Facebook Helps France Regulate Internet Speech

If there is anyone left on earth who trusts Facebook, this ought to cure them:

In a world first, Facebook has agreed to hand over the identification data of French users suspected of hate speech on its platform to judges, France’s minister for digital affairs Cedric O said on Tuesday.

France is a country where you can be thrown in prison for expressing viewpoints that leftists like Emmanuel Macron consider “hate speech.”

The decision by the world’s biggest social media network comes after successive meetings between Zuckerberg and Macron, who wants to take a leading role globally on the regulation of hate speech and the spread of false information online.

Given that the definitions of “hate speech” and “false information” are entirely subjective and mean whatever authoritarians want them to mean, this power grab dwarfs Zuckerberg’s megalomaniacal plan to launch his own currency. Macron cannot even maintain order on Paris streets, but he wants to rule speech on the Internet — and Zuckerberg wants in on it.

“It is a strong signal in terms of regulation,” said Sonia Cisse, a counsel at law firm Linklaters, adding that it was a world first. “Hate speech is no longer considered part of freedom of speech, it’s now on the same level as terrorism.”

With Facebook’s latest move, France is now a clear frontrunner in the quest to regulate big social media outlets, and other platforms might follow suite, Cisse said.

Facebook will provide IP addresses among other identifying data to tyrants prosecuting people for politically incorrect thoughts. There was a time when any American — and possibly any Frenchmen — would have recognized this as something very bad.

On tips from Blackjack and ABC of the ANC.

The post Facebook Helps France Regulate Internet Speech appeared first on Moonbattery.