Size Matters

I found this interesting:

The owners of porn streaming site Pornhub are profiting from “revenge porn” and failing to remove videos once reported, BBC News has been told.

One woman, “Sophie”, said she felt “violated” after a video featuring her was viewed hundreds of thousands of times when it was uploaded online.

Campaign group #NotYourPorn said such content allowed Pornhub owners MindGeek to make greater advertising revenues.

And not for the reasons you filthy-minded people are thinking. Tsk!

Back when The Economist was written by experienced adults rather than noodle-armed hipsters called Jeremy, they ran a decent article on the perils of being number one in any industry. They pointed to McDonald’s being the poster child for all complaints about junk food, while Burger King was barely mentioned. Coca-Cola would get bad press about everything from brainwashing kids to murders in Latin America, but few such claims were made against Pepsi. Environmental campaigns in the US tend to focus on ExxonMobil rather than Chevron, just as Shell seems to be the main target for European protesters. When politicians and campaigners are on a supermarket bashing spree in the US, it’s always Wal-Mart which gets singled out, never Publix. The article listed several examples and said that on occasion it pays to be number two.

There are probably at least half a dozen giant porn sites out there, but Pornhub is the biggest and best known, so that’s why it’s been singled out here. I confess I had to do several weeks of selfless research to bring you this information (ahem), but most porn clips are not exclusive to one site. In other words, this particular piece of revenge porn would have been shared across dozens of sites, many of whom would not take the approach of Pornhub:

Pornhub said it “strongly condemns” revenge porn.

It added it had “the most progressive anti-revenge-porn policy in the industry”.

Revenge porn is pretty disgusting, to be honest. I know a young woman who split from some shithead of a boyfriend and he started posting videos of her all over the internet, and contacting people on her social media accounts. She had to go into hiding while her brother-in-law trawled the internet finding where they were hosted and asking for them to be removed. Of course, it is monumentally stupid for a young woman to allow her boyfriend to video her during sex, but young people do daft things, are easily manipulated, and nowadays everyone walks around with an HD video camera in their pocket.

So while Pornhub is coming in for some flack here, at least they appear to be doing what they can to avoid hosting revenge porn; I expect lesser-known sites are quite happy to do so. So why am I sticking up for Pornhub here? Well, as I explained before, one day we’ll all be on Pornhub as it’ll be the only free speech platform left.

“I’m on there for the message boards, honestly!”

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Playdates

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, a widow in her early forties. She said she’d tried online dating but found it a complete sewer, and the men either looked as though they ought to be on Crimewatch, or they looked half-normal but sent her photos of their dicks. She said the biggest problem was she had no idea who the people were she was chatting to, and when she met one or two of them they turned out to be completely different.

I could sympathise. I’ve met at least two women online who for the first month or so offered up Version 1: pleasant, mature, intelligent, and serious about a relationship. Suddenly Version 1 was replaced with Version 2: unpleasant, immature, dumb, and showing no sign they were even capable of having a proper relationship. I was left wondering what the hell happened to Version 1.

When I was in Florida having my recent bout of troubles, my sister made a good point. She said when she was single she wanted to see potential partners in the context of their everyday lives, i.e. with friends, family, and colleagues. For instance, if a man says he’s divorced, does he say the same thing in front of his friends? Then you’ll see who they really are. The problem with online dating is it allows people to play-act, detached from the realities of their everyday life (which is a problem with the internet and social media in general). This doesn’t mean everyone on there is play-acting, but if they are it’s hard to figure out.

It also means the medium attracts those who play-act in real life, and there are reasons people do this. For example, if a foreign woman in her twenties marries a westerner in his forties for the chance of a nice life abroad, and then later becomes self-sufficient, I can imagine the knowledge that she sold her body for a passport weighs heavily upon her. In ten or fifteen years she might have learned English, earned a degree, and got a half-decent job but she won’t ever be able to forget how all this was made possible – especially when she meets other women who didn’t take that shortcut. I can imagine it’s a bit like an athlete who’s used steroids or someone who cheated on an exam: they’ll be living with that decision their whole lives. So they make up a story: I did it for love, despite knowing him for a week and only being able to communicate using an electronic translator. He was very handsome and didn’t look his age, only please don’t make that face when I show you the photos. He was very charming, at least up until the wedding day. I never wanted to leave my country, but somehow my profile ended up on a dating site aimed at foreigners. I’ve heard them all.

