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Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies have been given an ultimatum by the European Union: rid your platforms of hate speech or face legal consequences.
European regulators have been pushing social media firms to remove racist and violent posts from their platforms in a timely manner for years. Their patience is running out.
Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google have all pledged to do more. In May 2016, they promised to review a majority of hate speech flagged by users within 24 hours and to remove any illegal content.
But the European Commission, EU's top regulator, said Thursday they are still failing to act fast enough. It said it would pass laws allowing the EU to impose punishments on companies that fail to act.
"The situation is not sustainable: in more than 28% of cases, it takes more than one week for online platforms to take down illegal content," said Mariya Gabriel, the EU's top official in charge of the digital economy and society.
The Commission said it will consider implementing new laws to tackle the problem if the online platforms fail to "take swift action over the coming months."
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/28/technology/hate-speech-facebook-twitter-europe/index.html
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Friday September 29 2017, @10:46PM
It wouldn't work. Yes it DID work and a hub and spoke system like FIDO and the other FTNs would have some advantages. But note carefully that Usenet was also a similar design and was already becoming an unmanageable Hell of spammers and trolls before Eternal September happened.
I think the difference was, especially on the non-FIDO nets, firm lines of control and a willingness to ban so plain it almost never needed to be used. Usenet never managed to make the Usenet Death Penalty stick hard enough to deter. And I doubt any new revival of such a system would manage to either if it grew beyond a size where one person could exercise final veto power.
So balkanization, even if not along national borders. A single world spanning like Twitter or Facebook is rapidly becoming impossible.