It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.
Really, it comes down to this: censorship is bad. Always.
If someone violates the law, get a court judgement. With the judgement in hand, take down that specific material.
Too much work? Tough...
Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?
If not you can get around the absolute statement “censorship is always bad” by just making more things illegal.
I think censorship is so clearly good in some scenarios that we would never think to even debate it. Like child porn.
Anything you want to censor has at least 5 stages:
Creator, first share (direct), second order sharing (public-ish website), third order sharing (indexed resharing), and finally the consumer wanting it presented.
In the way there are things we clearly want to censor for being awful, there are things we must never allow to be censored. Eg knowledge of a genocide.
But the solution kind of rights itself. To censor something you need as many actors as possible in that enormous graph of sharing nodes to clearly want to censor that thing we all agree we clearly want to censor. I.e. a public library doesn't censorship child porn because they are required to.
> Isnt taking down illegal content censorship?
So yes this is censorship, but 'illegal' content is too vague.
We want to know about the censorship beyond the natural baseline.
Censorship, usually, means the extraordinary request for powers to control the web of communications - in the context of what and why.
Everyone into childporn use uncensored models/sites deeply hidden from the public. Every single part of censorship is having a bad effect on the common world where normal people try to operate normally. The ones caught at this levels are not the interesting ones you want to catch.
Leaving aside your source for that assertion… I’m reminded of the anecdote of a patrolman pulling over a speeding car:
“But officer, all of them were speeding too, it’s not fair to give me a ticket and not them!”
“You ever go fishing?”
“Yes…”
“Did you catch ‘em all?”
…I am absolutely interested in catching both dumb and clever child pornography enthusiasts. The fact that there are clever ones doesn’t mean I don’t want to catch the dumb ones too.
If anything, I’m more interested in policing the obvious entry points—even if I can’t do anything at all about the hard core of seasoned offenders, it seems easier for people to resist the temptation to start down that path if they believe they’ll be held accountable as soon as they first cross the line. Everyone’s capable of everything: there’s virtue in helping honest people keep honest, as it were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Handley
Hentai depicting animated/drawn fake children means that 0 children were harmed, thus CSAM rules do not apply.
My guess is that slop generated CSAM images are NOT 'child sex assault' in any way. Are they icky? Uh, hell yeah. But it seems similar to hentai here. There's nobody being sexually assaulted. Hell, there is nobody at all - just a large multi-billion array of floats.
Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material. There is the root problem. In a world were we’re ruled by Epstein friends, this is probably not gonna happen though
>Just to be sure to point out the obvious here, I think the main police effort should be on catching the sources of such material.
Uhhh how about both? It is vital the material be taken down as well.
Enforcement budget is limited. If you have $1, would you rather spend it to fight crime, or to chase whatever gets distributed online?
Sure, but let's prioritize catching actual criminals, right? Somehow US started completely ignoring the actual criminals and demanding platforms to play police and not try to punish the actual sources of lawbreaking.
I think they should catch the criminals as well, like I already clearly stated. They just aren’t mutually exclusive.
How do you know if something is child porn?
I dont think it matters for the point im making. Child porn exists and should be censored.
What are you suggesting?
I think the point they might be trying to make is that there are religious and socially conservative groups that intentionally misclassify anything even remotely related to LBTQ topics as “pornography” so that anti-pornography laws can be used to silence anyone and anything that opposes their regressive views on sexuality, as one example. So it is a line that must be tread carefully.
Ah thanks that makes sense. And it indeed does not matter to the point Im making, which is some censorship, such as child porn, is good.
People can disagree on what that means, although I think there are some very obvious examples. Unless you think NOTHING called child porn should be censored because it might not actually be child porn, you can see how its a non factor.
It matters because if you can't determine if something is child porn, then you'll end up overblocking, so it doesn't matter if it "exists" and "should be censored"
But my point is some censorship is good. Such as child porn. We can disagree on what constitutes child porn in practice but you arent saying nothing should be censored right?
