NDM 28

Welcome to new era of global digital censorship

"It’s dangerous to ask tech companies to decide what’s legitimate free speech."

The article talks of laws being made to enable a more free and safe space on the internet, regulators in countries are creating laws to enable this.

• France has proposed banning so-called fake news during the country’s future elections

• Germany, new hate speech rules impose fines of up to €50 million on social media companies that don’t delete harmful content within 24 hours of being notified.

• Freedom of speech advocates warn of an Orwellian digital dystopia where government apparatchiks dictate what we can read and write on the web.

• Social media companies removed 59 percent of suspected hate speech across Europe last May compared with just 28 percent in December 2016, according to a recent EU-wide study.

The European Commission issued their biannual report talking of how Facebook, Google and Twitter are handling the hate speech lurking in social media’s darker parts and through this if they seem to be not doing enough will lead to EU policymakers complaining of companies not doing enough to tackle the problems and probably threaten them with regulations. 

US lawmakers are also following the same route in tackling extremists and terrorists online- prior to this had already targeted Big Tech last year for allowing Russian-backed content to be widely shared online during the 2016 U.S. election. Facebook's executive stated to "fixing" the internet as a New Year's resolution, though some sought of help had created a 59% crackdown on such tasteless posts. This shows an example of monitersation, the ability for institutions to censor and picking out specific things they deem unacceptable.