If you tell the lie often enough you’ll start to believe it, and eventually you’ll forget it was ever a lie. The problem is, you’ll then use this technique to deal with all the inconvenient facts of your life and before you know it your default setting is to play-act. And if that’s who you are, then online dating sites hold an obvious attraction. You can enjoy being the person you pretend to be until you get found out, then you block the person and move on to the next. My guess is the online dating sites are absolutely chock-full of people like this, both men and women, who don’t know truth from fiction, who the hell they really are, or what they want. I suspect a lot of these also don’t have a whole lot of friends in real life, and if they do they keep their online partners well away from them.

Ultimately, only time will tell you who someone really is. That might take months or years, but the chancers on the internet seem to get found out in a matter of weeks, generating an enormous churn (which is good for the site owners). Given online dating is the way most people meet each other these days, it makes the whole process of finding someone absolutely exhausting. I expect people are already starting to regret the MeToo movement banned people chatting each other up at work. They might even regret that they stopped going to church.

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Kim Karmeghan

Sky News reports breathlessly on the scandal that is Meghan Markle getting abused on social media. My immediate thought is why are members of the royal family using social media? The entire point of the royals is they are not like the plebs, they exist – in theory anyway – on a higher plane. That’s why they get to live in a palace. So what the hell is this?

Earlier this month, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex created their own Instagram account, under the name SussexRoyal. It features professional photographs of their work and has already amassed over four million followers.

However, it has attracted criticism online and some people attacked its branding, which appeared to feature an ‘M’ with a tiara above it.

Yes, famous people will attract nutters wherever they go, and this is especially true for the royals. This is why their public life is carefully managed, or at least it was. Opening an Instagram account is the equivalent of turning up unannounced on the terraces at the local football ground.

An account with over 14,000 followers almost exclusively posts criticism of Meghan, sharing negative news articles and conspiracy theories.

Since when have royals anywhere in any era not been the subject of gossip, speculation, and conspiracy theories by the masses? That’s part of their role, I thought. The difference is that in previous eras they would have risen above it, remaining unaware or at least indifferent to what the peasants were saying about them. My advice to Mr and Mrs Wales is to do the same thing now.

Message boards 4chan and 8chan were found to host orchestrated attacks against Meghan. The sites allow users to post anonymously – without needing to create an account or even pick a username – thus eliminating any threat of accountability.

I’m pretty sure Meghan Markle doesn’t use 4chan, so what Sky are complaining about is that people can get together and say bad things about her. Twenty years ago these conversations would have taken place in a pub, equally anonymously for all practical purposes. Now things have shifted online, but the thing which has really changed is the royals have decided to wade into the social media sewer. As the name suggests, it’s not for the likes of them. They cannot claim a divine right to a life of taxpayer-funded privilege while at the same time demand to be treated equally by the plebs if they’re silly enough to get down among them. The royals need to stay off social media, or quit being royals. Otherwise they might find it’s not just trolls on the internet who take a disliking to them.

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Problematic Personal Preferences

I’ve written before about how dating sites and apps are one of the few remaining places where people are free to discriminate, and gay men appear to be particularly unenlightened. Here’s an article addressing the same thing:

Dating applications can allow users to fall into their own racial biases while searching for a partner, a new study says.

Meaning, people have dating preferences. What a revelation.

But in their study, researchers from schools like Cornell University say the “sexual racism” that plagues apps like Grindr, Tinder and Bumble can be stamped out with a few simple changes.

User preferences can be stamped out by not giving people any choice.

The end goal, the study says, is to promote more diverse pairings on the dating sites.

The ultimate goal of dating sites is miscegenation, eh? And there was me thinking they were there to make money for the owners by giving users a service they want.

Jevan Hutson, lead author of the study, said …“Intimacy is very private, and rightly so, but our private lives have impacts on larger socioeconomic patterns that are systemic.”

Your love lives must contribute towards the greater good of a mixed-race society.

Take the case of Sinakhone Keodara for example. He threatened to sue Grindr, a dating app for gay, bi and trans men, because of “sexual racism” he faced on the site, NBC reported. More specifically, Keodara says some users on the site had captions like “Not interested in Asians.”

So what’s the alternative? You meet with a guy who doesn’t like Asians? How does that end well?

