Irony: German Chancellor Merkel Upset At Twitter For Banning Trump; Meanwhile Germany Demands Social Media Blocks Dangerous Content

from the square-the-circle dept

Lots of folks are reporting on the news that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has now said that she finds Twitter's decision to ban Donald Trump "problematic."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel blasted Twitter’s decision to ban U.S. President Donald Trump.

“The right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance,” Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s chief spokesman, told reporters in Berlin on Monday, according to Reuters.

“Given that, the chancellor considers it problematic that the president’s accounts have been permanently suspended.”

Of course, this totally leaves out the fact that Germany is among the countries leading the charge in forcing internet companies to remove "dangerous" or "terrorist" content. I mean, it was only three years ago when the infamous NetzDG law went into effect, giving social media companies 24 hours to remove "obviously illegal" content, with threats of fines up to €5 million for employees of these companies if they magically fail to delete such content.

As we've pointed out, this is an impossible standard to meet, and it's likely to get worse. The law has been a total dumpster fire with websites rushing to remove all sorts of content (including criticism of Angela Merkel...), to avoid facing penalties under the law.

On top of this, Germany has been among those pushing for new rules, such as the Terrorist Content Regulation that would give companies only an hour to remove "terrorist content."

So it seems a bit rich for Merkel to now whine when Twitter shuts down Trump's account. Of course, I've heard two semi-defenses of Merkel's statement here. The first is that she's distinguishing between removing specific tweets and shutting down the full account. And the second is that in the EU, they distrust corporate power, but are more trusting of government power. So they're okay if the government decides to block certain content, but not comfortable with companies doing the same.

Indeed, the next part of Merkels' statement seems to highlight that both of those claims explain this weird cognitive dissonance:

Seibert said that, while Twitter was right to flag Trump’s inaccurate tweets about the 2020 U.S. election, banning his account altogether was a step too far. He added that governments, not private companies, should decide on any limitations to freedom of speech.

But... that doesn't hold up to any amount of serious scrutiny at all. After all, even if it is the government that passed the NetzDG law, and is working on other laws like the Digital Services Act and the Terrorist Content Regulation, every one of those laws then basically hands off the decision making to those companies. They never pick and choose which content is bad, they just tell the companies that if they mess up, they may face huge fines and/or criminal prosecution. That leads to massive over-censorship.

Indeed, it creates such a liability for companies that they will frequently overblock to avoid that liability. It's just not worth it.

So, the whole thing is ridiculous. It's yet another version of the "nerd harder" response from politicians, claiming that this kind of blocking is a bridge too far, but that other kind of blocking is fine, and if you mess it up in either direction (blocking too much or too little) you'll get in trouble.

This is what's so frustrating in all of this. People who have no idea how all of this works seem to expect that there's some magic way to do the perfectly correct amount of moderation. They're wrong. There's always, always, always, going to be disagreements about the proper amount of moderation, and Merkel's been part of the problem in pressuring companies to take down too much. It's quite ridiculous for her now to complain that companies are doing what she and her government have been demanding all along.

Filed Under: angela merkel, content moderation, donald trump, eu, germany, netzdg
Companies: twitter

Germany's CDU, Angela Merkel's Party Of Fuddy-Duddies, Decides To Join The Cool Kids: Backs Open Standards, Open Source, Open Data, Open APIs -- Open Everything

from the it's-groovy,-man dept

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Germany is Angela Merkel's party. She led it for 18 years before resigning last year as leader, but remaining as Chancellor of Germany until 2021. It is a party that has often held the reins of power in Germany, but has seen a steady decline in membership over the last 30 years. From a peak of nearly 800,000 in 1990, it is now down to around half that. According to figures on Wikipedia, in 2012, the members' average age was 59 years, and 6% of the Christian Democrats were under 30 years old. In other words, it is German's party of old fuddy-duddies. Against that historical background, the following passage from its "Digital Charter", agreed during its recent party conference, is noteworthy (original in German pdf):

The open and jointly developed standards of the Internet and open interfaces are the principles from which we advance the digitisation of Germany. It is only through openness that competition can be created; only through openness can new players in competition challenge the top dogs. This is why the following will apply to all (public) digitisation projects in Germany in the future: the awarding of contracts and funding will be subject to compliance with the principles of open source and open standards. Software financed by public funds should serve all citizens. In addition, free and open APIs should facilitate access for independent developments.

