Otherwise Objectionable episode 6: ‘The Rest of the World’

The sixth episode of Otherwise Objectionable, the narrative-driven podcast that tells the true story of Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, focuses on how the rest of the world handles thorny content moderation decisions.

NARRATOR: Chander has written some of the most comprehensive studies on global attempts to regulate the Internet.

ANUPAM CHANDER: I describe the rise of Silicon Valley and the way that the rest of the world kind of hampered their own innovation.

NARRATOR: Chander claims that Facebook could not have been invented in London – and that’s not just because of some abstract idea like American ingenuity.

ANUMPAM CHANDER: I think the United States isn’t alone in having brilliant engineers, but Mark Zuckerberg, of course, started Facebook famously in 2004. What was it that made it popular? Easy for him to launch it here. What I’ve suggested it was, is that it was the law.

…

NARRATOR: Europe has always been more protective of users’ information and privacy.  Chander points to the first case that fell under Europe’s data protection laws as an example.

ANUPAM CHANDER: This is a case of Bodil Lindquist, who is a Swedish parishioner who, while taking a data processing class, decides to put up a webpage to help her fellow parishioners during the catechism.

NARRATOR: Bodil wanted to be helpful by collecting stories and resources from the church. But that is not how it was received.

ANUPAM CHANDER: This isn’t someone who is out to get her fellow parishioners, but in the process, she references her fellow members of her community in quote, mildly humorous terms, unquote. She uses sometimes their full name, and she puts this on the internet. Her church links to this page. And this results in a Swedish prosecution.

She is criminally prosecuted, and I kid you not, she notes that one of the people has hurt their foot, and that is revealing sensitive health data and therefore subject to heightened protections and heightened discipline. And so, this goes to the European Court of Justice. The European Court of Justice says, ‘yeah, yeah, she’s guilty, totally guilty.’

Now imagine this is what people do every day on Facebook. They post information about their work colleagues without asking those colleagues and so that kind of personal information processing is inherently, possibly even a criminal act. Imagine being a platform that carries that.               

Could Facebook have been founded in Japan, a world leader in consumer electronics and robotics in the 1990s?

ANUPAM CHANDER: There’s a story I tell, which is a case involving a Japanese programmer who puts out a P2P file sharing service,that P2P file sharing service is used by others to share various Hollywood films. So someone is convicted of downloading A Beautiful Mind using this service.

NARRATOR: Remember that 2001 film, A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe? Well, downloading it sent someone to jail in Japan. But the guy who hosted the platform – the intermediary – he continued business as usual.

ANUPAM CHANDER: Now he knows because there’s been this criminal conviction that his service is being used for criminal copyright infringement. But the programmer continues to supply this software after that. And so he is then arrested and charged with intentionally continuing to supply a device that aids and abets copyright infringement.

So this is what you face in the rest of the world.

Why is the United States uniquely positioned to produce these large technology and social media platforms? Listen to Otherwise Objectionable Episode 6: The Rest of the World.

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