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Comment by skwirl | Hacker News Reader

The "right to be forgotten" is a doublespeak - it is really a concept for revoking others' right to free speech. I have no idea how the EU justice system works but I hope they have the means to correct this serious error.

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it is really a concept for revoking others' right to free speech

Yes, because in Europe free speech isn't an absolute right; sometimes the right of privacy trumps free speech.

Anything that trumps free speech, except for the truly extreme cases (shouting fire in a theatre etc.) is a slippery slope that can erode liberty over a period of time.

How long before this moves into "right to not be offended trumps free speech" territory?

So you are saying that the exceptions to free speech that you agree with are fine, but that the exceptions other people/cultures have chosen and that you disagree with are a 'slippery slope'.

This standard of yours completely eliminates the ability to critically comment on the actions of "other cultures".

Not at all.

You can comment all you want about it, but it doesn't compel them to change how they are at all.

Then why call it out as if it were a negative? Nothing anybody says on Hacker News is going to change EU law.

Because you're exhibiting cultural imperialism.

What does that even mean?

You're talking out of both sides of your mouth here. First it's okay to comment on other culture's behaviors and now it's "cultural imperialism".

How about everyone is okay to comment on whatever they wish without the meta value judgements? I think that system works pretty well.

There is a tendency for some US commentators to totally ignore the European attitude around freedom of speech and to talk about the slippery slope to totalitarian states.

Sometimes those people will mix up "first ammendment" rights with what a website owner is allowed to do; or they appear to be unaware of the very many cases of people in America who lose their jobs or are arrested because they wear the wrong t-shirt or have an innocent poster on their door.

We often hear these people when there's coverage of twitter trolls going to court. They'll say that it's ridiculous to prosecute people for being mean on twitter. This is intensely frustrating because -and this should be fucking obvious- no-one is arrested for being a bit mean on social media. People are arrested for making credible repeated threats of violence. But that happens in the US.

An Englishman did three months for an offensive drunken tweet after a match, brilliant.

>or they appear to be unaware of the very many cases of people in America who lose their jobs or are arrested because they wear the wrong t-shirt or have an innocent poster on their door.

Arrested and convicted of a crime are two different things. Do you have any evidence of that happening? I know of a Virginia teenager who was arrested last year because he wouldn't take off an NRA shirt, but first, he wasn't arrested for the shirt, he was arrested for obstruction, and second, charges were dropped.

As for European attitudes toward free speech, I don't say they're wrong for Europeans, I just think some of them are daft, like locking people up for racist remarks or offensive speech. That just turns harmless idiots into martyrs.

Do you have any examples of people "locked up for racist remarks" or "offensive speech"?

Here's a couple from 2012:

http://deadspin.com/5896709/racist-tweets-about-fabrice-muam...

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/21/man-racial...

Here's 11 people who got locked up last year:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2330809/Lee-Rigby-de... (daily fail, but their info appears sound)

And that was just on the first page of google. Note that in all of these cases, the comments were just ugly and racist, but not threatening.

It's OK to comment on other cultures' behaviors, and that includes commentary on your behavior being expressive of cultural norms.

Imperialism implies some sort of actual meddling. However, as previously established, nothing said on HN is going to change the EU. Without the possibility of any sort of meddling or interference, then there can be no Imperialism.

Interestingly though, your comment is a nice example of being irrationally fearful of free political speech.

You say that as if it's hypocritical, but this seems like an almost axiomatic statement to me. It is perfectly reasonable to have opinions about exceptions to free speech which are safe and unsafe, and to advocate why to those with different opinions. Just like the USA's interpretation of "free speech" isn't sacred for the rest of the world (and might actually be wrong!), a European nation's interpretation of safe and unsafe free speech is not absolute and might be wrong.

Portions of the U.S. used to have a strong cultural affinity for human slavery, yet many within that same U.S. argued that slavery was wrong from day 1 of the current republic. Europe used to have a cultural affinity for anti-Semitism (and it hasn't completely gone away). If you believe in any sort of objective truth whatsoever, then it's possible for a 'cultural value' to still be wrong.

Shouting fire in a theater isn't an extreme case if you think about it. When was the last time you heard of a stampede in a crowded theater when someone shouted fire and there was none? I've never heard of it. Who would take off running? Would you take off running because someone else is? Honestly. The case this phrase originated from is overpraised.

Basically, one can imagine, one would not want someone to invoke panic into others frivolously when it has potential to cause physical harm.

Another example would be shouting "She's got a gun, arhhhh!" in a crowded plazza while setting off some firecrackers.