That's an impressive hit-rate for the "opens": openness, open interfaces, open source, open standards. Also thrown in for good measure is the idea that publicly-funded code should be available to everyone -- presumably as open source. Elsewhere in the document, the Digital Charter speaks approvingly of open data and open educational resources (OER), and promises to create an "open public repository" of re-usable digital components. On the downside, the document also includes the usual platitudes about blockchains, AI, 5G and "smart cities", as well as rolling out tired buzzwords such as "agility", "sandboxing" and "decentralization".

Nonetheless, the emphasis on openness in all its forms is striking and thoroughgoing. The Digital Charter may not commit the party to doing anything concrete very soon. But it's a clear and welcome sign that openness has entered the mainstream to such an extent that even the fuddy-duddies get it.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: angela merkel, cdu, germany, open, open interfaces, open source, open standards

Techdirt's Readers Kept This German Comedian Out Of Prison

from the trolling-Gollum dept

[The following post was contributed by Fault Lines (a Scott Greenfield/Lee Pachia joint) columnist David Meyer Lindenberg, a self-described "wannabe 1-L" and actual German. The last fact explains his in-depth knowledge of German speech laws, which Mike Masnick has graciously allowed him to dump all over Techdirt's pages. Enjoy! {And possibly NSFW around the middle-ish.}]

Remember Jan Böhmermann? The guy who caused a major diplomatic spat back in April when he read out a satirical poem about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the notoriously thin-skinned Turkish president, on a German comedy show?

Usually, what happens on Central European state-run TV stays on Central European state-run TV. Not this time. “Erdogate” went massively viral: there were protests in the streets of Istanbul. Techdirt covered it at length. Even a guy named John Oliver did a segment on it.

Now Erdogate’s back in the news, with a number of media outlets reporting that a German court just permanently enjoined Böhmermann from reciting his own poem. Sucks for him, right? Actually, no. Bad as it is, things are usually a hell of a lot worse for people in his position.

First, a little historical context. Böhmermann’s poem came at an inopportune time for the German government, which relies on Turkey to help stem the flow of Syrian refugees into Europe. And Erdogan, the Turkish strongman who was himself imprisoned in 1997 for reading a political poem out loud, is exactly the kind of guy to endanger a bilateral agreement over his hurt feelz.

These feelz of his are very sensitive, indeed. For example, he doesn’t like it when you compare him to Gollum. (There are some alleged similarities between the two.) If you’re a Turk and ask him to guess what you’ve got in your pocketses, he’ll have you convicted of a crime. On the other hand, if you’re fortunate enough to live somewhere with freedom of speech, the worst he can do is block you on Twitter.

What if you live in a foreign country that nevertheless has archaic, repressive speech laws? As a lot of surprised Germans found out in mid-April, it may mean Erdogan and other delicately minded people can reach out to your government and get it to punish you for them.

On or around April 15, German prosecutors indicted Böhmermann on a count of insulting a foreign head of state, a felony punishable by up to three years in prison under Article 103 of the federal criminal code. Erdogan also sued -- something he does a lot -- and in May, a Hamburg court issued a preliminary injunction blocking Böhmermann from saying the poem out loud.

Of course, that just had the effect of Streisanding the comedian and his poem into the stratosphere. I wasn’t totally happy with the non-rhyming translation floating around the web, so I came up with one of my own.

That Erdogan, the President’s,

a dumb, repressed, repressive gent.

