Google schließt sich den Angriffen auf Großbritannien wegen der freien Meinungsäußerung im Internet an

„Google has accused Britain of threatening to stifle free speech in an escalation of US opposition to online safety rules.

The regulator Ofcom is planning to prevent posts going viral that include “potentially illegal” material, such as hate speech or calls to violence.

However, Google warned that proposals to require tech giants to detect and suppress such “potentially illegal” posts risk “undermining users’ rights to freedom of expression”.

Google said the measures would “necessarily result in legal content being made less likely to be encountered by users, impacting users’ freedom of expression, beyond what the [Online Safety] Act intended”.

Ofcom rejected the claims this weekend, insisting there was “nothing in our proposals that would require sites and apps to take down legal content”.“

Resist this with everything you have.

„Donald Trump’s allies have repeatedly criticised Britain’s pioneering legislative attempt to curb abuse and other harms online.“

I cant think why Trumps allies would criticise legislation that tried to curb hate speech and voilence

While I think we should all push back against things like this, Google are already fine with moderating away content *they* don’t like, so it is perfectly clear they don’t give a shit about free speech.

I can’t remember Google publicly attacking or lobbying against China’s censorship when Google operated there. Funny that.

It’s insane that this sub seems to be fine with the fact that we have no free speech in this country.

They are correct as the OSA requires platforms to pro-actively remove priority harmful content and also to prevent content harmful to children from going into recommender systems.

This is prior restraint censorship. You are censored before even being able to publish.

The only way you can do that proactively is with mass AI and algorithmic moderation. This moderation uses keywords and perceptual hash matching image recognition.

For some types of content like CSAM it’s very good and accurate. For others like ‘what is a public order offence, or terrorism, or misogyny that are highly contextual and difficult to judge it’s awful.

The OSA created mass censorship where all the penalties on firms are for non compliance and the only free speech duty is a legally weak duty to ‘have particular regard to free expression.

There is a legitimate argument that the lines about what is potentially harmful in the OSA are too fuzzy, and there needs to be more guidance and an assurance that good faith efforts won’t result in a big fine.

But there really isn’t an argument that content providers shouldn’t be responsible for the content they publish. This type of material is *already* illegal, and if I print out leaflets and hand them out in the town square I’ll get fined. Why should that be different when it’s published online?

There’s a different question about whether „incitement to religious hatred“ should be illegal in the first place – in my opinion that gets too close to suppressing criticism of religious ideologies.

Tech companies do have a responsibility to manage the content they publish, and they constantly try to shirk it because it costs them money.

You only have to see the lack of censorship on scam websites that litter Facebook adverts to know they and Google don’t give a stuff as long as it pays money. I’ve tried countless times to complain about offensive adverts (to me) on Google mail and they do precisely nothing.

As much as Trump wouldn’t like it, the internet like other forms of communication should have rules governing what is acceptable. Like other forms of communication there has to be a boundary between free and unacceptable speech.