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FC: Germany's justice minister demands global ban on "hate speech"

------- Forwarded message follows ------- Date sent: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 13:11:50 -0400 To: politech@vorlon.mit.edu From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> Subject: FC: Germany's justice minister demands global ban on "hate speech" Send reply to: declan@well.com

[A nice touch: "Self regulation" has much the same effect as government censorship, but is harder to challenge in court. And it sounds so much kindler and gentler, no? Perhaps next we'll see European ministers call for "self regulation" of sites that expose ethnic groups to hatred (anti-Irish joke lists and late-night comedian home pages, for instance), inspire dislike of the government or some other such nonsense. But it's "regulation," a good thing, right? --Declan]

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0%2C1283%2C37251%2C00.html

Germany Wants Hate Crackdown Reuters

7:00 a.m. Jun. 27, 2000 PDT BERLIN -- Germany's justice minister Tuesday called for global rules against hate speech on the Internet and urged stronger self-regulation by Web companies to beat racism and xenophobia.

"What is forbidden offline must be forbidden online," Herta Däubler-Gmelin told a conference in Berlin on hate speech on the Web.

"Given the global character of the Internet, our goal must be to achieve a global value consensus and to agree an international minimum level of regulation."

Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the explosion of extremist websites in the United States proved the need for action.

"We have gone from one hate site on the Internet in 1995 to over 2,000," he said. "There are dozens of sites that teach people how to build bombs."

[...]

She also said that Internet companies had an obligation to make sure they did not sell extremist books or music, while service providers could block websites promoting hatred.

[...]

She noted that the majority of extremist websites originated in the United States and said it was a shame that U.S. representatives had not turned up at the conference.

[...]

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