He reeks of bad kebab. Your nose

will think a pig’s fart was a rose

once you’ve inhaled his scent. He beats

up helpless women in the streets

behind a mask. He gets his kicks

from fucking goats and watching flicks

of child abuse. Christians and Kurds

are made to lick his fetid turds.

Instead of sleep, it’s his delight

to blow a hundred sheep a night.

Compared to theirs, the President’s cock

is limp and floppy as a sock.

As any Turk will tell you, “Yup,

his tiny nuts are shriveled up.“

From Istanbul to Ankara town,

the guy’s a fag of great renown,

a lousy perv, a devotee

of vilest bestiality.

He forces women to his bed,

his balls as empty as his head.

No bunga-bunga party can

be called complete without the man:

his lust for sex is quite unique.

He fucks ‘til, when he takes a leak,

his penis burns like phlogiston.

That’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

the Turkish President.

Fast forward to this year. On February 10, the Hamburg court ruled in Erdogan’s favor, making the preliminary injunction permanent and ordering Böhmermann to pay $2000 in legal fees. Bad? Yes. Illiberal? Totally. Anywhere near as bad as it would’ve been if the Streisand effect hadn’t made Böhmermann famous? No. To understand why, we need to understand how insult prosecutions work in Germany.

Something that attracted a lot of attention during the Erdogate coverage was Merkel’s promise to repeal Article 103 as soon as Böhmermann’s case was resolved. The law came in for its share of criticism, including at Techdirt. And rightly so. Laws that criminalize making fun of heads of state are an undemocratic throwback to lèse-majesté, the idea that it’s wrong to offend the king. What’s more, the German government has a long, sad history of using Article 103 to silence people who criticize foreign despots like the Shah of Iran and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.

While people’s attention was focused on the absurdities of German law, the actual case against Böhmermann died a slow death. On October 4, prosecutors in Mainz announced they were dismissing the charges, allegedly because they didn’t think they could prove the poem was a criminal insult.¹ This cleared the way for Merkel to make good on her promise, and in January, the German cabinet announced it was going to follow through and scrap Article 103.

To be sure, it all looks incredibly reform-y. Erdogan got his ass kissed, Böhmermann got away by the seat of his pants and people get to applaud the government for championing free speech. But appearances can be deceiving.

You see, Germany can easily afford to lose Article 103. The state has dozens of speech statutes at its disposal, laws criminalizing everything from US-style defamation to what, in America, would be indisputably protected expression. What’s more, many of these laws cover the same conduct. The result is that some of the more specific statutes work like sentencing enhancements.²

Article 103’s exactly that kind of law. It makes insulting foreign heads of state a felony, but repealing it wouldn’t decriminalize making fun of the likes of Erdogan. If it does, the government can simply prosecute under Article 185, Germany’s misdemeanor-insult statute, one of the most vague, expansive and authoritarian pieces of legislation ever devised. A classic example of an offense under Article 185 -- and I’m not kidding here -- is using an insufficiently formal pronoun to address a cop.

Worse, the law practically invites selective prosecutions. Officially, Article 185 makes it a crime to insult anyone. However, under Section 153 of the federal code of criminal procedure, prosecutors are free to throw out misdemeanor cases if they decide there’s no “public interest” in pursuing charges. It’s prosecutorial discretion at its worst.

The predictable result is that prosecutors only pursue insult cases when you offend a famous person, a government official or someone the prosecutor likes. Conversely, famous people and government officials who insult others are almost never charged.

Everyone knows it, too. The colloquial term for an Article 185 case is “Beamtenbeleidigung” (lit. “insulting an official,”) and when Germany’s economy minister flipped off a bunch of right-wing protesters in August, the media treated it as a hilarious joke.

Things get more interesting, and weird, when you look at what happens when celebrities and government officials insult each other. In 2005, an undeservedly famous singer-songwriter got in a fight with a Hamburg cop over a parking spot. Because failing to respect a police officer’s authoritah is an actual crime in Germany, the cop charged him with insult.

