never about anonymous hate-postings as the harasser's comments where posted under his real name, he just claimed that other people had access to his facebook-account. The case has been overruled by the higher instance a few weeks ago. I don't agree that this was the trigger for this law, the current gov consists of two right-populist parties/movements and made other irrational decisions in the past.

[pergadad]

This would be surprising. If I remember correctly the MP was from the Green party (= centre left & environmental) while the current government is pretty much the opposite (centre right party & we're-not-nazis-but-pretty-close party).

This is just the far right interior minister enforcing his ideology of control.

[GordonS]

If Austria is anything like the UK, I imagine it's a move designed largely to garner votes from a particular segment of the population who have been led to believe there's a terrorist round every corner, and "it's all to keep them safe".

[lazyjones]

> Could anyone shed some light on which problem this is supposed to solve exactly and what triggered it in the first place in Austria right now?

Existing hate-speech legislation allows persecution of users already, but in some cases the offenders hide too well or Facebook does not cooperate with authorities. Online newspaper forums are also now full of professionally organized dirt campaigns, sometimes tolerated by left-leaning media. The government wants to be able to persecute those who break the law and thinks it's the responsibility of media to at least make their users identifiable for authorities.

[codedokode]

Isn't it enough just to remove those comments?

[lazyjones]

No, for example when there are death threats or defamation of well-known people that goes viral.

[raxxorrax]

In theory, if you are connected by a medium to almost everyone and utter an opinion, the probability of getting a death threat becomes 1.

[masswerk]

Since this is intended for international audiences, it maybe worth stating that "left-leaning" is what was considered center just a few years ago. (The idea of a general consent is somewhat a thing of a past.) Particularly "Der Standard", the newspaper the post is linking to, is now often attributed as "left" and its forum, the biggest and oldest one in Austria is subject to diffamation. (If you're reading the comments in this forum, there's a feeling that the law is meant to implement a premature censorship of sorts, an idea which is also maintained by some law and media professionals.) – While this is nothing like the US divide, there's no such thing like a common (political) perspective in Austria anymore. As a result, even comments meant to remind of the constitution and rule of law are sometimes countered by a qualification as left wing hate speech.

Edit: Previously, the political center of Austria was slightly to the left, like in most European countries. Bored with the great center coalition, the conservative party (ÖVP) has burned all bridges to the center-left social democrats (SPÖ) and is now considering the center rather more near its own right wing. Refugees and immigrants and "punishing" those are now the go-to argument for every legislative initiative. Also, governmental "message control", i.e., controlling what may be leaking of internal political communication or what may be setting an agenda, is deemed of high strategical importance by the ruling parties.

[lazyjones]

> it maybe worth stating that "left-leaning" is what was considered center just a few years ago.

Please don't attempt to change the meaning of my post with your own interpretation. When I write "left-leaning", I mean exactly that.

[masswerk]

Where are there any "left-leaning" public posts of notice in Austria? This isn't the 1970s anymore, when there were actual Maoists… "Left-leaning" is now somewhat of a contested concept and there is no common consent on its meaning – which is what I was trying to point out.

[xnyan]

All political terms and discriptors are in constant flux. That is normal. Generally speaking when you refer to left-leaning in a specific country, you mean the leftests of your contemporary time. I’m not sure what Austro-Maoists in the 1970s have to do with today’s leftists in Austria

[masswerk]

Personally, I do prefer to keep a more general perspective in view, regarding the history of political ideas. If we just focus on the accidental socio-historical situation, we may miss the general spectrum. E.g., in the 1970s and '80s, there was actual left-wing terrorism or individuals who played with the idea of a substantial change. However, it has been decades since we did see such things even sparsely in public discourse. (But still, we may reminded ourselves of what a real "left" or leftist action may imply. Social-democrats are still centrists, after all. On the other hand, nowadays even the former vice chancellor and leader of the conservative party is considered "left" by some. If we would subscribe to such an idea, we may lose orientation.)

Yet another historical marker, at the end of WW1 about 15% of the Viennese population was anarchists, some of them living in illegal settlements. (These anarchist settlements were mostly converted to allotment associations, some of them still carrying auspicious names like "Future". The reintegration of those who had already left the common political ground into a more traditional spectrum is a special and generally overlooked treat of the political history of Austria and probably the cause, why communists were rather rare in Austria as compared to the neighboring countries.)

[szbalint]

This comes from a government in which the junior coalition partner is the far-right FPÖ, an openly pro-Putin and authoritarian party.

This law is part of their campaign to browbeat the press and public sphere into submission and it is following attempts to rein the austrian public broadcaster (orf) in.

The proposed law is useless for any legitimate purpose, as anonymity was never a problem with hate speech or other things. People are willing to engage in hate speech, libel or just in overall awful things with their name attached without reservation already.

[DyslexicAtheist]

Putin even attended the wedding of Austrian foreign minister last year[1] and nobody was outraged, in fact Austrians on social media applauded it. Vienna is also crawling with Russian spooks.

The problem in Austria is that the Russians have started buying a lot of property there decades ago. Property prices in Kitzbühel have been going through the roof thanks to Russian oligarchs buying up everything. Russians love Austria (as much as Cyprus) because it's a great place to hide and launder money, see[2]:

Peter Pilz, a member of parliament from the opposition Greens party, said the Italian mafia, especially the Calabria-based ‘Ndrangheta, had years ago used Austria as a money-laundering centre, cleansing around 2 billion euros.

“Now it is mainly a matter of Russian money. A lot of banks must be afraid that the Russians will take their millions and flee to Asia,” he said.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vladimir-putin-karin-kneissl-we...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-banksecrecy-austria-id...

see also: How Russia stands to profit from Austria’s new government: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/10/how-russia-stands-to-p...

edit: parent is getting silently downvoted for stating facts. welcome to HN.

[cxy1211]

I wonder why people think that Putin controls all right wing parties on this planet (including Trump).

No one talks about Gazprom Schroeder (center-left SPD) who destroyed the welfare state in Germany and then joined Gazprom.

[rocqua]

But what about this other thing?

[int_19h]

I don't think he controls them. What it reminds me of is how USSR supported pretty much any political movement anywhere in the world, so long as it was in opposition to the capitalist West. The important part was that last one, but most such movements were left-wing.

But that was there and then. We don't have any strong hard left movements of that kind in Western countries today. We do, however, have far right / "third position" movements of that kind. And ideologically, they align pretty well with Russia's own internal politics, so they're more reliable allies, as well. So, while there is some support for left-wing anti-establishment movements, most of it goes to the right. And hence we're mostly talking about that.

[hospitate]

“Populists” lol. It’s not like anyone on the political spectrum has any shame. All political entities will abuse every mechanism that is at their disposal that won’t get them in trouble. Maybe the “populists” were the first to take advantage because they are smarter?

[int_19h]

Populist/technocrat is really more a function of who your key supporters are, and what kinds of appeals are more efficient with them.

[the_mitsuhiko]

I doubt it solves any problems. The right wing parties just want to have more leverage for message control. A platform under the proposed law has to share the identity of an individual if another party wants to sue them for libel as an example. A think the FPOe does regularly.