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Comment by car_analogy | Hacker News Reader

You are defending generic restrictions on speech, but the NetzDG makes very specific restrictions - such as prohibitive (up to €50 million) fines if something claimed to be illegal (by a mere complainant, not a court order) is not taken down within 7 days, and within 24 hours if it is "clearly illegal", resulting in severe chilling effects.

Try to defended those instead.

(Yes, no fine is levied if the content is not taken down, and turns out to not be illegal. What sane company will take such a risk?)

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> NetzDG makes very specific restrictions - such as prohibitive (up to €50 million) fines if something claimed to be illegal

That is wrong. Merely, NetzDG imposes an obligation on specific social network providers to establish an "effective and transparent process" to deal with complaints about unlawful content. Without prescribing a specific process in itself, it specifies certain functional requirements. Among them, this process has to ensure that "blatantly illegal content" is being removed within 24 hours, unless the social network provider has agreed on a longer timespan with the law enforcement agency.

Any fines the NetzDG stipulates do only refer to failures to meet requirements of process design. In no case there are fines for social media providers in the case of wrongfully consider a piece of content lawful in a specific case.

It seems to me that this whole discussion is fundamentally unable to consider these legal nuances. Also, blaming NetzDG for actions of authoritarian governments is just plain silly.

Do you have a precedent where this resulted in unlawful restriction of speech or it’s just a generic speculation?

I had a look once at the form in one of Meta services to report hate speech: it does require some effort to fill the form and it does require the issue to be reported to police. If you don’t want to report the case to authorities, the platform will not take down the content. I do not see how this could result in a real censorship in a state with the rule of law.

I have looked at the NetzDG reporting on YouTube and Twitter and while both of them require you to cite a specific law the content is in violation of, they both do not require any report to authorities. The NetzDG doesn't require involvement of authorities, it was especially designed with the goal of moving the work from the state to private companies.

Laws that are bad because of abuseability didn't somehow transcend from good to bad the first time they were abused, they would have already been bad before that event.

But you still have a point in so far as that you can't look at a law ignoring the legal conventions and processes of the environment where "the code is run", something that would be perfectly fine in one environment could be terrible in another.

A few examples (though the reporting could be clearer):

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/01/12/second-time-week-german-...

https://www.dw.com/en/facebook-slammed-for-censoring-german-...

Fortunately for the defenders of that law, the notoriously opaque censorship of social media companies helps hide what is going on, so few examples surface. I could not find anything as convenient as a list of (wrongfully or not) censored content by this law. Often the censored party is not even told that the NetzDG was involved.

Silence on this issue should not be confused with a lack of problems, however. For example, in Germany:

“it can be a criminal offense in Germany to call another person a ‘jerk,’ or even to use the informal du, or ‘thou,’” to communicate a lack of respect for the recipient. German courts have penalized other similar “derogatory epithets,” including “asshole,” “bastard,” “old goat, “fathead,” “dope,” and “whore.” [..] German courts heard 26,757 criminal insult cases that year, leading to 21,454 convictions and 20,390 fines. - https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/germanys-netzdg-and...

To me this looks like a severe overreach of speech restrictions, even if one doesn't idealize the US 1st amendment, and accepts the need for some government censorship. Yet I've only learned about it just now, from a very obscure post.

Your first two links don't support the claim. Twitter removed an impersonator spreading fake news.

Unlabeled satire posted context-free to Twitter where it gets interpreted at true and repeated, is a different complicated problem (and why Twitter is a fundementally terrible design).

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