The same court that banned Böhmermann from saying his poem found for the celebrity in 2006, ruling that because he was habitually rude, what he said to the cop was generalized “impoliteness” that didn’t rise to the level of insult.³ This, to put it mildly, is the kind of break no judge would ever cut a less well-connected defendant.

And in December of last year, a cop was charged when he called Merkel “criminal” and “insane.” That case hasn’t been resolved yet, but the fact that some random cop’s a lot less important than the wrath of the Chancellor suggests it’s unlikely he’ll be acquitted.

Because Article 103 duplicates the elements of an offense under Article 185, the same unofficial rules for who gets charged and convicted apply. Böhmermann, a minor celebrity in his own right, was only charged in the first place because he offended an extremely well-connected person. If he’d written his poem about some bum in the street instead of a man with significant value to the German government, the authorities would’ve laughed at the joke and moved on.

But it’s not all bad. The main reason Böhmermann’s case was dismissed, in a country where homeless men are occasionally imprisoned for saying rude things to bureaucrats on the phone, is that people all over the world responded to the Streisand effect and turned him into an international free-speech martyr.

With each retweet of a story about him and his poem, you helped make him more important than Erdogan’s ego. The fact that he’s not a felon right now isn’t on the government and its promise to scrap a law it doesn’t need. It’s on you. And those of us who love free speech appreciate it.

---

¹ If that’s true, they may want to find a new line of work.

² For example, while Articles 186 and 187 criminalize defamation, 188 covers defaming a government official and provides a steeper sentence. Article 90, one of several lèse-majesté laws, makes it a felony to insult the President of Germany, something that’s already a misdemeanor under Article 185.

³ Did I mention German speech laws are incredibly vague?

Filed Under: angela merkel, free speech, germany, insults, jan bohmermann, recep tayyip erdogan, turkey

Germany Finally Dumps Law That Says It's A Crime To Insult Foreign Leaders

from the but-not-because-of-trump dept

Last year, we wrote about a bizarre situation in Germany, in which the incredibly thin-skinned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had discovered a little-used, mostly forgotten German law, saying that it was illegal to insult a foreign leader, and used it to go after a German comedian. Erdogan, of course, had been filing thousands of lawsuits within Turkey against people who mocked or insulted him, which resulted in people around the globe mocking and making fun of Erdogan. But the fact that he dug up this mostly forgotten law created a bit of a diplomatic mess at the time for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was trying to play nice with Erdogan diplomatically, for the sake of helping with the flood of refugees from the Middle East. The weak "compromise" was that Merkel allowed the case to move forward, leading to a sad ruling from a German court, barring the comedian from mocking Erdogan, though a federal investigation was later dropped for "lack of evidence."

However, part of the compromise suggested at the time was that Merkel would allow that case to move forward, but would work towards getting that law off the books later. And apparently, that time is now. The German cabinet has said that the law is being scrapped.

Justice Minister Heiko Mass said the law is "obsolete and unnecessary," Deutsche Welle reported. He said the concept "dates back to a long-gone era, it no longer belongs in our criminal law."

Mass added that foreign heads of state could still pursue libel and defamation cases "but no more or less so than any other person," according to the broadcaster.

Of course, given that this is happening less than a week after the Trump inauguration and the Merkel/Trump relationship is off to quite a rocky start, with Merkel now making very public digs at the new US President, some are trying to read more into the plan to dump this law. The timing is, most likely, more of a coincidence, but perhaps it will free up Merkel to come up with better insults for other world leaders.

Filed Under: angela merkel, donald trump, foreign leaders, germany, insults, recep tayyip erdogan, turkey, us

Now Germany Wants To Criminalize Fake News

from the this-is-a-bad-idea dept

Oh boy. Ever since people started ridiculously blaming fake news on Facebook for the election outcome, we've pointed out that these calls will be used to justify censorship of opposing views -- and that's a very bad thing. We've already seen authoritarian countries with long histories of punishing and silencing dissent jump on the "fake news is a problem!" bandwagon to justify heavy handed censorship. Both China and Iran have pointed to "fake news" as a reason for new internet censorship plans.

