Germany approved a new law this past week in which social media companies will be fined up to $53 million if they don’t remove hateful messages. Heiko Maas, Germany’s justice minister, argues that these fines will allow for a “free, open, and democratic society,” as reported by BBC News. But ironically, giving corporations an obligation to delete content leads us to a dangerous route of censorship, where freedom of content is infringed upon.
While eradicating harmful hate speech is a positive step in making the Internet a safer space for the common good, we have to ask if social media companies can be trusted to properly define what content is classified as hate speech on their platforms, particularly under the pressure this law generates.
With only 24 hours to delete illegal content and seven days to delete other material deemed inappropriate, social media companies would face pressure on a financial and temporal level to make the right calls and get the work done.
Bernhard Rohleder, Bitkom’s group manager, believes this pressure will lead to content that isn’t actually hate speech being removed. Sorting through billions of posts is “utterly impossible.” In other words, hasty decisions will be made, creating a slippery slope to unjust censorship.
In Canada, we follow the Canadian Human Rights Act that strictly prohibits any propaganda of hate speech or discrimination, while our Charter of Rights and Freedoms allows for freedom of media and press. This leaves for shaky ground when trying to ascertain whose rights come first when hate speech and freedom of speech butt heads, which makes taking down scrutinized posts on social media controversial at times.
Canada took a different approach from Germany with Section 13 a few years ago, in which users spreading hate speech via the Internet would be personally fined $10,000. However, this law has been highly contested. No one can seem to agree on whether the rights to human expression or the rights of those who feel they are targeted in speech should prevail. Section 13 was repealed in 2013.
Twitter and Snapchat already have access to our valuable data and play a crucial role in news, information, and other media production. With Facebook preying on our emotions for advertising revenue, too, do we really want to give these companies reason to vet and manipulate our content any further?
The Internet historically has been grounds for non-regulation. To me, it appears as though governments who would draft these kinds of policies want to wipe their own hands clean of doing any hands-on work to help regulate the Internet themselves.
Instead of being more diligent about penalizing the users who spread such content, they choose to place the blame squarely in the laps of social media companies for not regulating content well enough.
With Brexit, the election of Trump, and other anti-immigrant and destructive movements that have taken shape in recent times, it is no wonder we want to challenge their influence in our media-scape. However, we have to be careful not to follow the leader in bending to the other side of the political horse-shoe, so to speak. Doing so risks allowing censorship of our online speech.
