Posted by rzk 1 day ago
Trump sanctions the International Criminal Court and anyone who provides evidence to it, and now pro-Palestinian groups can't post videos of Israeli abuse on YouTube. The First Amendment is nowhere to be seen.
Germany took those lessons to heart. Speech and expression related to Nazism is heavily regulated and subjects you to imprisonment. Demonstrations/rallies are often banned. The Nazi party itself is banned. AfD is being monitored by intelligence agencies and might be banned in the future, etc. They do this defensively when groups demonstrate an "actively belligerent, aggressive stance" towards the democratic order. Because it's like pointing a gun at people in public - it's already violent even if you don't pull the trigger.
The intelligence agencies in charge of monitoring extremists have long had their own problems with extremism. The former head of the agency for "Protection of the Constitution" ("Verfassungsschutz") himself turned out to be a xenophobic right-wing extremist.[0] They have wide authority to spy on citizens based purely on their political views. Unless you really, really trust the agency doing that, this is not a good thing for society.
During the war in Gaza, the various restrictions on free speech were used to crack down on pro-Palestinian protesters. For many months after October 7th, many cities (such as Hamburg) issued blanket bans of pro-Palestinian protests. A Jewish German woman was even arrested for standing alone in a public square and holding up a sign about Gaza, because that was supposedly a violation of the ban on protests about Gaza.[1] All sorts of people have been banned from entering the country (including an elected member of the European Parliament, Yannis Varoufakis [2]), purely because of their views on Gaza. A major conference in Berlin was broken up by police because they allowed "banned" individuals to speak over Zoom (banned explicitly for their views on Gaza) [3]. When there's a major event going on in the world (which your government is involved in), and the government tells you you're not allowed to demonstrate about it, that's not a good thing.
These supposed protections have not done much of anything to prevent the rise of the far right in Germany. The "Alternative for Germany" (AfD) is a right-wing extremist party filled with "former" neo-Nazis (such as the leader of the party in the state of Thuringia, who used to write neo-Nazi articles under a pseudonym [4]). The AfD is now polling at 25%, making it tied for the most popular party in Germany. Even if the AfD doesn't get into government, the conservatives are imitating them more and more. The Chancellor recently said that German cities no longer look right (because you see too many foreigners). When asked what he meant, he responded, "Ask your daughter" (with the obvious implication). And no, the agency for protection of the constitution is obviously not going to tell him to stop saying things like this.
The German system of political censorship is not something that other countries should be imitating.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Georg_Maa%C3%9Fen
1. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/1/we-jews-are-just-arr...
2. https://www.newstatesman.com/diary/2024/04/cancelled-germany...
3. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pal%C3%A4stina-Kongress_in_Ber...
4. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B6rn_H%C3%B6cke#Pseudony...
To quote Gisy: "Die soll'n mal ihre Arbeit tun und die Verfassung schützen." - "They should do their work and protect the constitution" (referring to said agency and its name)
Nazis are just as entrenched in Germany as in the US, if not moreso.
nitpick - Youtube is bound by the US Constitution, it is the highest law of the land. 1A[1] is only about binding the government/congresses power though so youtube is not bound by 1A.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
The problem is that in practice, if you can't do YouTube, Facebook, Tiktok, INsta, etc... your speech will not be heard by anyone. It's like if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, the fact that it makes sound is irrelevant. So effectively, it amounts to censorship, even though the government potentially had no hand in it.
Now imagine someone in Trump administration pressured Google with a juicy contract, or the prospect of an expensive lawsuit, and the quid pro quo was dumping these videos that annoy "our Israeli friends". This kind of "pay to play" is at minimum corruption. It may also fall of short of constitutional guarantees for free speech. Ironically, it is exactly the same thing a lot of members of the Trump administration have accused Biden of doing (exhibit: the so called "Twitter Files" etc... ), although I don't believe this went anywhere in federal courts (am I wrong?)
I honestly don't know what the answer is. But I would not be surprised if in 50 years time, some of these large companies get regulated as "utilities" and are no longer able to yank "videos" from their platform just because they feel like it. And every time they "abuse" their powers, I feel like we get an inch closer to that onerous regulation.
When the government pressures companies to censor Constitutionally protected speech, that is a First Amendment violation. If it weren't, the First Amendment would have no practical meaning.
Perhaps not, but they could courier the evidence on a DVD to the Hague.
The lesson to draw from Gaza is that if you become inconvenient to "the people in power" tomorrow, you would meet the exact same fate.
Also, do you have any actual evidence of political debanking in the US? I can't find any references to it other than the propaganda of the current administration.
https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...