You do think there is such thing as child porn right? And that it should be censored?
Im not claiming more censorship is better. So I agree it could be overapplied. Im saying some censorship is clearly good.
I don’t think it’s inherently obvious that censorship is the right tool for CP.
I’d rather track people downloading CP than prevent them from being able to find it and thus not know who was more likely to be a child predator. Of course any negative outcomes without due process is problematic but there’s tradeoffs here.
Now people paying for CP creates an incentive to create CP so that’s definitely worth banning. Similarly there’s a justification for banning ownership of CP on the premise you’re going to catch child predators, but do we then lockup kids looking for people their age?
> It's not just Europe. DMCA takedowns in the US: no liability for taking down innocent content.
Isn't it under penalty of purjury?
Only in theory. If I remember correctly, the "penalty of perjury" is applied to only some small part of the claim, which makes it easy for all but the most blatantly malicious claims (and possibly even those) to get off scot free by claiming a honest mistake.
It's impossible for a victim to enforce this penalty, even if they hire a lawyer, in my experience.
soon with the age verification laws, the mass surveillance laws coming
we'll have a great wall of Europe ... my guess is that they're following the Russian / Chinese model.
banning of VPN is a matter of time.
then the days of free or anonymous internet is behind us.
you might have more success by thinking about things that are actually happening or about to happen instead of speculating so far.
We already have a great wall of Europe, it's implemented on the US side of the ocean by websites that are afraid to somehow get in GDPR trouble or (more likely) want to put pressure to repeal GDPR.
Did you know you can do that, by the way? You can block your website in Bumfuckistan citing bill AB1234 and if your site is big enough it puts pressure to repeal that bill no matter what it's about.
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> censorship is bad. Always.
Sure! Great slogan! Who can disagree! Now, let's define the terms?
What's censorship? Don't we all want some sort of censoring of content? If someone doxxxes me, posts revenge porn of me, threatens me and my family with credible threats of harm, shares my credit card numbers and bank/Bitcoin/Ethereum accounts, uploads all 400 of my password credentials and my mobile phone#, posts videos of them strangling my dog, wages a campaign to redefine my personal name into a perverted sexual practice...
Aren't those the sorts of things where we encourage the censorship of content? Do those fall outside of our definition of the term, so that "censorship" is bad, but "moderation" is good?
If someone gets a hold of "F/OSS" software and distributes it contrary to the licensing and violates that licensing, do we want their distribution censored or suppressed or, what's the term for good censorship? LLMs and generative AIs are moderated/constrained as a matter of course, and we've got the entire board here in an uproar over too much moderation, or too little? Because AI Slop Is Ruining Everything and please rein it in?
Our Founding Fathers espoused "Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion" but is that an unbounded, unchecked, lasseiz-faire freedom that they envisioned, or were there boundaries?
If you want to talk in the american context, its not like they wrote the constitution yesterday, there is hundreds of years of juriprudence on the issue.
To be sure its not an easy question, but we aren't starting from zero here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...
>The phrase is a paraphrasing of a dictum, or non-binding statement, from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s opinion in the United States Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States in 1919, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected free speech under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
This phrase was coined when the government, having arrested somebody for handing out leaflets opposing the draft in WW1, claimed that handing out leaflets opposing the draft was the moral equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater.
Rick Santorum was a public figure, his name is fair game.
It only took 13 minutes for an account to bulls-eye exactly the incident I was referring to.
Sure, "fair game", whatever, how can you "censor" a grassroots parody/mockery like this? Part of the game was, it wasn't actually stoppable in any meaningful fashion.
It seems rude, unethical, puerile even, to do this name-calling and dragging through the mud, if you will, and it was perpetrated/spearheaded, so to speak, by a journalist whose morals and platform encouraged that sort of tactic.
I don't think "censorship" was a solution to that incident, and since Mr. Santorum was a politician then "fair game" is a meaningless circumscription.
But perhaps the whole episode should reflect more on the character of the originator, rather than the target?