Win for Free Speech! Australia Drops Global Takedown Order Case
www.eff.orgNo single country should be able to restrict speech across the entire internet. That's why EFF celebrates the news that Australia's eSafety Commissioner is dropping its legal effort to have content on X taken down across the globe. This development comes just days after EFF and FIRE were granted official intervener status in the case.
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As an Australian I am happy we are protected by this form of government censorship, making it harder for them to sweep other atrocities under the rug.I do wish however social media would be more active in restricting graphic content.Edit: I read the article again, sadly it was a voluntary retraction of the take down order, not a law preventing them.
I do not have any obligation to follow the laws in a foreign country. It doesn’t matter how graphics or controversial it is. A country takedown order should be country specific. It is an overreach to try to do it world wide.
I think it’s overreach inside the county too. There has been far too many events in recent history that have been surpressed because it would undermine the peoples view of the ruling government
Well that isn’t something a foreign power should decide. That is up to the Australians
This isn’t necessarily good
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/australia-drops-court-action-against-musks-x-over-church-stabbing-posts-2024-06-05/
This article doesn’t say what X was being sued for.
Musk should have removed that regardless. He’s simply leaving it up because it’s profitable for him. This is actually a win for him because it means he doesn’t get any responsibility of moderation.
The content is irrelevant. One country should not censor the entire web. I don’t care how terrible it is. It is easy to say a stabbing is bad but what about a criticism or a leader or hard discussions.
I don’t live in Australia but yet they were trying to enforce there legislation on me. Australia is very much not the only country that is guilty of this. It is one win in the bigger picture.
If a international platform wants to host something questionable they should have the right to. If it violates local law they just remove it from the specific country.
What if its Child porn or revenge porn?
Or a video of your wife being tortured or raped? Suddenly its not ok? What happens if the family of the victims don’t want it up? They don’t want to be reminded of that shit. You say this only because it doesn’t affect you in this case and it’s not your family
it DOES affect me because I’m in Australia, and we don’t want copycat dickheads. We don’t want school shooting 5x a week, and we don’t want organisations like the NRA coming to australia and using this shit as an excuse for everyone to arm themselves. The worlds worst extremists dickheads love pushing videos like this because it helps their agenda.
There’s no incentive for Elon to take any of this stuff down either… It profits him. It’s funny that people like Elon have a cry about people tracking his plane and gets what he wants and everyone calls him a nutjob… But, then he profits from stuff that has REAL consequences that affects everyone, and he is defended.
What about the US where Trump used inflamatory language on social media which led to an attempt to the overthrow of the government.
Lets not pretend, this is about freedom of speech. This is explicitly because its not profitable to censor posts. Elon can pretend like he’s the good guy in this case and keep all the people who want it to be kept up, and all the people who want it down. Why do you think X seems to be the preferred platform for bigots and nazi’s? It would be good if we could see how much profit they were generating for him
There needs to be some international rules about some of this stuff. I’m not saying blanket ban for everything, but, there should at least be rules where people are harmed, torture, or violence is encouraged
I am not saying that this content should be allowed or disallowed. All I am saying is that one shouldn’t have jurisdiction over any country. If they want to have it removed via official government channels. Just don’t try to force it world wide.
Also you are falling into the trap of censorship. Once you start mandating it it is a very slippery slope. It starts with public safety and ends with attacks on journalism. I can’t and shouldn’t control what happens in Australia but in my own country I will continue to support free speech as it is critical for democracy.
Additionally Elon was not even mentioned in this article. I’m sure he knew about it but he didn’t comment publicly. Just because you hate some billionaire doesn’t mean he plotting.
“Didn’t comment publicly”? Is this a joke comment or are you really this uninformed? The guy was constantly tweeting about it:
April 19
April 19
April 20
April 20
April 22
April 22
April 22
April 23
April 23
April 24
April 28
May 10
May 11
June 5
And this is only the times I could find him tweeting about it on his personal account. It doesn’t include any of his multiple retweets of other people who were arguing in support of his position (including comparisons to Nazi Germany and Hitler), or any statements he gave directly to the media. It is rather ironic that you went after the previous person for some supposed “hatred” of Musk - maybe we need to be questioning your bias as well, considering you just straight up lied about his involvement in the saga.
It’s NOT a slippery slope. You just define the bounds lol
International laws already exist for a lot of things
Again, if its your family, suddenly people like you care.
It’s like freedom to carry guns in the US… That is working out SO WELL, and the NRA will argue that once you take away guns, it’s a slippery slope, the government will control you, etc. None of that happens.
The slippery slope argument doesn’t really work well, and throughout the years, people have used it to argue against everything from seat belts, to restrictions on kids toys
Each country is free to create whatever rules they want for their country, but for people that don’t live in those countries then there is nothing more to say. There can be voluntary international cooperation (like there is with copyrighted works) but if I live somewhere that isn’t part of that international cooperation then like it or not, I am free to violate your laws all day.
Exactly
Also I think this kind of behavior could strain international relations.
I agree, but I think it is more complex than that. There are limits to free speech already. I agree that no one country should be able to censor others, but what about content that is illegally produced in that country.
So if terrorist training videos were made in Australia, could banning them from distribution mean they could prosecute fitter for distributing them? How about csam? How about China prosecutes for ibfro about Tiananmen. What about CSAM?
So objectively there are things some countries would want banned, but not all. Some that all might agree to ban. Classifying it might help but might that be more of an invasion of privacy? The web is built on lots of open protocols that assume good actors and no malicious intent. We are now adding protocols that increase privacy and security on top. Even something like the fediverse is a good example of the trade off between being public and being anonymous and being private. You can’t have it all.
Geoblocking is a better solution. Just don’t store that content in Australia and block it from coming in.
Everything on the internet is effectively permanent anyway
Holding social media companies responsible for the content they host is a better solution in my view. We hold newspapers responsible. Why not social media? Yes, moderation is expensive but they are wildly profitable, musk aside.
They don’t need to moderate everything, as the content volume is high, but they certainly could manually moderate all content that reaches a certain threshd. They choose not to and hide behind their users sharing as a reason.
That would be very bad for free speech. Companies would not take any chances and would remove any content that could remotely bring them trouble. I’m sure there would be lots of bad takedowns and it would be abused just like the DMCA.
Depending on private companies for free speech is bad for free speech in and of itself. So either course has negatives, which means the course with leqsr negative outcomes is best. If they over moderate, they lose users. If they undermoderate they face fines. I’m sure the market force will mean they do whatever is most profitable.
The eSafety commission argued that “well everyone just uses VPNs anyway so it won’t matter”