Make of it what you will.
https://www.wired.com/story/republicans-claim-biden-censored...
right.
e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918
There is nothing unique about what is happening now.
It is a statement of fact about the nature of the US state (and would apply to most western ones tbh). Freedom of Speech is simply a privilege that those in power grant you when it is convenient to do so. It will be taken away when expedient to do so.
The post I was replying to seemed to believe it was a novel situation.
Freedom of speech is meant to protect us from government censorship. Trump sanctions would fall into that category, but a social media site censoring what they don't want to host seems like fair game.
Yes, according to the article. That argument is made over and over in it, it’s hard to miss. “Forcing” doesn’t just mean directly requiring the action, it also means the threat of “this is not going to end up well for you if you don’t comply”. Of course, you can argue that Google could and should fight it, but that doesn’t change what the government is doing.
> but a social media site censoring what they don't want to host seems like fair game.
Again, the article makes it really clear they are doing this as the direct result of government actions.
I saw multiple references there to the government sanctioning groups and that YouTube took down videos based on the sanctions. That very well could be a loophole and a court might deem that a first amendment violation, but it isn't as simple as finding communications where the government directly requested those videos to be taken down.
> “Forcing” doesn’t just mean directly requiring the action, it also means the threat of “this is not going to end up well for you if you don’t comply”.
Which is definitely what the current administration does. If you need an example, look at the recent Jimmy Kimmel case.
I could see a court deciding this YouTube situation is a first amendment violation. I don't know of any law or precedent that makes it a clear cut case given what is described in the article.
Jimmy Kimmel is on the air today, having walked back his nonsense about the political allegiances of the Charlie Kirk killer. If the outcome is the political left in America is even fractionally less likely to incite violence against anyone they don't like the speech of, then that's a great outcome.
That it was even off, based on threats made by the government, is the point. Bad things by one party aren’t suddenly OK because a different party beat them.
I am as against the Republicans doing this stuff even 5% as much as the Democrats did, so I'm glad the Trump administration turns out to have not done anything to get him off the air.
1. The right was making all sorts of claims about the killer before they knew anything about him (this is a true statement).
2. Donald Trump is not acting at all like someone who's in mourning (this is also a true statement).
Neither of those statements is inflammatory or ignorant. They're both objectively true statements that pretty much everyone who follows the news is aware of.
Beyond that, you're ignoring the fact that ABC only "chose" to suspend Jimmy Kimmel's show after they were publicly threatened by Trump's FCC chair.
The article answers this:
> YouTube, which is owned by Google, confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the groups’ accounts as a direct result of State Department sanctions against the group after a review.
Sanctions were put in place and YouTube followed policy to not allow content from sanctioned groups. That sounds like a loophole, and could be found by a court to be a violation, but it isn't nearly as cut and dry as people here seem to be making it out to be.
Genocide in Gaza. It is described as a "genocidal campaign" implying systematic targeting of a national, ethnic, or religious group, prohibited under the 1948 Genocide Convention. This is what the ICC is investigating now.
War Crimes:
- Killing of Palestinian civilians, including children and families.
- Killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a violation of the Geneva Conventions protecting civilians and journalists in conflict zones.
- Destruction of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank, possibly constituting collective punishment or unlawful destruction of property under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
- Intentionally starving civilians by blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza, explicitly prohibited under Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and cited in ICC arrest warrants for Israeli officials.
- Torture of Palestinian detainees by Israeli forces, a violation of the UN Convention Against Torture.
The article also alleges complicity from the US authorities and corporations (YouTube, Google, MailChimp).
YouTube probably has far worse.
All US social media are bound to US foreign policy which enables Israel to continue it's invasion and systematic cleansing of Palestinians.
And if someone is not, then they have material for blackmail
Bing maps seems to be entirely pre-war as far as I can tell. In a way, that's kind of useful, as it can serve as a reference for what Gaza used to look like in A/B comparisons.
Google maps on the other hand has had at least some updates. Southern Gaza appears basically unscathed, but the Northern part shows some wide swathes where there's very little left but dust and rubble. I think Google did that update a couple months ago. Before that it was kind of hard to find any serious damage at all. (Jabalia refugee camp has shown as a ruin before that update.)
To some extent it's understandable that neither company wants to be updating all of their satellite images all the time. Still, the war has been going on for years and this is a place that a huge number of people really want to know what's going on. Updating slowly (Google) or not at all (Microsoft) at this point seem like deliberate policies, and I'd imagine they're probably highly contentious within those companies.