"Indeed, as Europe is pushing for more and more use of platforms to censor, it's important that someone gets them to understand how these plans almost inevitably backfire. Daphne Keller at Stanford recently submitted a comment to the EU about its plan, noting just how badly demands for censorship of "illegal content" can turn around and do serious harm.
Errors in platforms’ CVE content removal and police reporting will foreseeably, systematically, and unfairly burden a particular group of Internet users: those speaking Arabic, discussing Middle Eastern politics, or talking about Islam. State-mandated monitoring will, in this way, exacerbate existing inequities in notice and takedown operations. Stories of discriminatory removal impact are already all too common. In 2017, over 70 social justice organizations wrote to Facebook identifying a pattern of disparate enforcement, saying that the platform applies its rules unfairly to remove more posts from minority speakers. This pattern will likely grow worse in the face of pressures such as those proposed in the Recommendation."
- Date Published:04/17/2018
- Original Publication:Techdirt