But, of course, now the disease is spreading, and spreading quickly. Over in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has now endorsed a proposal to criminalize publishing fake news. Let's repeat that: she's endorsing a plan to make it a criminal offense to publish "fake news."

Angela Merkel is as good as her word: the German chancellor is backing a new law that would ban fake news stories distributed via social media, according to German newspapers. The move comes amid growing concern that fake news on social media influenced the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, and could play a similar role in Germany’s own upcoming elections.

Politicians from Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union are proposing a law that would require social media sites to immediately remove fake news stories and make the publishing of such articles a criminal offense. The CDU currently governs in coalition with the leftwing Social Democratic Party as well as its own sister party, the Bavarian Christian Social Union, giving the government an easy majority and making it very likely that the law will pass, perhaps with some revisions after parliamentary debate.

This is an out and out pro-censorship law which will be abused. And the really scary thing is that with all this hype about "fake news," it appears the general public in traditionally open democracies may cheer on this plan for government-mandated censorship. A new Pew Center study suggests the hype around fake news has tons of Americans believing it's a much bigger problem than it really is. But the really scary part is that, according to the survey, many believe that the government should be responsible for stopping fake news. In fact, more people would put a large part of the burden on the government than on internet companies or... (wait for it...) the public themselves: If you can't see that, 45% of respondents say that "a great deal of responsibility" for "preventing completely made up news from gaining attention" should fall on "government, politicians and elected officials." 42% say the same thing for platforms and 43% apply that standard to the public themselves. Obviously, these numbers are pretty close, suggesting they could be seen as about equal -- but that's still ridiculous. The government should not be in the business of deciding what is "fake news." It would fundamentally upset one of the basic concepts of freedom of expression.

Again, none of this is to say that timelines flooded with blatantly hoax stories (again, the definition of "fake news" seems to morph with what one's beliefs are...) is a good thing. And it seems that approaches like the one that Facebook is now taking seem perfectly reasonable (providing more information, rather than blocking, and combining user feedback with expert fact checking to vet stories that deserve additional informational flags). But the idea that the government should take responsibility leads to ridiculous ideas like criminalizing "fake" news stories, which will only justify crackdowns like the ones in China and Iran even more.

As the Washington Post's always astute Margaret Sullivan notes, politicians are the last people who should be judging what is, and what is not, fake news -- since it allows them to tilt the scales on issues directly impacting their own jobs:

Government involvement is a seriously bad idea. It could put the question of what constitutes real news and what constitutes fake news in the hands of those who may be most affected by it.

Indeed, this seems to directly be the case with the plan to criminalize fake news in Germany. As the quote above noted, the reason it's even up for debate there is because of "concern" that fake news could impact the upcoming election. Totally false news that people fall for can certainly be annoying -- but (again) we're mostly talking about confirmation bias. People believing stories because it fits their existing worldview. It's not like they'd change their position magically if they didn't see the fake news stories. And, even if they did, that's no excuse for criminalizing fake news -- which is only going to create a massive headache, and put freedom of the press and freedom of expression at serious risk.

Though, it will be amusing when German officials try to charge The Onion with criminal offenses...

Filed Under: angela merkel, fake news, free speech, germany, social media
Companies: facebook

DailyDirt: Harnessing A Lot Of Energy Ain't Easy

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We've mentioned some advances in fusion energy research not too long ago, and it looks like Germany is ready to take a few more baby steps towards figuring out how to control insanely hot plasma. Still, we're a long way from plentiful fusion-generated electricity (not counting solar), but if we want to stop burning fossil fuels, we're going to need to do some more research.

