To be clear, the legislation in France and in the EU that is most likely behind this arrest is that companies have to at least try to do some moderation. There is an understanding that not everything can be moderated (obviously, the entire Internet would be banned otherwise) but there has to be a genuine attempt.
Which every company does more or less. The fact that Telegram doesn't reach this extremely low, very low bar is quite something.
Telegram is not a behemoth like Facebook so doesn't have their resources to moderate everything. Even Facebook isn't particularly good at it. They mostly rely on software which often produces false positives.
This arrest is completely preposterous and is just an attempt to get Durov to play ball with France's privacy destroying authorities.
Not being a behemot is not an excuse if they are not moderating criminal behavior at all. I dont know if that is the case, just pointing that logic is not sound.
As many people say when Facebook's failures came to light: a tech company cannot pass the buck by blaming their inability to perform their legal obligations on scale.
If a business can't do a thing it is required to do, their CEO's option is "close business" or "break law".
lately when i see arguments like yours one thing keeps popping into my head. i’m not sure how i feel about the following yet but it’s been on my mind a bit for the past couple of years:
if someone is incapable of making good faith genuine attempts to mitigate against atrocious things happening openly in the property they control, then isn’t this fairly solid evidence they’re just not capable of owning that property? if they make such an excuse, it would seem to me they’re either too irresponsible or just plain incompetent.
again, i’m not sure how i feel about the implications of this, but the whole “we just don’t have the resources” feels like a cowards excuse rather than reality—particularly as someone already pointed out, they seem to gather their wits to make a sizable dent when it’s spam.
According to this rule, approximately 100% of officials must be thrown out of their jobs right this second. I think you are mostly correct about irresponsibility, incompetence, and excuses, but I don't see why there should be legal consequences for people who did not take on any obligations. Especially in the situation, when people who take on, like all officials, have no responsibility
it’s still a bit muddy why he was arrested, but it seems like it’s due to his constant dismissal of any responsibility.
i’m not sure of the specifics of what you mean by 100% of officials must be thrown out” but if im understanding what you’re implying, i disagree, most land owners, elected officials, capable owners of organizations take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces . and if they don’t, then yes, why wouldn’t we hold them responsible?
it seems like you’re indicating there should be no
consequences for people who don’t take on obligations…
> i don’t see why there should be legal consequences for people who did not take on any obligations.
of course they take on obligations, it’s partially why we pay executives so much because they’re taking on obligations. this isn’t some pauper struggling to pay rent on his studio apartment—he was arrested after traveling from one country to another in his private jet.
again, i haven’t spent much energy on the implications from effect iteration of this but we have pretty solid evidence of what happens when we allow these wannabe kings to claim they should have nothing but positive personal benefits while externalizing any negatives onto the rest of us.
“you should pay me obscene amounts and treat me like a king while i take no responsibility whatsoever” is absurd. and we’re seeing the cascading effects of this absurdity in real time.
>most land owners, elected officials, capable owners of organizations take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces
And I am saying that zero percent of them do that. And somebody saying that Durov "take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces". My point is that there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.
> My point is that there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.
That's literally a thing that happens during trial, at least for certain crimes and legal systems.
Can't speak to this specific case because (1) IANAL, and (2) my grasp of the French language is so bad that I can't even reliably say the French for "I don't speak French".
> there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.
of course there is…
one of the reasons people justifiably bring up spam in these “my free speech” cases is because it shows definitively that the “free speech absolutists” don’t actually care about free speech—if they truly believed all speech is as valuable as all other speech then spam would have the same weight of priority as non-spam speech for them, yet they have no problem silencing spam.
off the top of my head, we would consider their guard rails against spam and have they implemented those same guard rails against the things they’re being charged for? if not, then obviously they’re not making real attempts.
of course there are multiple ways to determine whether they’ve made meaningful attempts. i think this is all moot though, if my understanding is correct, he’s resisted doing anything at all which is why he’s been charged.
as i said in a different post though, it’s still muddy on the specifics, we’ll know more later—we’re just wildly guessing at this point.
"The property" you mean the council housing where all the ganging, killing, raping and terror plotting occurs, right? Sure, the administration of said council should be jailed ASAP.
It is indeed completely illegal to own a property where illegal activities happen, know it and do nothing about it in France. Reporting the issue to the police is an adequate step. And yes, people have been jailed for owning apartments where terror plotting happened. Thank you for this good exemple.
For the good of the discussion, I would however appreciate if you kept your baseless fantasies about council housing - which is both numerous and very safe in France, a country which tries to do something to mitigate poverty - out of it.
> Captain Damien must team up with Leito, a local insurgent from District 13, to defuse a neutron bomb that has fallen into the hands of a local drug lord, Taha, and rescue Leito's sister Lola.
