Proposed law: EU to give internet firms 1 hour to remove extremist content - Polidicks

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/eu-to-give-internet-firms-1-hour-to-remove-extremist-content/2018/09/12/a3f4c51a-b691-11e8-ae4f-2c1439c96d79_story.html?utm_term=.b391f01a4ac9 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45495544 BRUSSELS — European authorities are planning to slap internet companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook with big fines if they don’t take down extremist content within one hour. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said in a speech Wednesday that the Commission is proposing the new rules as part of efforts to step up the bloc’s security. He said that removing material within an hour is important because it’s “the critical window in which the greatest damage is done.” Under the proposal, internet companies would have to take measures, including installing automated systems, to prevent content from being re-uploaded after being removed the first time. Companies that fail to comply would face fines of up to 4 percent of their annual global turnover. For Google, which owns YouTube, that could amount to as much as $4.4 billion, based on parent company Alphabet Inc.’s $110.9 billion in revenue for 2017. “We share the European Commission’s desire to react rapidly to terrorist content and keep violent extremism off our platforms,” Google said. “We welcome the focus the Commission is bringing to this and we’ll continue to engage closely with them, member states and law enforcement on this crucial issue.”

That's fairly unreasonable and is just going to lead to more aggressive auto-moderators that slap down content that shouldn't be slapped down, and/or lend even more power to non human moderated report systems.

Are the commission going to define what is considered 'extremist content' to the tech firms?

How small do they think the internet is? And how did they come up with the idea that one hour is some critical window?

The EU has been passing a lot of laws recently that show a complete disregard for the reality of the internet, don't be too surprised.

Technology is moving faster forwards and the old people in charge of laws aren't dying fast enough. What do we do.

old men making laws to govern technology they don't understand

Old men. Ruling the world.

It's ignorance in a pure, crystallized form. It's as unstable as pure sodium and water.

The idea probably comes from a quick within an hour estimate of how fast a large company can respond and have it cleared by whoever is in charge before its removed, and then past one hour is probably the time where enough people have seen it where it can't be effectively removed as the content has already been passed around and a certain amount of people have already seen it.

sounds like a foolproof idea that will not at all backfire should the overton window shift somewhere nah the old geezers got it, 1h to remove content that is (sometimes) arbitrarily considered extremist

Why hasnt that bbc news image been removed? Looks pretty extremist to me.

Why can't they have at least one god damn tech expert there to advise them on how bad of an idea this is.

I think the absolute worst part of this, and lets 100% ignore any and all impracticality of it here When you drive extremist content out like this you force it to go underground and the mainstream will have less knowledge of it. This means it has more power because it's not nearly as known and media attention only serves to aid. It also doesn't actually STOP it from spreading effectively. When you let extremist content be generally out there and open, you let the public have a better understanding and knowledge of where said content comes from. Then there is the Streisand effect. Trying to destroy evidence of something can actually make it far more popular. It's so powerful that it may as well be part of the code of conduct of the entire internet.

Actually it wont just lead to it, it directly demands exactly that.

At the VERY least it should be like 48 hours but even that is pretty short.

This is complete and total bullshit and the reality is actually entirely the other way around. The greatest spread of right-wing extremism is happening in the open over Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. If you let it fester in the open you given them a chance to indoctrinate people. When it's forced underground, the spread is effectively stopped. Nobody is going to use Tor just to load the Daily Stormer, for instance.

I propose that the EU should be in charge of inventing the algorithm capable of quickly detecting such content with no error margin.

may as well just shut down the internet

Get Al Gore on the horn, the experiment is over

So how long until all these 'We don't understand the internet but we'll regulate it anyway' EU laws force the big internet giants like Google to just disable access to any EU IP rather than dealing with the clusterfuck the EU's laws create? I'm pretty sure if every EU IP that tried to access all these major sites got redirected to a 'We're sorry, but due to the draconian and misinformed regulations put in place by the European Union, your IP address has been refused access to our systems.' there'd be a massive uproar regarding reversing the dumbassery.

do these laws apply to IRCs and BBSs?

totally non-suspicious heart attacks my dude

The way they're worded makes it apply to any connected computers. They don't explicitly say "the internet"

Any website is pretty much forced to just completely ignore EU law or block the EU from accessing it. Complying with these laws really isn't an option

If you let it out in the open you also allow people like antifa to protest them. You let people drive it underground through public speech rather than government force. I agree that driving them underground can be a good thing, but NOT this way. Though I agree, driving them underground stops its spread. I did after all note "like this". For example Charlottesville 2.0 wasn't a failure because of some massive government intervention. It was a failure because of terrible planning on top of an extremely vocal counter-protest. Them being in the open exposed to the public and the public protesting ruined them. When they're forced underground by the government all they have to do is us coded language and the government won't even know it. As a side effect, the government starts attacking the wrong people and you end up seeing totally innocent people that were just telling a dumb meme getting charged for 'hate speech'. Because of this, false-alarms are dealt with while the actual assholes are untouched.

And they wonder why a country might contemplate leaving. I’ve never really paid attention to how the EU Parliament works but how do their constituents feel about all of this.

isn't something like 400 hours of content uploaded to youtube every minute? How do these morons expect this to be possible, let alone desireable or in any way not result in the extreme foam padding of every corner of the internet where the default is to destroy everything that could even have the vague potential to be deemed undesirable. And the automation of which will inevitibly nuke bsaically everything because coding something like that is almost entirely technically impossible, and is by defualt pretty scattershot, and will default to "if in doubt stamp it out". This is incompetence so profound it's bordering on totalitarian maliciousness. Even if that isn't the intent, i guarantee it's going to end up being used as such. And i mean every word of that.

And yet more censorship and stupid ideas from the EU. They wont stop until they have their own Chinese firewall, only it's Juncker the alcoholic saying what can and can't be shown.

The evolution of the Internet: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/242634/d6d49122-9795-4244-81ff-fae3ca805813/mindmee.jpg why did i make this