• German Chancellor Angela Merkel flipped the switch on the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator to start testing its experimental plasma conditions that could lead to a fusion generator someday. Germany has spent over a billion euros and two decades building this experimental device which will never actually generate more energy than it consumes. Let's hope they learn a lot from this facility -- and maybe we'll have a new source of clean, convenient energy in a few more decades. [url]
• Nuclear reactors using fission (not fusion) are relatively expensive compared to other sources of energy. The history of small or modular nuclear reactors also suggests that there's not much advantage in small scale nuclear power plants. Dealing with radioactive waste also just scares people away from fission, too. [url]
• If Back To The Future taught us anything, it's that a lightning strike has enough energy to send a car through time itself -- if you only knew where lightning was going to strike. Unfortunately, 1.21 gigawatts isn't as useful as you might think, and capturing the energy of a lightning bolt doesn't get you all that much energy (unless you could do it continuously somehow). [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: angela merkel, energy, fission, fusion, lightning, nuclear energy, stellarator, wendelstein 7-x

NSA Never Stopped Intercepting Foreign Leaders' Communications, Swept Up Congress Members In Its Collection

from the another-shitload-of-empty-assurances dept

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the NSA is in the middle of another "incidental collection" mess, this time involving Congress.

The U.S., pursuing a nuclear arms agreement with Iran at the time, captured communications between Mr. Netanyahu and his aides that inflamed mistrust between the two countries and planted a political minefield at home when Mr. Netanyahu later took his campaign against the deal to Capitol Hill.

The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears—an “Oh-s— moment,” one senior U.S. official said—that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.

Technically, spying on Congress is off-limits. In reality, the NSA can grab anything involving conversations with foreign citizens, provided it feels the content of the communications contains "significant foreign intelligence." Even so, the NSA is required to inform oversight committees when it has released unminimized, Congress-related communications to the executive branch. In this case, that information was never turned over to the oversight committees, and the executive branch deferred entirely to the NSA's judgment on the withholding of this information.

That's the little-b bombshell in the Wall Street Journal piece. The capital-B Bombshell is this: despite President Obama's public assertions in the wake of the Snowden leaks, the NSA never turned off its intercepts in foreign countries.

Instead of removing the implants, Mr. Obama decided to shut off the NSA’s monitoring of phone numbers and email addresses of certain allied leaders—a move that could be reversed by the president or his successor.

The very public indignation of German Chancellor Merkel and other NATO allies led to a quasi-promise: the NSA would no longer listen in on their conversations. But President Obama never specifically named which foreign leaders would be exempted from the NSA's surveillance. Merkel was namechecked and the administration agreed to stop surveillance of certain foreign leaders, but anyone below them (advisors, cabinet members) was still considered fair game. And other leaders, like Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, were never considered for exclusion from NSA snooping.

There was little debate over Israel. “Going dark on Bibi? Of course we wouldn’t do that,” a senior U.S. official said, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname.

The shocking thing here isn't the surveillance of foreign leaders. That's what we expect agencies like the NSA to do. The shocking thing is the duplicitous nature of the Obama administration, which allowed Congress to be swept up by intercepts that were publicly claimed to have been shut off, as well as allowing behavior it promised to end to continue under its tacit blessing. The administration wanted intelligence it felt would be valuable while simultaneously wanting to protect itself from further blowback.

White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ ” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’ ”

Cowards.

Further making a mess of things is the NSA's long-running, begrudging intelligence partnership with Israel. As was revealed by the Snowden leaks, the NSA considers its partnership -- in which unminimized US citizen data and content are handed over to Israeli intelligence -- with the country to be lopsided. Israel is viewed as a needy partner which often takes much more than it gives.

However, Unit 8200 (the Israeli NSA) did gift the agency with a surveillance tool. But true to form, the gift horse was more of a Trojan.

Early in the Obama presidency, for example, Unit 8200 gave the NSA a hacking tool the NSA later discovered also told Israel how the Americans used it. It wasn’t the only time the NSA caught Unit 8200 poking around restricted U.S. networks.

The multiple levels of hypocrisy and deception are breathtaking. The administration was never truly interested in reigning in the NSA's activities. It was only interested in minimizing the damage it would sustain from the Snowden leaks. It allowed the NSA to do what it wanted while absolving itself of any responsibility. And it never held the agency up to the accountability standards the administration and the intelligence community repeatedly referred to when responding to each successive leak.