As noted by the study — which compiled data from prior research — white people are ten times more likely to receive a message from a black person on a dating app than they are to message the black user themselves. That suggests a hierarchy of attention on racial lines.

Okay, but we can add that to the long list of other factors in the hierarchy of attention: height, beauty, wealth, intelligence, social status, breast size, hair colour, sense of humour, etc.

The study found other examples of inequalty in dating apps, including:

Asian men and black women have the lowest chance of receiving a message or a response.

Right, but are these people living in majority white countries? It would seem odd indeed if Asian men in China or black women in Nigeria weren’t getting many responses , but in the US or UK? What do they expect?

White people of “all ages” prefer to go on dates with other white people.

Isn’t this true generally of all races?

College students are most likely to avoid going on dates with black women.

Does this include black male college students? If so, maybe someone could ask them why?

Stephanie Yeboah, a blogger, said that she has experienced racism as a black woman on online dating apps even when people are open to meeting up, according to The Independent. She said that some people ask offensive questions like if they can “get a taste of jungle fever” — and say they want to see if black women are “as aggressive in bed as they’ve heard.”

Well, yes. Manners and politeness tend to disappear altogether when strangers communicate electronically while hiding their true identity. Take a look at Twitter, for example. This isn’t unique to dating apps.

“Comments such as these are extremely dehumanizing to myself and other black women who are only looking for companionship,” she told The Independent. “It seems to suggest that black women are only good for one thing, and cites back to previous ideologies of black people being compared to primates; as primal and feral, hyper-sexualized creatures. It’s very hurtful.”

To be honest, I’m surprised more black women don’t feel that way after watching a rap video.

The study’s authors noted that OK Cupid itself experimented with pairing up users and saying they were “highly compatible” — even though they weren’t considered good matches — and found that the conversation between the two people often went well.

And if it didn’t? Well, that terrible date you’ve just been on is the result of an experiment you were unwittingly forced to take part in. How the hell is this ethical?

In other words, it appeared that just the mere suggestion that two people were compatible made both users more likely to give the connection a chance.

Anyone who’s used online dating sites will tell you the compatibility ratings are a load of nonsense.

The study’s authors wrote in a press release that it proves “the strong power of suggestion” that can be used to bridge the gap between people of different races.

Why is this even desirable?

Another potential solution could come from 9Monsters, a gay dating app from Japan, that allows people to describe themselves without explicitly revealing their race, according to the study’s authors.

Another gay dating app, called Hornet, prevents people from using their profile to mention race at all.

This might work well for pen-pals, but I’m not sure it’ll work for people who eventually want to have sex with one another. It’s just delaying the inevitable to a point where time and effort have been expended.

The study’s authors concede that sexual racism is a hard thing to conquer — but Keodara, who threatened to sue Grindr, said fixing the problem would improve the mental well-being of people of color looking for a chance at love on dating apps, according to The Guardian.

So we should treat people of colour as mentally-ill and unable to navigate dating preferences? Could this be any more patronising?

“Over the years I’ve had some pretty harrowing experiences,” Keodara told The Guardian. “You run across these profiles that say ‘no Asians’ or ‘I’m not attracted to Asians’. Seeing that all the time is grating; it affects your self-esteem.”

Imagine how short, bald men have felt for decades.

This whole nonsense about sexual racism is the illogical endpoint of anti-discrimination laws which force people to associate with those they’d rather avoid. Give it a few years and there’ll be legislation being passed forbidding you from not dating in a state-approved manner. I kid, but not by much.

Incidentally, I’ve seen a few articles and tweets here and there which suggest one of the freest web forums is the one on Pr0nHub, simply because busybodies and the perpetually offended would never contemplate using the site. You think people just talk about sex on there? Think again:

One day we’ll all be Pr0nHub users, sneaking under the ever-pinging radar of the SJWs roving overhead.

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Impotents Ignored

This comes as a follow-up to this post:

MPs have threatened to issue Mark Zuckerberg with a formal summons to appear in front of parliament when he next enters the UK, unless he voluntarily agrees to answer questions about the activities of his social network and the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Damian Collins, the chair of the parliamentary committee that is investigating online disinformation, said he was unhappy with the information the company had provided and wanted to hear evidence from the Facebook chief executive before parliament went into recess on 24 May.

