For those who don't know, France has a peculiar law. It is illegal to say "bad" things about Jewish people. It's framed as "anti-semitic speech" but since Arabs are apparently
not covered it is clearly about "Jews". Apparently it is the case, like a lot of places in Europe, that the government(s) are of the opinion that the citizenry is so immature and childlike as to not be able to see "bad" speech for what it is and decide for themselves how to deal with it. And so it is illegal to sell Nazi material (because that magically prevents folks from becoming
violent White Supremacists (as opposed to the more genteel and acceptable, sofa, governmental and university White Supremacists.
To this end the
French government has been coming after Twitter:
In January, a French court ruled that Twitter must hand over the details of people who had tweeted racist and anti-semitic remarks, and set up a system that would alert the police to any further such posts as they happen. Twitter has ignored that ruling, and now the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF) is suing it for €38.5m (£32.8m) for its failure.
The French government is of the opinion that a US based company must spend it's time providing the actual identities of persons who make "anti-semetic" remarks on Twitter
to the police. This amounts to exporting French law to other countries.
Twitter refused, arguing it was based in the United States and thus protected by the 1st Amendment's freedom of speech guarantees. A Parisian circuit court ruled against the social network, giving it two weeks to comply or face a fine of up to €1,000 (£849) for every day it doesn't. The UEJF want considerably more than that, says its president, Jonathan Hayoun, because "is making itself an accomplice and offering a highway for racists and anti-Semites".
Even if US law didn't protect such speech it would not be relevant. Twitter is not a French entity. As far as I know Twitter's servers are accessed
by french citizens. The actual burden here is on the French authorities to police it's citizenry not overseas entities.
As to the charge of "accomplice", what happens if a media outlet reports on "anti-semetic" speech and provides quotes of said speech? Are they too "accomplices" because they have provided an outlet for such speech?
"Twitter is playing the indifference card in not respecting the decision of 24 January," he added, when speaking to AFP. If the UEFJ wins its case, it plans to donate the money to the Shoah Memorial Fund. Twitter has said it will appeal the decision. It deleted many of the offensive tweets in January after the earlier court ruling, but has so far held back on using its country withheld content feature to pre-filter potentially offensive content, as it does with neo-Nazi posts in Germany.
I think Twitter has made a huge mistake in deleting the offending tweets
as well as providing filters in Germany for neo-nazi tweets. Twitter ought to simply block access to it's site from the IP ranges originating from those countries. Trust me, the world is FAR LARGER than France or Germany. Let the citizenship realize that the censorship laws they have are undemocratic and are
costing them access to a world of information.
Such a move would also be quite profitable for the web proxy business.
This is the problem with accepting the small censorship. Now you cannot talk "ill" of the Jew. Soon you cannot talk ill of any religion. The men at Pycon and Play Haven have found out just how far the speech suppressors are willing to go.