On top of it all, the NSA continued to use a surveillance tool it knew was compromised, rather than lose access to the information it obtained with it. And it shrugged off intrusions by a foreign surveillance agency because it's all just part of the spy game -- like telling world leaders you'll do one thing while never actually doing anything at all.

Filed Under: angela merkel, benjamin netanyahu, congress, israel, mass surveillance, nsa, surveillance

Zuckerberg Tells Angela Merkel Facebook Is On The Hate Speech Censorship Case

from the dislike dept

A brief review of the available record shows that Facebook and Germany have always had something of a contentious relationship. Past examples of this have included Germany trying to influence Facebook's really dumb "real name" policy, Germany trying to get Facebook to drop its facial recognition database, and even Germany attempting to outlaw the "Like" button. The context in most of these instances is a German government perhaps still rather touchy with a sordid, if decades-old, history and its overcorrection on matters of privacy and speech. The latest is no different.

At a recent UN summit, Mark Zuckerberg apparently had a discussion with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Facebook will start getting involved in policing racism and hate speech on the social media network.

"I think we have to work on that," Zuckerberg told Merkel during their meeting on Saturday on the fringe of the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in New York.

Facebook has been much criticized in Germany for not doing more to shut down hate speech on its network during the refugee crisis, with Justice Minister Heiko Maas a leading voice calling for better moderation on the site. At a meeting with Maas earlier in September, when the minister demanded faster procedures to get hate comments removed, Facebook agreed to set up a working group to look at the problem.

It's the age-old question on matters of free speech: how do we handle speech the public generally finds unacceptable? And, to be fair, it's not the easiest question to discuss, because free speech advocates find themselves within the ranks of some truly horrible people who say some truly horrible things. Racism and bigotry is, of course, not acceptable as a matter of morality and public discourse. But should it be hidden by corporate interests at the request of the government of a free people?

No, it should not. And, when we slide emotion to the side, it's quite easy to see why not. First, on matters of comments that involve threats or calls to violence, we already have laws on the books (as I assume Germany does as well) to deal with that. Indeed, rather than disappearing the comments from social media, law enforcement would likely want to have those comments on hand should a crime for incitement or menacing have been committed. For charges of racism and hate speech, on the other hand, I would argue that the need for exposure of the bigot outweighs any, if there is any, harm done by the speech. Put another way: if there are racist assbags in the world, do you want to allow them to identify themselves, or shall we allow social media sites to put up a veil so that we can all pretend that everything is right with the world?

Zuckerberg is allowed to do with Facebook as the site's corporate interests please, but as an American leading a company that can only continue to benefit the world through the free exchange of ideas if the site rests on the principles of free speech, I would hope he might be cautious in what promises he might make that violate those principles.

Filed Under: angela merkel, free speech, germany, hate speech, mark zuckerberg
Companies: facebook

German Investigation Into NSA Surveillance Of Angela Merkel Dropped

from the politic,-but-unlikely-to-be-a-popular dept

After the first wave of Snowden revelations two years ago, one of the most dramatic later claims was that the NSA had been monitoring the calls of Germany's Chancellor, Angela Merkel. As Techdirt reported at the time, the US government made things worse by emphasizing that it was not presently monitoring her calls, and promised not to monitor them in the future, while leaving the obvious question about past activity glaringly unanswered. Matters were not improved when President Obama then claimed that he had known nothing about the spying. No wonder, then, that a formal investigation into the allegations was launched by Germany in June 2014.

Since then, things went rather quiet, which makes news that Germany’s chief federal prosecutor is dropping the case because of lack of evidence rather surprising. As Reuters reports:

"The accusations made would not stand up in court with the means available for criminal proceedings," the federal prosecutors office in Karlsruhe said in a statement.

