A danish tourist was killed on holiday and it was filmed (very graphic) and now the parents of the deceased are being sent videos.
> She said she had reported every instance of the harassment to Facebook but in a number of cases it had left the video online. She also complained that Danish police had failed to identify the culprit.
> Simon Kollerup, 35, the Danish trade minister responsible for internet regulation, said Facebook’s “hopeless” response had underscored the need for more stringent EU rules on social media.
> Martin Ruby, 48, Facebook’s head of public policy for the Nordic and Benelux regions, said he was sorry “if we made the wrong calls in this case” but insisted that it had done its best to eradicate the execution clips. He said that the code for the videos was being continually tweaked to elude Facebook’s censorship algorithms. “The problem is that these evil people are sitting there and changing the format on them,” he told DR. “It’s a perpetual battle.”
I'm usually a free speech absolutist and privacy advocate, but whomever is sending that poor woman's parents videos of her torture and beheading deserves to be banned from the Internet forever. At minimum.
> Being against harassment doesn't make you any less a believer in free speech.
The validity if your statement depends heavily on what's your personal definition of free speech, and where you draw the line regarding acceptable censorship and persecution from the state.
Considering the spectrum of free speech includes absolutists who argue speech can only be free if it's free from any consequences from the state, there's a huge grey zone on where to draw the line.
I believe it was Chomsky who defined what we mean by freedom of speech would be more appropriately defined as freedom of opinion. Harassment, calls to violence, inciting panic and defamation are not opinions.
I think I can agree with that. Although defamation is probably a grey area. If I say, “the vice president is corrupt and unintelligent”, should I not be allowed to speak that opinion?
That’s an opinion though. Defamation has a very specific definition, often with a high bar. This would be like “the Vice President accepted a bribe of ten thousand dollars to inject a support of terrorism in their past speech on January 5, and I have film evidence to prove it” explicitly knowing this is false and saying it anyways just to hurt the Vice President.
Indeed. Personally I think we could solve a lot of our problems by offering users robust content filtering controls and teaching people to use them as a basic life skill.
Bullies don't stop when a few people ignore them. That just creates an echo chamber, and they get more bold.
Bullies stop when you punch them in the nose.
Offering people "content filtering controls" might work in a small population where bullies could get ignored completely after a short time, but IME it doesn't even work then. What does work is when the community stops them cold by banning them.
But not everyone is a bully, so the system needs to be more nuanced than that, with warnings and lesser punishments before the final ban.
Personal filters are a good thing because it allows people to go beyond the rules and filter out things that bother them personally, and even to stop the bullying personally while the community works out that the bully will not stop. But it's the first step, not the last.
It doesn't have to be that complicated. Blacklist certain words and phrases. In this case, the people are being sent videos of a murder. Silently block all media content from non-whitelisted users, or any video that falls within a certain range of lengths. On a larger scale, content filtering rules can get more complicated and can be collaborated upon and shared. If we can do it with advertisements we can do it with offensive content.
I'm not sure any of the those points is true always, and at the very least will raise the bar slightly. Blocking on a naive hash wouldn't work, but there are more sophisticated video matching algorithm. If they're good enough to be applied to DMCA type content, this seems like a higher priority.
there's no personal definition imho - free speech is the allowance of the citizens to say anything, regardless of whether the state wants it heard or not.
Free speech isn't the idea that other people must have the opportunity to hear one's speech.
So sending emails or photos to people (ostensibly to harass) doesn't constitute free speech.
Yes, it's an awful and unacceptable situation. Different people have different ways of responding to harassment based on their risk acceptance and resilience: some people respond and fight back, some people hide, and some people seek help from others around them (the latter is, it seems to me, probably generally the healthiest approach, although I'm no expert).
What the parent post seems to be advocating for is that tech companies should automatically attempt to hide people from harm, and that they're best-placed to do that. I think it's doubtable whether they'll be able and willing to implement that in an effective or accurate manner (partly because it requires putting significant time, money and staffing into it, it can never be completely automated, and attackers -- especially in individual or small cases -- evolve as the representative mentions in the quote), and I don't think it respects or empowers victims, long-term.
It's also key to focus on the perpetrators - hold them accountable and figure out the reasons why this happened in the first place.
Free speech is nothing to be absolute about. Things that were encouraged before can become absolutely abject later on - free speech in the public sphere must be regulated, and is in many jurisdiction (I'm French, I live in China - both are very similar in how they approach it in principle, China is more ideological when implementing but France can go very far when someone must stop talking).
I'm glad that as an absolutist, you managed to make a compromise, even if it's just for beheading. How can we convince you rape, insults, religious conflict, racism apology, or even treasonous discourse also can be regulated ? What is so good about stupidity that it has to be exposed so free to the public or what is so special about it that it can't be distinguished from intelligence ?