The firecrackers aren't speech.

What if instead you have an accomplice who's really good at beatboxing?

One could argue that "art isn't speech" as well. It's expression none the less.

Or yelling "I have Ebola" on an airplane.

The case the phrase is from was about placing limitations on blatantly political speech. It was a truly reprehensible decision.

"A unanimous Supreme Court, in a famous opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., concluded that defendants who distributed leaflets to draft-age men, urging resistance to induction, could be convicted of an attempt to obstruct the draft, a criminal offense." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

From it's very inception, that phrase has been used to justify the restriction of political speech. Nothing has changed since 1917, people still use it to argue against political speech to this day.

I did not know this. Thanks for sharing.

Is it even illegal to shout "fire" in a crowded theater?

This isn't 1900. There are accessible, well-lit exit routes in every theater I've been in. Not to mention fire suppression systems, alarms, and the fact that you'd most likely see a fire before it was time to panic.

Perhaps this does not happen much in the US. However, there are "discotheque" fires [1] which harm numerous people throughout the world. Typically overcrowded with locked exit doors. It's a sad thing, but it happens.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nightclub_fires

No. It was an example of speech that could have terrible consequences, just like anti-war speech.

edit: You're overestimating the wisdom of crowds and the care of theater owners. Spraying mace in a crowded club led to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_E2_nightclub_stampede

Fear that the Who would start playing early caused https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Who_concert_disaster

We should probably add 'doing a sound check' to 'shouting fire in a crowded theater.'

Don't be so literal-minded. If you have been following the news you might have noticed some deliberate Ebola hoaxes in the last week, where a man on an aeroplane and another on a bus shouted out they had Ebola and threatened to deliberately infect other passengers and the bus driver, respectively. The fact that nobody was actually hurt in these two incidents doesn't alter the deontological basis for a rule against such behavior.

Is 'shouting fire in a crowded theater' supposed to be figurative now? It used to be offered as the archetypical example.

>The fact that nobody was actually hurt in these two incidents doesn't alter the deontological basis for a rule against such behavior.

Then what possibly could? Hegel's ghost?

Reasoning by analogy is the norm in the American common-law system. If you were to maliciously cause some sort of dangerous stampede at, say, a sporting event, you would not be able to get off the hook by arguing that you were not in a theater. Once more, I urge people to consider the difference between civil and common law systems. A lot of people seem to assume the standards of one apply to the other.

Then what possibly could? Hegel's ghost?

The improbability of anyone being hurt. If you stand in the middle of a public park and yell 'the sky is falling!!' nobody will take you very seriously, but even if they did and decided that it was necessary to run indoors the probability of a stampede occurring is vanishingly low. But maliciously causing panic in an enclosed space significantly elevates the risk of injury to others, because the more panicked people are, the more irrationally and dangerously they may act, a phenomenon for which we have abundant evidence.

Shouting in a crowded theater is not an analogy, it's a benchmark. This seems obvious to me - if it is an analogy, then what does the theater represent?

What it says is that some line has to be set, and this concrete situation described is something that obviously should fall on the other side of the line. (Therefore, people should be imprisoned for speaking out against the war Q.E.D.)

> How long before this moves into "right to not be offended trumps free speech" territory?

This is already the case in Europe.

Then why isn't the government going on to BBC servers and removing those articles? Don't they violate somebody's privacy?

Is there even a right to keep private something everybody knows? A right to have milk on the floor be in the glass it spilled out of?

Free speech wasn't an absolute right in Soviet Russia either. And, yes, they too had ways of avoiding naming what they were actually doing.

Is there an equivalent of Godwin's Law for invoking Soviet Russia when discussing free speech?

The answer to your question is that the EU law is written horribly, by people who have no real idea how the internet works.

I hope not. I already find it annoying enough when people decide to shut down a conversation by bringing up Godwin's Law.

In the US it is not an absolute right either. Ignoring the cliche fire in a theater thing, the ag-gag bills and provisions of the patriot act make it illegal to say something which could impact the profitability of perishable food production chains. Even true statements are illegal to make.

But many would argue that these laws are unconstitutional. Free speech is one of the highest laws in the land and there's a court challenge underway: https://www.aclu.org/free-speech/aclu-idaho-and-coalition-fi...

As the other comment mentions, restrictions like those may well be overturned, but it's true that free speech is not an absolute right within the U.S., considering we have laws against slander, libel, divulging personally-identifiable information and some types of medical records, espionage, etc. Free speech is an individual right that like any other right, gets balanced against others' individual rights.