This would be the Damian Collins who was elected by 32,000 people in the constituency of Folkestone and Hythe. Commenter Ottokring had this to say about him:

D Collins is my local MP and is an utter c*nt.

Right.

“It is worth noting that, while Mr Zuckerberg does not normally come under the jurisdiction of the UK parliament, he will do so the next time he enters the country,” Collins wrote in a public letter to Facebook. “We hope that he will respond positively to our request, but, if not, the committee will resolve to issue a formal summons for him to appear when he is next in the UK.”

What are they going to do, wait for him at Heathrow arrivals? Could they come across as any more impotent if they tried?

The digital, culture, media, and sport committee has repeatedly invited Zuckerberg to give evidence but Facebook has sent more junior executives to answer questions from MPs.

Which is what this is all about: MPs believe they are important enough that none other than the CEO should appear before them to answer questions.

Facebook declined to comment on the possibility of a formal summons. In theory, Zuckerberg could be found in contempt of parliament if he refuses one.

When Rupert Murdoch and his son James resisted appearing in front of a select committee in 2011, it was speculated that potential punishments could include “fines and imprisonment”.

In reality it is likely that, at worst, the punishment for ignoring such a summons would include an arcane process resulting in little more than a formal warning from the House of Commons.

At which point Zuckerberg starts sharing MPs’ Facebook Messenger histories.

MPs have debated making it a criminal offence for potential witnesses to ignore formal summons to select committees, following attempts by Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley to avoid answering questions.

I expect this debate ended rapidly when someone asked: “Can Iraqi MPs summon Tony Blair?”

“It’s a hard job for parliament to make a foreign national come,” said White. “What’s the Serjeant at Arms going to do? Patrol all the ports and airports to see if he’s coming in?”

Precisely. This is empty posturing, but that’s what the government does best these days, isn’t it?

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Zuckerberg says no? Good.

At some point when I was living in Nigeria they had one of their frequent “petrol crises” where for some reason there is a shortage of petrol in the filling stations. These are usually caused by strikes, sabotage, or plain old incompetence (see the third item in this post, for example). This particular crisis got bad enough that the government started getting concerned and commissioned some functionary to look into it. Rather than tackling the root causes, which would have been absolutely impossible, the functionaries started hauling in the foreign directors of western oil companies and subjecting them to lengthy harangues which were televised. I caught a few minutes of a European I knew being asked the most stupid of questions by a Nigerian lawmaker who looked about fifteen years old. It was an exercise in grandstanding on the part of the Nigerians and humiliation on the part of the directors. Of course, it didn’t help the petrol crisis one whit, but it was good politics. Many Africans like seeing one of their own ritually humiliate a white man, even if they’ll be substantially poorer the next day as a result. See Zimbabwe, or where South Africa is heading, for example.

I was reminded of this exercise in political posturing a few years later when the Labour MP Margaret Hodge headed up the kangaroo court known as the Public Accounts Committee. This awful woman would drag hapless executives before her and denounce the tax avoidance measures their companies had employed, even though they had broken no laws and were in most cases acting well within the spirit of the law. Her ignorance of the subject she was presiding over was on full display, and she was also a staggering hypocrite: the family firm Stemcor, from which she draws her fortune, uses much the same tax avoidance measures as those she was denouncing. The whole thing was a circus designed to whip up anger from the left against “big business” while covering up the many failings of British politicians, primarily getting spending under control. I was not only disappointed that Britain should have fallen so far as to adopt the practice of political bullying I saw in Nigeria, but also that none of the executives had the balls to stand up, denounce the whole thing as a show-trial, and call out Hodge on her hypocrisy.

This is why I was happy to read this story a couple of days ago:

Mark Zuckerberg has come under intense criticism from the UK parliamentary committee investigating fake news after the head of Facebook refused an invitation to testify in front of MPs for a third time.

Was he obliged by law to do so? No, he wasn’t.

Zuckerberg has been invited three times to speak to the committee, which is investigating the effects of fake news on UK democracy, but has always sent deputies to testify in his stead.

Which is sensible. If Facebook must answer specific technical questions to a committee of MPs, it may well be that the CEO is not the best person to attend. Note what’s being complained about here: it’s not that Facebook ignored the invitation, just that Zuckerberg didn’t come in person. In other words, this gaggle of MPs from a country which can’t even secure its borders (unless a “far right” Canadian shows up at Stansted) and prosecutes people for internet jokes thought they were so important that one of the world’s most prominent billionaires and an American citizen should drop everything and come to participate in what is likely to be a kangaroo court.

