Racism and worse on Facebook

I was interested to read in yesterday's FT of a newly activated, law in Germany to the effect that the likes of Facebook will have to respond to reasonable requests from the German public to remove offensive material or be subject to massive fines.

The likes of Facebook are complaining that they are being asked to do the job of the legal system, that is to say to rule on the offensiveness of stuff which has been published on their systems. And they do have a point. Deciding whether or not this or that posting breaks the law is not part of their core business and they will be forced to play safe, with stuff at the margin of legality and decency being deleted along with the stuff which is more clearly out of order. An infringement of our freedom of expression!

However, I think I am with the new law. Given the volume of stuff being posted to social media, even a small proportion of offensive material is going to swamp a legal system, or even a civil service. And given that I do not care to live in a world where unpleasant people can give free reign to their unpleasant thoughts, direct push back to the companies concerned, by the general public, seems to be a reasonable way forward. Crowdfunding for decency, as it were. Let's keep the lawyers in reserve for important points of law and principle. Or, at the very least, out of the legal aid system.

And as for the costs which will be incurred by the likes of Facebook in sifting through all the requests that they are going to receive, a good proportion of which are not going to be reasonable, let the likes of Facebook pay. They are not charities and they make huge amounts of profit, so some of that profit can be diverted to cleaning up their act.

Would our not giving, say, our mining companies or power companies, carte blanche to blight our green and pleasant land, be a fair analogy or precedent?

Reference 1: see bottom right of page 6 of the main bit of the FT for Wednesday 3rd January.

Reference 2: ask Bing or Google about NetzDG. I must have missed it when it came around last summer.