The biggest problem/threat for free, uncensored social media (and the internet in general) will always be clear and blatant violations of the law, such as people posting CP. Currently big tech is allowed to judge these posts on their own as inappropriate and remove them. But we want to stop this behavior, where social media judges the content of our posts. So what can we do to have our cake and also get rid of CP?

In the past, I have proposed that social media should remove posts containing harassment, threats of violence etc. only if the person reporting them had proof from a court of law that declared said post as illegal. Or at the very least the one reporting should present evidence that they also have reported it to the police.

But this wouldn't work well enough when it comes to CP and potentially other crimes. My suggestion is, for a very narrow number of crimes, allow the platform itself to report the potential criminal posts/accounts to the relevant authorities, and only afterwards hide said posts or suspend the account, with permanent deletion taking place only after the person is found guilty.

@alyx you forgot one detail...

Hate speech is illegal in some places.

@LukeAlmighty @alyx another issue: host from a country that allows $content so that you can ignore the legal claims because they arent valid in $country. what now?

@kura @LukeAlmighty
This is kinda the reason why I'd rather have the internet as an independent nation of it's own.

But leaving that aside, in my view a platform has absolutely no obligation to abide by another country's laws if they don't have headquarters there. Any country that doesn't like that can either go fuck itself or try to censor the platform entirely and enjoy the backlash from it's own population.

So yes, if someone find a nation in which $content is acceptable and hosts a site from there, then tough luck for any other country or entity that doesn't like $content. They don't have a legal claim and neither should they. If I'm not obligated to follow British law when it comes to jaywalking, why should I follow British law when it comes to anything else?

@alyx @LukeAlmighty dont get me wrong, i agree with you.

i was just trying to say that binding a virtual medium that is mostly unbound by physical borders to that affortmentioned physical border is pretty much useless.

how would you define the origin of content?

the country where visitor looks at the site? hooray for ip region black lists
the country where server is located? hooray for slow requests (cdn were created bc of thhat)
the country where owner of server is located? makes the most sense - but is still weird

it all doesnt make any sense

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@kura @LukeAlmighty
Origin of content is place where poster made the content. If I post from Romania I must abide by Romanian laws and must be punished by Romanian laws if I break them. Not American laws, not British laws, not Chinese laws etc.
As for the platform, if content is legal in the region of the server and of headquarters, they have no obligation towards Romania. If they have a local server that functions for Romania, then they'll be obligated to remove content once authorities are notified of any breaking of the local law.

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@kura @LukeAlmighty
And if a Romanian can access content that is illegal here, through the internet, from a server in say China, were content is legal, though luck. Authorities only have the right to prosecute the Romanian (if simply viewing the content is illegal), and if they want, they can try to IP block the server. They don't have a right to tell the host what to do.

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