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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 10 2019, @06:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the Free-speech-is-priceless dept.

[Ed. Note: Behind the invective and political slant in this story is a subject that I think could lead to a fruitful discussion. "The price of liberty is constant vigilance." SoylentNews is a little corner of the 'net that tries to provide a venue for open discussion. Are our days numbered or threatened? What can be done? Just keep doing what we are doing?]

France has turned into one of the worldwide threats to free speech

Just over one year ago, French President Emmanuel Macron came to the United States to import two potentially invasive species to Washington. One was a tree and the other was a crackdown on free speech. Ironically, soon after the tree was planted, officials dug it up to send it to quarantine. However, the more dangerous species was his acorn of speech controls, a proposal that resulted in rapturous applause from our clueless politicians.

While our politicians in the United States may applaud Macron like village idiots, most Americans are hardcore believers in free speech. It runs in our blood. Undeterred, however, Macron and others in Europe are moving to unilaterally impose speech controls on the internet with new legislation in France and Germany. If you believe this is a European issue, think again.

Macron and his government are attempting to unilaterally scrub out the internet of hateful thoughts. The French Parliament has moved toward a new law that would give internet companies like Facebook and Google just 24 hours to remove hateful speech from their sites or face fines of $1.4 million per violation. A final vote is expected next week. Germany passed a similar measure last year and imposed fines of $56 million.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Wednesday July 10 2019, @07:16PM (3 children)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Wednesday July 10 2019, @07:16PM (#865467) Journal

    Google/Facebook and the government are both threats to free speech.

    I say: let them fight each other. Politicians make unreasonable demands for the snooping/advertising corps to police user-submitted and algorithmically generated material. The corps resist because of financial reasons and also fail repeatedly due to the sheer technical impossibility of it all. This generates scandals and blowback and makes them all look dumb, while causing inconvenience for the poor fools who actually use these services, possibly turning them away for good.

    What more can you hope for?

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by shortscreen on Wednesday July 10 2019, @07:20PM (2 children)

    by shortscreen (2252) on Wednesday July 10 2019, @07:20PM (#865469) Journal

    Macron and his government are attempting to unilaterally scrub out the internet of hateful thoughts.

    Goog/FB are also not "the internet"

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday July 10 2019, @08:18PM (1 child)

      by looorg (578) on Wednesday July 10 2019, @08:18PM (#865481)

      That depends on whom you ask. My parents more or less believe that the Google is the Interwebz and I have grown tired of trying to correct them so I'm just rolling with that now. I tried to sneakily redirect their browser to DDG but they noticed that the logo wasn't the same and there was much lamenting. They still have not noticed that they are not running Chrome anymore so there are apparently limits to everything. Still if the Google is missing the interwebs are down, and I get one of them family support calls you can't put on hold ...

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 10 2019, @10:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 10 2019, @10:26PM (#865537)

        Google almost actually "is" the Internet because they have a near monopoly on search and videos. Most people use one of 4 sites: Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, Google, and Youtube. Thus, to the majority of people, those four are the de-facto Internet.