This "shows" those things in much the same way that First Contact "shows" how one may convert a Titan missile into a 3-person faster-than-light spacecraft in a post-nuclear-war Bozeman, Montana.
if the administration took zero good faith demonstrable attempts to address it, then they should at least be removed from the position, yes.
if they refuse to take steps whatsoever, yes, that’s a problem. why does it feel like you both understand the problem yet are defending the problem at the same time?
>if someone is incapable of making good faith genuine attempts to mitigate against atrocious things happening openly in the property they control, then isn’t this fairly solid evidence they’re just not capable of owning that property?
Even if true, what then? It doesn't follow said property can be ethically transferred to anyone else; otherwise you've just thrown out all semblance of property rights. You've sold off the world to the HOA's, as it were; now anyone who objects to the way you maintain your grounds has a button to push to make sure you are deprived of any grounds you keep. Be they real, or digital.
If I make a platform that shuffles bits around, and a bunch of users start using it for CP and terrorism (lets assume perfect enforcement/investigative capability up until piercing the platform, so probability 1 on the CP/terrorism front); I don't think the choice then is "lets shluff this to someone responsible to admin/make a tap". The only ethically tenable approach would be "well, no more moving bits around by anyone for anyone else anymore". And at that point we've unmade computing essentially.
No one, and I mean "Not One Single Entity, government or otherwise" can be trusted to not to abuse privileged access; and once put into the position to abuse, abstain from doing so. Abuse is probability 1. This is part of why I believe Stallman was right. The concept of the user account has been a disaster for the human species. As it is by the prescribing of unique identifiers to discern one operation on behalf of someone from another that has created a world in which we can even imagine such horrifying concepts as a small group unilaterally managing the entirety of the rest of humanity, for any purpose.
For me it is a sobering thought on the impact of automated business systems. I've practically 180'd on actual character of my own life's work. It's got me in a spot where I'm strongly considering burning my tools. Extreme? Maybe. Sometimes though, you have to accept that there are extremely unpleasant consequences out there that cannot be satisfactorally mitigated.
So I have a return question for you. Are you sure that the question you asked is the one you should be asking, or should you be asking yourself, "how many lives are acceptable casualties in order to continue operating within the bounds of my assumed ethical envelope?" Because there is a counter of people effected; you may not be able to read it or write it, but it's there.
To be fair, anyone that has used Telegram for a while know that this is just a mock option to fool regulators. You can report all you want; zero action is taken. There are dozens of accounts that joined groups I'm in to spam CSAM. We've reported them, kicked/banned them from the group. Months later you can look them up and they're still there and still active. They even post CSAM in their public (visible for everyone on their profile) stories.
Absolutely not. This stuff happens in a lot of technology groups, custom ROM groups, even a small (but public) board game group got overrun with it once; multiple accounts posting dozens of CSAM videos/images in a minute after joining - kept going for a few weeks.
The amount of obviously illegal content on Telegram makes it plain that, for all intents and purposes, it is an un-moderated platform. They sporadically moderate when there's serious pressure, but for the most part do nothing.
Because we saw the same accounts pop up in other groups sometimes weeks later, so we started to keep track of the usernames after banning them. If you check their profile it's easy to see that they are active months later.
What keeps amazing me is that this is supposed to make children's lives better, by helping social services.
Of course, such legislation only has any chance in hell of improving lives if the standard of living for children, the education, the ... IN social services is good. It is very easy to see this WILL put more children into such a situation, and that's about the only thing such legislation will definitely do. It is completely absurd to think this is going to end drugs, abuse or whatever else they're looking for.
Is that the case? Is it the case that the standard of living, education, ... in social services is good?
No. Not at all. There's constant scandals and if a child that gets into a social services institution makes it into university, just one, any given year, that's national news. Prostitution in social services is common, drugs and crime are everywhere.
It seems there is A LOT more work to be done on the other side of social services first. They seem to perform VERY badly once they actually catch someone. So why do this? Because it isn't to help children. At the very best they see this as a cheap way to look like they're improving social services.
They're building the penthouse suite with all the luxuries you could imagine, but the foundation is rotting away and, if anything, becoming more ignored rather than increasingly important.
It lays bare that their motivation is blanket surveillance for their own political ends and nothing to do with protecting children in the slightest.
Social Services are one of the most consistently underfunded and under-resources arms of government.
Australia has recently had to "increase the bar" at which mandatory reporting is required because the resources don't exist to even consider investigation of cases where the child's life isn't in immediate danger.
It's gross, but it seems politics around the world has found it's shared water level, and that level is happy with exploiting exploited children.
It's so disingenuous to say it's just a small requirement. It always starts off small than grows and grows into ever widening topics and unfavourable people. We've seen that plenty of times on the internet and in history. The good intentions in the early days won't make any difference in 20yrs from now.
Which every company does more or less. The fact that Telegram doesn't reach this extremely low, very low bar is quite something.