> The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters; c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”
Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement.
Or the sort of thing bigger companies lobby for to make the entry barriers higher for small competition. Regulatory capture like this is why companies above a certain level of size/profit/other tend to swing in favour of regulation when they were not while initially “disrupting”.
Large companies will, and it becomes a moat to smaller entrants.
But it sounds much worse than that: infrastructure for textbook tyranny.
Suppress speech of dissidents against the regime, take away their soapboxes and printing presses, demand that the dissident be identified and turned over to the regime, and put fear of sanctions into all who might be perceived by the regime as aiding dissidents through action or inaction.
Or a system intended to prevent and identify dissidence by labeling anything as "fake".
15 years ago that would've been outrageous. But at this point they're just kicking a dead horse.
Surprised/not surprised. When surveillance capitalism is the MO for generations, it just becomes the norm.
Personally, I find the world becoming more and more about fighting for survival while simultaneously fuck you I got mine...
Doesn't all this assume that any such media is being "social media" shared? The language of this strikes me as moot within private communities. Could this be the unrealized "thing we want" and that is the killing of social media?
Good luck defining social media in legislation.
That's my point, this legislation does not define social media at all, but it sure as hell makes being a social media site harder.
> The new version of NO FAKES requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a) take down speech upon receipt of a notice; b) keep down any recurring instance—meaning, adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the already deeply flawed copyright filters; c) take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image; and d) unmask the user who uploaded the material based on nothing more than the say so of person who was allegedly “replicated.”
You already need point a) to be in place to comply with EU laws and directives (DSA, anti-terrorism [1]) anyway, and I think the UK has anti-terrorism laws with similar wording, and the US with CSAM laws.
Point b) is required if you operate in Germany, there have been a number of court rulings that platforms have to take down repetitive uploads of banned content [2].
Point c) is something that makes sense, it's time to crack down hard on "nudifiers" and similar apps.
Point d) is the one I have the most issues with, although that's nothing new either, unmasking users via a barely fleshed out subpoena or dragnet orders has been a thing for many many years now.
This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies. They can afford to hire proper moderation staff to handle such complaints, they just don't want to because it impacts their bottom line - at the cost of everyone affected by AI slop.
[1] https://eucrim.eu/news/rules-on-removing-terrorist-content-o...
[2] https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/vizr6424-bgh-renate-k...
This is one of those cases where the need to "do something" is strong, but that doesn't excuse terrible implementations.
Especially at a time when the US is becoming increasingly authoritarian.
The EU has a different approach to this kind of regulation than the USA [0]. EU regulations are more about principles and outcomes, while US regulation is more about strict rules and compliance with procedures. The EU tends to only impose fines if the regulations are deliberately being ignored, while the US imposes fines for any non-compliance with the regs.
So while you can compare the two, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. You need to squint a bit.
The DMCA has proven to be way too broad, but there's no appetite to change that because it's very useful for copyright holders, and only hurts small content producers/owners. This looks like it's heading the same way.
> This thing impacts gatekeepers, so not your small mom-and-pop startup but billion dollar companies.
I don't see any exemptions for small businesses, so how do you conclude this?
[0] https://www.grcworldforums.com/risk/bridging-global-business... mentions this but I couldn't find a better article specifically addressing the differences in approach.
None of which is acceptable
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The fallacy is in expecting corporations to play the role of the government.
Suppose someone posts a YouTube video that you claim is defamatory. How is Google supposed to know if it is or not? It could be entirely factual information that you're claiming is false because you don't want to be embarrassed by the truth. Google is not a reasonable forum for third parties to adjudicate legal disputes because they have no capacity to ascertain who is lying.
What the government is supposed to be doing in these cases is investigating crimes and bringing charges against the perpetrators. Only then they have to incur the costs of investigating the things they want to pass laws against, and take the blame for charges brought against people who turn out to be innocent etc.
So instead the politicians want to pass the buck and pretend that it's an outrage when corporations with neither the obligation nor the capacity to be the police predictably fail in the role that was never theirs.
Sorry, but your argument is even less acceptable
You need to expound on why as your replies are not only unacceptable but remarkably useless.
Try dialogue.
Is it? Why should the big tech giants be exempted from the laws and regulations that apply for everyone else?
We don’t punish telecoms, ISPs or the mail company for “facilitating terrorism”. Where do you draw the line?
These rules have serious consequences for privacy, potential for abuse, and also raise the barriers immensely for new companies to start up.
The problem is quite obvious when you consider that Trump supporters label anything they dislike as fake news, even when the facts are known and available to everyone. These rules would allow any opposition to be easily silenced. Restricting the measures to terrorism, illegal pornography, and other serious crimes would be more acceptable.
Your question is like asking “why don’t we have metal detectors and body scanners on every school and public building”. Just because you can, and it would absolutely increase safety, does not mean it’s a good idea.
IMO legislation should focus on how individuals can be made responsible, and prosecuted when they break the law – not mandating tech companies to become arms of a nanny state.
As I understood, it propose for broad filter so more content which should fall under "fair use" will now be take down faster.