The chair, Damian Collins, said it had become more urgent the Facebook founder give evidence in person after oral evidence provided by the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Christopher Wylie.

The MP said: “I think, given the extraordinary evidence we’ve heard so far today, it is absolutely astonishing that Mark Zuckerberg is not prepared to submit himself to questioning in front of a parliamentary or congressional hearing, given these are questions of fundamental importance and concern to his users, as well as to this inquiry.

Who the hell is Damian Collins? Has anyone ever heard of him? The most noteworthy thing on his Wikipedia article is this:

It was revealed Collins claimed £4,440.90 over three months in rent for a house in London, despite declaring that he already owned a home in the capital. In his defence, he claimed the property belonged to his wife and was “too small to provide accommodation for my young family, and even if that was not the case, as a new Member of Parliament I wouldn’t be able to claim any accommodation allowance against the mortgage on the property.”

So this small-time grifter who was elected by 32k people in the constituency of Folkestone and Hythe is astonished that Mark Zuckerberg, who presides over a multi-billion dollar international business enterprise providing a service with literally billions of users, won’t come in person to answer his questions? Do British MPs start out with this over-inflated idea of their own importance, or does it build up over time?

“I would certainly urge him to think again if he has any care for people that use his company’s services.”

So if an American CEO of a giant corporation doesn’t come and grovel before a parliamentary select committee, and instead sends (possibly more suitable) deputies, some obscure backbencher will issue veiled threats in a national paper? Let me tell you something, Mr Collins: given the choice of keeping Facebook or keeping you, 100% of British people would keep Facebook. Nobody would give one solitary fuck if you were cleaning the insides of wheelie-bins by this time tomorrow.

MPs are likely to take a still dimmer view of his decision after he ultimately agreed to testify before Congress in the US.

Note to British MPs sitting on a select committee: you are not the US Congress. I wonder, do other countries get to do this? Can an MP from rural Uzbekistan demand the CEO of Glaxosmithkline attend a grilling over public concern surrounding Sensodyne toothpaste? Probably not, no. So why do British MPs think they can order foreign CEOs to appear before them?

The company’s head of public policy, Rebecca Stimson, said in a letter to Collins: “Facebook fully recognises the level of public and parliamentary interest in these issues and support your belief that these issues must be addressed at the most senior levels of the company by those in an authoritative position to answer your questions. As such, Mr Zuckerberg has personally asked one of his deputies to make themselves available.”

Both men, Stimson wrote, “report directly to Mr Zuckerberg and are among the longest-serving senior representatives in Facebook’s 15-year history. Both of them have extensive expertise in these issues and are well placed to answer the committee’s questions on these complex subjects.”

Exactly. Collins and his mob have absolutely no right either legal or moral to demand the appearance of Zuckerberg in person. This is pure vanity on his part, driven by delusional levels of self-importance. He should resign immediately, not just for making highly inappropriate comments which make Britain look like a banana republic, but for making me defend Mark Zuckerberg.

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Cambridge Analytica

I was wondering what all the fuss was about this Cambridge Analytica story, until I came across this detail:

The London-based company is accused of using the personal data of 50 million Facebook members to influence the US presidential election in 2016.

“Russia hacked the election” hasn’t worked, so the ruling classes need to come up with another excuse to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s election and explain why Hillary lost. As people are pointing out:

[W]hat’s odd is that people don’t seem to mind data being plundered if the beneficiaries are the perceived good guys.

Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, for instance, used one of Facebook’s APIs (application programming interfaces) and data to target voters. It’s clever and complicated, but what it boils down to is that Obama’s data scientists were able to persuade about a million Facebook users to connect their profile to the Obama campaign website. They were then able to access the profiles of these people, which also showed who their friends were. From this they were able to construct real life social networks, which enabled them to target many, many more potential Obama voters. “If you log in with Facebook, now the campaign has connected you to all your relationships,’ boasted a digital campaign organiser.

What Cambridge Analytica did, in essence, was the same as the Obama campaign in 2012 – though they had a smaller sample group of 250,000 to model from.