I don't think there is a conflict between a right for absolute speech (on a practical level) and being held responsible for direct and foreseeable harm without a mitigating reason.
I.e. nobody can shut your mouth, or stop you from speaking, but there can still be consequences if your speech is directly aimed at unjustifiable harassment.
For instance, simply making the video available on a web site would be protected speech (no restriction on that) - assuming no other law was conflicted (copyright, etc.) But going out of one's way to push the speech to those it harms, and on services that prohibit it, creates a problem independent of the freedom to simply speak/publish.
Likewise, you can publish technical secrets you were given under a nondisclosure agreement, but will be prosecuted civilly and possibly criminally (depending on circumstances) for the damage you have done to intellectual property value.
You can claim anything you want for some product, but expect to pay for it legally if you are defrauding people.
You can publish any code you want, source or object code, but expect to pay the consequences if you are publishing code that doesn't belong to you, or violating an open source license by only publishing in one form, without providing the required form, or without proper attribution.
Etc.
For all those cases, nobody limits your speech, but direct consequences of your speech can still result in enforcement action.
You don't have rights that prevent you from hearing things you dislike, things you don't want to hear, or things you find offensive. But you absolutely have protections against repeated harassment.
Restraining order.
And in this case, it should be issued against any Does that engage in the activity.
Rights are best when fundamental and few. Even then it takes a lot of thought to balance between them.
If you start creating a long list of rights then the complexity of balancing all the areas of contradiction will be so many that inevitably an elite will simply use the plethora of rights/contradictions to rationalize getting their way.
In most important things, we need to keep boiling down the principles to as few as possible to explain/perform as needed.
> What is so good about stupidity that it has to be exposed so free to the public or what is so special about it that it can't be distinguished from intelligence ?
The problem is: who gets to define “stupidity” and “intelligence” and the exact limits of what speech is allowed or not. We already have provable examples of people who were considered some of society’s biggest idiots while alive but ended up having a deep and lasting impact to society in the long term (Socrates is a notable example). It’s also guaranteed that this power would be abused to prevent legitimate political discourse almost immediately after granted. There is no such thing as perfect, consistent enforcement. It’s always subject to the human biases of today.
Based on your concerning desire for that poster to indulge the endless slippery slope of censorship, which you (wrongly) may believe is in your favor, perhaps they should consider retracting said post and reaffirming said absolute-ness.
The key distinction is not that China is more ideological (it's just a different ideology), but rather that they're is a democratic and rule-based foundation to the regulation of free speech. Both the democracy and application of the rules may be flawed at times, but it's the consent (through democratic politics) which makes the situations very different.
Facebook butchered (pun intended) a case where cartel sicarios executed a Mexican national, but before they finished him off they tortured his Facebook password out of him.
They proceeded to send members of his extended family, his friends, and family members' friends taunting messages from his account, which by this time had his profile picture replaced with a photo of his decapitated body with his head and genitals essentially co-located in an obscene manner. The other pics on the account (background/header image, photos of the decedent, etc.) were replaced with photos of the victim in various stages of torture & dismemberment. I saw them and it was horrific (and I'm pretty jaded).
FB slowly responded and locked the account, except they left his profile picture alone (beheaded body) and didn't delete the messages that had been sent. It was just a trainwreck, but who cares? They're just Mexicans and they don't know any politicians so... /s
Atrocious behavior, and I saw it for myself on FB after seeing screencaps so I know it wasn't fabricated. I hope they can find a way to better handle this stuff. It makes revenge porn seem mild.
>Martin Ruby, 48, Facebook’s head of public policy for the Nordic and Benelux regions, said he was sorry “if we made the wrong calls in this case”
Ah, the good old "we apologize because we're having to, but we did nothing wrong" non-apology.
>“The problem is that these evil people are sitting there and changing the format on them,” he told DR. “It’s a perpetual battle.”
Sooo all they need to do is run it through handbrake/ffmpeg again and the scanner stops detecting that video? Oh no. Does that mean FB needs to buy/license Apple's CSAM scanning technology to improve their detection to 100%?
A danish tourist was killed on holiday and it was filmed (very graphic) and now the parents of the deceased are being sent videos.
> She said she had reported every instance of the harassment to Facebook but in a number of cases it had left the video online. She also complained that Danish police had failed to identify the culprit.
> Simon Kollerup, 35, the Danish trade minister responsible for internet regulation, said Facebook’s “hopeless” response had underscored the need for more stringent EU rules on social media.
> Martin Ruby, 48, Facebook’s head of public policy for the Nordic and Benelux regions, said he was sorry “if we made the wrong calls in this case” but insisted that it had done its best to eradicate the execution clips. He said that the code for the videos was being continually tweaked to elude Facebook’s censorship algorithms. “The problem is that these evil people are sitting there and changing the format on them,” he told DR. “It’s a perpetual battle.”