No it isn't. You can still do research and publish stories like 'John Doe, running for office, was convicted of littering 20 years ago...' You just won't be able to rely on a search engine to gather all that information for you; you'll have to research your subject a more old-fashioned way, looking through all the stories from the period. The only actors constrained under this regime are search engines, and I'm not sure algorithmically generated search results rise to the level of political speech as they're not expressive of an opinion.

I have no idea how the EU justice system works

Then why not inform yourself before making grand pronouncements on what counts as error? There are other legal philosophies besides the one you adhere to, you know.

What you are suggesting would further entrench and enrich the Fourth Estate.

Is that your intent?

It's not my intent, and I find your premise questionable. Are you suggesting that newspapers and similar organs would try to make money out of people who wanted to search their archives? If so then yes, they probably would, but so what?

No, I am suggesting that people who are not payed to search through archives will frequently lack the time to search through archives. Digging through newspaper articles at your local library to find information on the dozen politicians on the ballet is something that most people do not have the time/resources to do. For the most part, these people will have to rely on the media to do that for them.

Search engines are an equalizer, they allow people to search through massive amounts of data blazingly fast. This closes the gap between the research a professional reporter is capable of, and the research that the general public is capable of.

Again, so what? In the case of a politician running for office, the media is likely to do that research anyway; take a look at Oregon, where the governor's fiancee is mired in scandal over long-past personal relationship, which is being pushed with a barely-implicit guilt-by-association angle for the Governor's implied failure to perform due diligence on his intended wife. You're also overlooking the 'public interest' exemption to redaction of search results which has been extensively documented and would certainly apply to the case of a candidate seeking office.

Meanwhile, you're completely ignoring the actual problem, which is that now anyone can do a bang-up research job on private rather than public individuals, without being held to any ethical standards for journalistic accreditation or publication. Somewhere upthread I pointed out the example of mugshot aggregation sites, which operate a thinly-veiled extortion racket under the rubric of 'free speech'.

> You just won't be able to rely on a search engine to gather all that information for you

Sure you will, as long as you don't use Europe's neutered version of reality.

An iteration on the European court's decision might require operators to amend their robots.txt files. It's not hard to conceive of multiple approaches to the same end. In any case, your objection is not responsive to my point that free speech remains uninfringed.

Free speech remains uninfringed as long as Europeans can still reach US search results.

Free speech remains uninfringed even if all search results are the same.

So it is still free speech even if no one is allowed to hear it?

As I said earlier, I'm not sure algorithmically generated search results rise to the level of political speech as they're not expressive of an opinion.

You are still allowed to find and read the original article under this EU law. You are just not entitled to have it pre-emptively collected and indexed for you if the subject of the article has a colorable wish to preserve their privacy.

Sounds like a good use of EU resources.

> No it isn't. You can still do research and publish stories like 'John Doe, running for office, was convicted of littering 20 years ago...' You just won't be able to rely on a search engine to gather all that information for you; you'll have to research your subject a more old-fashioned way, looking through all the stories from the period.

I don't see that that's morally different from e.g. "you have to pay a $20 fine if you do this."

What if I have a hand-crafted artisanal search engine, like Yahoo Directory. Are those exempt from this law?

I don't think it's that clear cut, there are some inherent challenges related to privacy and internet, a persons past that may influence future opportunities in a way that's not really fair. In fact, Eric Schmidt has expressed that same sentiment publicly.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-w...

I think one of the issues with the ECHR is that to be a judge on the court, you don't actually have to have worked as a judge. You just need good moral character and law qualifications [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Court_of_Human_Rights#...

So you'd rather trust someone who rubber-stamped traffic infractions at a low-level court for 20 years than a professor of law to decide on highly abstract and generic cases?

Non-judges are a rather common thing among high European courts. And what would be wrong about putting someone whose publications have laid the groundwork for other judges' descisions in the past in such a position? It's not like the academic track is any less qualified.

I'd rather trust someone that has worked as a judge at the highest level in their own national court, rather than academics that are long on theory but have never tried a case.

The European Courts aren't really a higher courts than the national high courts, just ask the German one. Which, yes, does include academics and even civil servants with extensive background in law. And unlike say in America, the academic qualification you need to be a judge is higher than the one you need to be a lawyer, in the first place: Whether your professional choice then is to become a judge or something else changes nothing about your qualification.

They seem to think they are higher courts, given that people can appeal to them after exhausting the process in their own country.

It seems strange that people can become judges without actually practising the law or working as a judge in a lower court first. If I was being operated on, I'd want a surgeon that has operated before, not an academic expert on surgery.

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