[W]hen Obama did it, such practices were written up in glowing terms. His campaign’s social media tactics were widely lauded for harvesting ‘the power of friendship’. But when Trump or Brexit do it, apparently, it’s evil.

This certainly explains why the BBC is running it as front-page news, and probably will for the rest of the week.

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Why doesn’t Jordan Peterson have his own server?

Reader William of Ockham makes this remark in correspondence he probably thought was private:

You do know they are going to get [Jordan] Peterson, right? There will be a moment where they provoke him to give an awful soundbite or find a past failure that is enough to discredit him. He hints at this when people ask what keeps him up at night.

I agree that it’s only a matter of time before Peterson is hounded off YouTube, and probably Twitter and other social media platforms too. The question I have is why the hell is he still on there.

I’m reasonably certain oil companies, for example, own the servers they host their websites on. If not, they’ll certainly have an agreement with a hosting company that won’t be torn up in the event some green lunatics decide to spam them with ten thousand emails demanding they cease to host the oil major’s site. An oil company’s IT infrastructure is probably expensive to maintain, but would be less for smaller companies. At some point, it would make sense to just outsource the lot rather than own the equipment. But I assume owning your own server and maintenance/protection systems is possible even for individuals.

So why doesn’t somebody like Peterson, who has 850k subscribers to his YouTube channel and 500k followers on Twitter, not set up a small company and buy the necessary IT equipment so he no longer stands the risk of being kicked off the internet? Okay, it might be possible for SJWs to hound the telecoms company or even the landlord of the premises into dropping Peterson, but that will only work in a few countries. If it comes down to it, why could Peterson not set up a small company in Russia and host his server from there? The Russians wouldn’t care what he’s saying, provided he sticks to attacking deranged feminists in the west and not Vladimir Putin.

It might be Peterson doesn’t have the money, but he’s the No.1 seller on Amazon so he can’t be flat broke. How much would it cost to be independent? $10k? More? He could sell his books from his site, post his videos, and do whatever he wants and not have to lie awake at night waiting for the day when YouTube suddenly block his account. It doesn’t make sense for everyone to take such precautions of course, but for someone like Peterson? It seems sensible, yet he doesn’t do it. Anyone know why?

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Ve have vays of making you not talk!

I’ve written before about governments outsourcing political censorship to social media companies, and also about Germany’s suppression of free speech. Today I read this:

A German satirical magazine’s Twitter account was blocked after it parodied anti-Muslim comments, the publication said on Wednesday, in what the national journalists association said showed the downside of a new law against online hate speech.

Titanic magazine was mocking Beatrix von Storch, a member of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, who accused police of trying “to appease the barbaric, Muslim, rapist hordes of men” by putting out a tweet in Arabic.

Twitter briefly suspended her account and prosecutors are examining if her comments amount to incitement to hatred.

So not only is the German government forcing social media companies to block their political opponents under the guise of counteracting online “hate speech”, the people doing the blocking are too dim to spot a parody account. How the Germans can’t see that such a law, in the hands of the wrong party, could be devastating is a mystery. I can only conclude such occurrences have no precedent in their country from which they could draw obvious lessons.

Titanic said on Wednesday its Twitter account had been blocked over the message, which it assumed was a result of a law that came into full force on Jan. 1 that can impose fines of up to 50 million euros ($60 million) on social media sites that fail to remove hate speech promptly.

A lot of people will rightly ask who defines hate speech. What they should be asking is how easy is it to change that definition.

Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms are scrambling to adapt to the law, and its implementation is being closely watched after warnings that the threat of fines could prompt websites to block more content than necessary.

This is a feature, not a bug. The German government and those who would emulate them want the social media companies to self-censor everything that doesn’t explicitly conform to progressive standards of right-think. That way they can hold their hands up, adopt an innocent face, and say “We never told them to censor X, Y, Z”.

Merkel’s conservatives accused the AfD of undermining the post-war democratic consensus in Germany.

By winning so much support at the ballot box that she stands to lose her job?

“The racism that AfD lawmakers have been tweeting for days is intentionally violating, with criminal intent, the basic consensus which democrats have built up since 1949 despite all disagreements,” Armin Laschet, party deputy of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, tweeted.

There ought to be a law against it! Well, there is now. It’s ironic that a German politician coming out with this believes citing war-era precedents is an argument in his favour.

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