The New York Times reports Britain Proposes Broad New Powers to Regulate Internet Content.
Britain proposed sweeping new government powers to regulate the internet to combat the spread of violent and extremist content, false information and harmful material aimed at children. The proposal, announced on Monday, would be one of the world’s most aggressive actions to rein in the most corrosive online content.
The recommendations, backed by Prime Minister Theresa May, take direct aim at Facebook, Google and other large internet platforms that policymakers believe have made growth and profits a priority over curbing harmful material. The government called for naming an internet regulator with the power to issue fines, block access to websites if necessary and make individual executives legally liable for harmful content spread on their platforms.
Facebook Invites Regulation
On Saturday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post entitled: The Internet Needs New Rules.
I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what’s best about it — the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things — while also protecting society from broader harms.
From what I’ve learned, I believe we need new regulation in four areas: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.
Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree. I’ve come to believe that we shouldn’t make so many important decisions about speech on our own. So we’re creating an independent body so people can appeal our decisions. We’re also working with governments, including French officials, on ensuring the effectiveness of content review systems.
Self Serving Bullsheet
ZeroHedge hits the nail squarely on the head in UK To Fine Facebook, Google For Hosting Terrorist Content.
The cat and mouse game between the world’s largest media company and global governments continues.
Just days after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called for more government regulation in an attempt to mollify the company’s growing critics, while seeking to squash smaller competitors as well as give governments a legitimate reason to enforce censorship and chip away at freedom of speech in order to comply with Facebook’s mysterious “community standards”, the company and its tech peers are facing a new UK law that will impose “substantial” fines, or even ban companies if they don’t act swiftly enough to remove content that encourages terrorism and child sexual exploitation and abuse.
Additionally, hinting that Facebook is now openly seen as a media empire instead of merely a distributor of content, the companies’ directors could also be held personally liable if illegal content is not taken down within a short and pre-determined time-frame, the UK’s Home Office said, which is also seeking to tackle the spread of fake news and interference in elections.
In short: wholesale government censorship under the guise of cracking down on the private sector.
Ding Ding Ding
We have a winner, but let’s lay it on the line more clearly.
Zuckerberg made billions promoting sleaze, selling user data, and with few if any data controls.
The best way to stay on top is to prohibit any other company from doing the same.
Thus, all of a sudden Facebook proposes to be an angel. It will even offer services that undoubtedly will cost money in one way or another at a future time.
Meanwhile, the government will get to decide what is fake news and isn’t. Zuckerberg is more than happy to get in bed with the government as long as it makes him more money and stifles the competition.
Fitting Irony
The irony in this madness is Zuckerberg posted his op-ed in the Washington Post, one of the biggest purveyor of false news on Russia and Trump in general.
Beware
Please be wary of wolves disguises as sheep who then demand government protection from themselves.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Capital is rules.
FB and Google have been in bed with the NSA from the get go, as the major focus of the NSA is finding money for a broke govt. Binney and other whistleblowers have made this clear. As ZH noted, everything else is a disguise that is lapped up by the easily distracted masses.
“Fake News Paranoia”
Actually, it is truth paranoia. They are afraid their false narrative won’t be believed, as people do have access to the truth on the internet. I stopped watching the MSM news programs, as what they are selling is a narrative. Someone once posted a video of a news story as shown on numerous TV stations. The copy was virtually identical.
I am aware of comments by Alan Dershewitz, but on KTLA News, he does not exist, as his comments do not fit their narrative.
Newsguard is a scam. It exists to protect promoted narratives, not the truth.
All compliance initiatives favor the big. Scale always makes compliance more burden some for smaller endeavours. But costs is not even the biggest consideration. If you are large enough, you can always get away with mere slaps on the wrist. Compliance is the opposite of freedom. Though sometimes necessary, it is virtually always anti-competitive.
Capitalism has ways to solve these problems. Make the creator of the data the owner, not the platform. False use and sales would be theft. Knowingly publishing false information is reprehensible and the creator can be held legally liable for any losses incurred by acting on that false information.
I’m hearing more about rules than about capital.
Outside of mathematics and formal logic, there are no true and false. It’s just opinion and degrees. By the time someone is competent enough to even pretend to understand leading edge math and logic, the last thing they need to differentiate false from true, is some government and it’s privileged twit hangers on and profiteers “helping” them.
Free speech means just that. No more restrictions on the sounds emanating from ones vocal tract, or pen, or keyboard, than what a songbird faces. Those who feel like believing what someone says, can do so. Those who don’t…, well don’t. Over time, people figure out who is trustworthy and who is not. Giving incentives to not lie.
Noone, ever, aside from the totalitarian juntas themselves and their privileged profiteering classes, benefit from some official truth commission. Nor from half literate ambulance chasers running around pretending to be useful for something.
They’re all liars.
The problem of this era is that a lie only needs to be believed. At the same time, your liberties are stripped, our economies socialized for the benefit of the few & crony, all under the guise of being told how good it is for you. Party doesn’t matter.
Now we know the real reason behind the ‘Fake News’ mantra.
The rules should be if you are publishing online content you can be liable.
“The rules” should simply not be. There should be no more rules governing what humans say and write, than ditto birds.
Like in America, back when it was still sorta-kinda free; before the “fire in a crowded theater” idiocy that the dupes have been told to cheer on as some sort of victory of anything but emergent totalitarianism. With the only difference being: Throw out any “libel” law nonsense as well.
Calm down everybody – this is mountain from molehill stuff.
Firstly, Facebook is dead – the kids are gone and the oldies are using it less and less. The demise of Facebook will have nothing to do with the U.K. forcing it to act like a media platform instead of a messaging platform – it will be superseded by another social media platform sooner or later. We heard the same doom and gloom stuff about MSFT in the 1990’s and early 2000’s – now they are a business services provider and their once dominant operating system is a small and relatively unimportant part of the stack.
As far as suppression of free speech, it is infuriating that the left has become the purity of speech party – Sam Harris and Bill Maher have been railing on about this for years. This is a far cry from targeting terrorist or child-dangerous material, and it is disingenuous to mix the two.
Not growing in double digit figures is death in the Bay Area – as soon as your stock options are moribund you lose all your top talent and the glide path steepens and becomes a death spiral.
“.. it is infuriating that the left has become the purity of speech party..”
You mean, like everywhere else where The Left has ever been in power? From The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, to North Korea and China?
This isn’t about Facebook or its viability. This is about governments moving toward more and more censorship while supposedly only curbing excesses, which of course will be defined by government. That’s not “mountain from molehill stuff.”
I had friends and family behind the “Iron Curtain” when the Soviets still had a iron hand.
They would joke ” We have plenty of free speech here. As long as you agree with the government, you can talk as much as you want!”
That’s what life under the jackboot of a government gets you.
Once upon a time, liberals believed in free speech. That no longer seems to be true.
Simple answer – opportunistic.
They still do: Freedom to say that which they want you to say. That’s all the free anything any of them ever believed in. The ones who genuinely believed in free speech, as well as freedom in general, were always anarchists/libertarians.
“Britain proposed sweeping new government powers ….”
That’s what governments, and their courts of privileged totalitarian terror state profiteers, do. It’s all that they do. Ever.