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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

As much as it's annoying, people tend to forget those websites are private companies, not charity or gov entities. They can do whatever they want as long it's legal. They don't have in any way humanity interests in mind, it's silly to expect them to take a stand on any other directions than the one benifiting them.

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The EU is defining "hate speech" as illegal. This isn't an initiative led by the companies.

Hate speech is already illegal in most of EU (you can go to jail for it). Trouble is, this was not enforced properly on social networks, they went "we don't care" and law enforcement didn't know what to do. This became a big problem during the refugee crisis, and several extreme far-right parties across Europe started using social media as their preferred medium (and the Russian propaganda machine is using it too). And they won big in several elections. So first Germany made a deal with Facebook and now the EU did it for all EU countries. I really do hope this will work to stop the propagation of hate speech at least a bit, otherwise several countries will be governed by neonazis in a few years, and even the EU itself might break. This is serious.

> I really do hope this will work to stop the propagation of hate speech at least a bit, otherwise several countries will be governed by neonazis in a few years, and even the EU itself might break. This is serious.

That's hilarious. You basically said "People who don't have the right opinions should go to jail!". Maybe if your governments had attempted to explain why the far-right is wrong instead of suppressing them, they would have been less radical. You can't just sweep the thoughts and emotions of your people under the rug, even (especially) if they are unpalatable to you, and hell, to me as well.

No, I did not say that, and did not mean that, they just have to stop the messages from spreading massively (right or wrong does not really mean a lot now). Trouble is, social media is new, it is very effective in spreading a message - any message really - and the society (and state institutions are a part of the society) did not yet adapt to it. The controlling mechanisms, the culture around the new medium, are not really there yet. So this is the dangerous time when fringe forces are trying to exploit it for evil purposes. And it is not impossible they will succeed in this, like they succeeded in radicalizing the masses in the 20's and 30's with different media.

This is one of the more terrifying posts I've read on HN recently. "Punish the wrong think!" just... wow

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