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teux | 3 years ago

> Yet people blame Twitter when someone posts a tweet with hate speech. This is a dangerous direction for the world to be moving in.

Not to diminish the issue, but this is mostly an American problem as far as I see it. I realise these are also American companies, but conflating the entire world to be in danger is a bit disingenuous imo.

MANY European countries (speaking from a Scandinavian perspective) don’t suffer from this, and while there’s a danger of American policies trickling down, that has been severely diminished in the past decade as there’s a movement of all of us (that I’ve seen) sort of re-evaluating our admiration of the US that was built in the 90’s - 00’s.

From the outside this isn’t a direction the world seems to be moving in. Just more crazy US spiralling.

discuss

order

raxxorraxor|3 years ago

In Germany you can get your house searched for a tweet. Not for terrorism or any egregious crime, a viral example was because a politician has been called a penis. I believe the UK has similar issues. This is far worse than the situatuation in the US.

Not the smartest choice to make yourself identifiable, but such legislative blunders still need to be corrected.

I don't believe a house search is some trivial policing. I think the state failed again to protect reasonable rights. And yes, the hate speech legislation of Germany should be adapted to the 21st century. This won't happen politically, because society currently loves pointing fingers at small missteps. A wrong joke and you get a shit storm.

It is the usual suspects, you hate women or are a racist are the most common accusation. People really start forgetting what these qualifiers really mean. And I believe they get far too much political support and that this isn't a healthy development.

mrj|3 years ago

Eh I mean, there's been a rise of extremism all across Europe. It's not quite accurate to say it's an exclusively American thing. Hate speech is rising and there's a case to be made that it's because extremists find each other on the internet (Doctorow calls it a "jihadi recruitment tool" in the article).

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2021-02-...

blue039|3 years ago

...what if the rise in so-called "extremism" is a direct result of government policy leading to poorer outcomes for the average person. If you study history people tend to become tribal not long after life gets hard. If I was a government think tank I'd surely blame the internet long before I blamed my rent seeking laws that inordinately effect the average worker.

logifail|3 years ago

> there's been a rise of extremism all across Europe

There's certainly a rise in talking about stuff being "extremist", but how much of this is genuine?

The incentives (more outrage, more views, more clicks, more ads) don't exactly encourage honest reporting or even discussion on this.

teux|3 years ago

Definitely. Might have been unclear but I was trying to speak specifically about the “blame the platform not the people” mentality I was responding to.

Fully in agreement extremism is on the rise and the internet aids this.

thedrbrian|3 years ago

be interesting to graph that against immigration numbers......

brantonb|3 years ago

A counterpoint is that if the companies running these platforms are run by American companies, then their efforts to combat hate speech will be disproportionately focused on English language and American hate speech. This can allow it to flourish elsewhere.