"The vague remarks from U.S. officials about U.S. intelligence surveillance of the chancellor's cell phone -- i.e. 'not any more' -- are insufficient evidence".

However, the official statement from the chief federal prosecutor's office (original in German) did not rule out resuming the investigation if new evidence emerged at a later date.

It is likely that Merkel and her advisers have decided that it is better to mend bridges with Obama in this face-saving way rather than to continue demanding answers from an unresponsive US government. That may be a politically reasonable move, but it is unlikely to satisfy many Germans who saw the allegations as evidence that no one was safe from US (and British) spying.

Moreover, as Techdirt noted back in 2013, the refusal by the US authorities to address these and other allegations of surveillance is contributing to the German public's jaundiced view of the TAFTA/TTIP negotiations, which are increasingly in trouble. That skepticism is reflected by the fact that among the 2 million signatures gathered so far by the pan-European Stop TTIP online petition, fully one half come from Germany. The decision to drop the investigation into claims that the NSA listened in on Merkel's phone calls is unlikely to make things better.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: angela merkel, bnd, nsa, surveillance

Obama To Germans Worried About NSA Surveillance: 'Hey, Trust Us!'

from the why? dept

It's often been said that trust is something that you earn -- or that you completely destroy in irredeemable ways. So it's a little bizarre to see President Obama trying to restore German trust in the US (and specifically over NSA surveillance) with a bogus "hey, trust us" line, when his own government has spent the past few years doing everything possible to undermine any residual trust. Yet here he is, in a joint appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, asking for "the benefit of the doubt."

There are going to still be areas where we’ve got to work through these issues. We have to internally work through some of these issues, because they’re complicated, they’re difficult. If we are trying to track a network that is planning to carry out attacks in New York or Berlin or Paris, and they are communicating primarily in cyberspace, and we have the capacity to stop an attack like that, but that requires us then being able to operate within that cyberspace, how do we make sure that we’re able to do that, carry out those functions, while still meeting our core principles of respecting the privacy of all our people?

And given Germany’s history, I recognize the sensitivities around this issue. What I would ask would be that the German people recognize that the United States has always been on the forefront of trying to promote civil liberties, that we have traditions of due process that we respect, that we have been a consistent partner of yours in the course of the last 70 years, and certainly the last 25 years, in reinforcing the values that we share. And so occasionally I would like the German people to give us the benefit of the doubt, given our history, as opposed to assuming the worst -- assuming that we have been consistently your strong partners and that we share a common set of values.

And if we have that fundamental, underlying trust, there are going to be times where there are disagreements, and both sides may make mistakes, and there are going to be irritants like there are between friends, but the underlying foundation for the relationship remains sound.

Yes, I can understand why President Obama would want that, but that doesn't mean that he deserves it. This is the same president who allowed the surveillance to happen in the first place, who acted surprised when told it covered Angela Merkel, and who has done nothing more than paid lip service to the idea of reforming surveillance. This is the president who could have ended the bulk collection of phone records just by ordering the NSA to not seek a renewal for its authority, but has not done so.

This is the same President who has prosecuted more whistleblowers and journalists under the Espionage Act than all other Presidents combined (and then doubled). And this is the same administration who has fought off nearly every attempt at transparency over these actions.

So, I'm sorry, but it seems rather hilarious to just say "trust us" when no reason has been given for that trust. No effort has been made to show why the US is trustworthy on this matter. Yes, mistakes are made at times, and then it's quite right to recognize that not everyone is perfect. But to suggest that the US's surveillance actions over the past decade have all been a result of such slip ups doesn't hold any water at all. There is a consistent pattern of stretching the boundaries further and further and playing games with definitions in the law and ever increasing the powers of the surveillance state.

President Obama and the US government may have had the benefit of the doubt in the past, but on surveillance, at this point in time, it seems like it's going to need a hell of a lot more than "hey, we're the good guys!" to get people to trust them on that again.

Filed Under: angela merkel, barack obama, benefit of the doubt, germany, nsa, president obama, surveillance, trust