> not your small mom-and-pop startup
not sure why you said this, it's the artists / content makers that suffer.
Slippery slope. See how far we've fallen.
Unfortunately this is the inevitable outcome of information and computation (and therefore control) becoming cheap. Liberal political systems can no longer survive in equilibrium. The 21st century will be a story either of ruling with an iron fist or being crushed beneath one :(
Information is as expensive as always it is just copying it that is cheap.
is it? it was always easier and faster to spew bullshit than to refute it, and now we can automate it.
Information, disinformation, what's the difference?
One's the kind that affirms existing worldviews, the other asks questions that makes TPTB uncomfortable, like Copernicus's questions about geocentrism.
Disinformation is not grounded in any observable evidence, and often has no basis in reality or is just wild speculation.
For example, anonym29, when did you stop beating up your partner?
there is a huge difference between having strict laws and enforcing them and "ruling with the iron fist"
the later inherently implies using violence to suppress people
That is always same thing.
All laws that you want to be strictly enforced, requires violence. This is why people should ALWAYS remember when making laws: "Is this worth killing for?"
I remember some years ago on HN people discussing about a guy that got killed because he bought a single fake cigarrete. IT goes like this:
You make a law where "x" is forbidden, penalty is a simple fine. Person refuses to pay fine. So you summon that person to court, make threats of bigger fine. Person ends with bigger fine, refuses to pay anything. So you summon that person again, say they will go to jail if they don't pay. They again don't pay, AND flee the police that went to get them. So the cops are in pursuit of the guy, he is a good distance away from the cops for example, then they have the following choice: Let him go, and he won, and broke the law successfully... Or shoot him, the law won, and he is dead.
This chain ALWAYS applies, because otherwise laws are useless. You can't enforce laws without the threat of killing people if they refuse all other punishments.
I don't know if the guy you were discussing with is right or not, if digital era result in the need of "ruling with the iron fist", but make no mistake, there is no "strict law enforcement" that doesn't involve killing people in the end.
Thus you always need to think when making laws: "Is this law worth making someone die because of it?"
In most places, shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.
Your whole post falls apart right there.
Person 'x' refuses to pay a fine - OK, well there are mechanisms where a fine can be automatically applied in some cases, or taken from their assets by court order, or docked from pay. In some places bailiffs/repo men can be called to take assets after fines have been delinquent for long enough.
Deadly force is not really the backstop position to a fine, even a 'strictly enforced' one.
> shooting by law enforcement is not allowed unless there is a clear and present threat to life.
But we have seen that the police may not follow the same principle. There have been cases where police have killed harmless suspects and gotten away with it.
And how you make sure bailiffs/repo men succeed? For example I know a case in Brazil, that happened in the 70s, where repo men tried to take a Capoeira Master car, and he just grabbed his huge "Peixeira" knife and chased the repo men away. Justice then decided to just let him break the law, because the other choice was send heavily armed cops and hope they would survive the confrontation with the guy and his students.
Nevermind cases where people don't even have a bank account or anything you can take. Or they protect it well enough.
All countries exist as distinct entities because they can maintain what Max Weber called the monopoly on violence within their geographic bounds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force_continuum
In countries where we don't have trigger-happy cops, the story continues this way:
* The person commits a crime or tort. Your courts fine the person.
* The person doesn't pay the fine. You extract the fine forcibly from their bank account (or force their employer to dock their wages, or forcibly obtain and auction their assets; let's go with the bank example)
* Why does the bank comply? Because you can revoke the bank's right to trade.
* Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.
* What if the bank tries to stop you doing that? Then you send in armed police.
* What if the bank shoots back? Then you send in the army, and at worst case encircle the bank and lay siege to it.
* What if the bank has their own army which they use to break your siege? Send in your bigger army. Also have laws against private armies, and spend your time detecting private armies and breaking them up before they get bigger than the state's army.
Most people comply with the state at the earlier steps in this chain, and the state runs all the smoother for it. But you can see in failed states, one of the main reasons for the failure is some group (or groups) inside the state have managed to develop a bigger army than the state itself, or parts of the official army break away from the current government or attempt a coup. At that point, it's not the current government's country any more, it's up for grabs. The government (and the entire system of law it represents) has lost the monopoly on violence.
The point of the GP's post is that all laws are ultimately backed by violence. Most rational actors don't let law enforcement reach the explicitly violent part, but it's still there.
To bring it on topic, what this highlights is it is much better to fight against bad laws while they are just proposals, it is much harder to fight against bad laws once enacted.
> Why doesn't the bank just trade anyway? Because if they do that, you can enter their buildings and take their equipment, arrest their employees, etc.
Or just cut off their power (or network access, or whatever)?
I know "monopoly on violence" is the term in the literature, but I think it's more like monopoly on coercion than monopoly on violence per se. The latter is one way to implement the former, but not the only way.
To give a hypothetical larger-scale example, if the population relies on a dam for water/power, then an implicit threat to destroy the dam could coerce them without any violence.
And what does “enforcement” mean in your mind? The western censorship regime isn’t being implemented by asking nicely…