More behaviour

HarmfulCommunications201908.org

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    including having to shut down) and where a claimant suffers nothing
    for abusive claims, the regime is guaranteed to be abused.
 
-** CONSTODO Behaviour
+** CONSDONE Content Moderation
 
    Much of the focus on legislative efforts to deal with harmful or
    objectional material on services that permit uploads from users is
@@ -690,22 +690,78 @@
      liable for a German user seeing statements that are illegal in
      Germany?
    - Consider the genocide of Armenian people in Turkey in 1915. It is
-     illegal to claim it happened in Turkey. However, it's illegal in
-     France to claim it didn't happen. In most other countries,
-     neither claim is illegal. What can a service like facebook do
-     when faced with 3 options, 2 of which are mutually exclusive?
-     Literally, should they be criminally liable both if they do /and/
-     if they don't?
+     illegal to claim it happened in Turkey. However, for a period
+     between 2012 and 2017 it was illegal in France to claim it didn't
+     happen. In most other countries, neither claim is illegal. What
+     can a service like facebook do when faced with 3 options, 2 of
+     which are mutually exclusive?  Literally, should they be
+     criminally liable both if they do /and/ if they
+     don't[fn:dink:Prior to his assassination in Istanbul in 2007,
+     Hrant Dink, an ethnic Armenian Turkish journalist who campaigned
+     against Turkey's denial of the Armenian Genocide had planned to
+     travel to France to deny it in order to highlight the
+     contradictions with laws that criminalise statements of fact. ]?
 
-   Modertors have no more than a minute to determine whether a
+   Moderators have no more than a minute to determine whether a
    statement complies with the law of not, and this includes figuring
    out whether the posting meets the definitions of abusive or
    harmful, and whether it is indeed intended to meet that
-   definition. For example, imagine an abusive tweet, and then the
-   target of the abuse quoting it 
+   definition. For example, consider an abusive tweet. Should the
+   harmful, abusive tweet be removed? Who decides? What if the target
+   of the abusive tweet wants that tweet to be retained, for, say
+   evidence? What if the tweet was an attempt at abuse, but the target
+   chose not to be affected by it? Should it stay up? Who decides?
+   What if the target doesn't care, but others who see the tweet but
+   who aren't the target of the abuse may be offended by it. Should it
+   be taken down as abusive even though the target of the abuse
+   doesn't care, or objects to its removal? Who would be criminally
+   liable in these situations? What if the target of the abuse
+   substantially quotes the abusive tweets? Is the target now to be
+   considered an offender under a criminal liability regime when that
+   person may be doing nothing other than /highlighting/ abuse?
+
+   "Content moderation" is very hard, and is impossible at the scales
+   that services like twitter or facebook operate in. When context is
+   critical in deciding whether to decide someone is engaged in
+   harmful or abusive behaviour, it would be fundamentally unfair to
+   make a service criminally liable just because it made the wrong
+   decision as it didn't have time to determine the full context, or
+   because it misinterpreted or misunderstood the context.
+
+** CONSTODO User Behaviour
+   Many believe that the way to deal with abusive or harmful material
+   online is to punish the services that host the material. This is
+   reasonable if the material was placed onto the service by those who
+   own or manage the service. It is also reasonable if the material is
+   put there by users with the clear knowledge of the managers or
+   owners of the service, or by users following encouragement of the
+   managers or owners of the service.
+
+   However, these specific situations are rare in the world of normal
+   online services[fn:criminal:Services that are dedicated to hosting
+   criminal material such as "revenge porn" or child sexual
+   exploitation material know they are engaged in criminal activities
+   anyway, and take steps to avoid detection that are outside the
+   scope of this submission -- those guys will get no support from
+   me!].
+
+   Engaging in harmful and abusive communications is a matter of
+   behaviour and not a function of the technical medium through which
+   the communication is made. The idea that internet services are
+   responsible for abusive communications is as difficult to
+   understand as the idea that a table-saw manufacturer is responsible
+   for a carpenter not wearing safety glasses which using to to cut
+   timber.
+
+   Recent history has shown that the most effective ways to change
+   behaviour are not necessarily punitive. It's hard to see how
+   punishing an intermediary would stop people being nasty to each
+   other.
+
+   Any new regulations around 
 
-** CONSTODO Content moderation
 ** CONSTODO Investigation support 
+** CONSTODO Encrypted services
 * CONSTODO Answers to consultation questions
   The follows are some answers to the questions posed in the call for
   submissions.