Re: Disconnect Germany?
Whose existing laws should be enforced? Thailand lèse majesté laws? N. Korea's speech laws (whatever they may be)? If Germany gets to say "not these sorts of posts" then everyone else does too. The US version of free speech may allow for unpalatable things to be said but that's a much better system than anywhere else I can think of. Once you start censoring based on one country's laws, where do you stop?
What is illegal? Where does that line get drawn and by whom? Is a post by someone in the USA regarding the holocaust liable to be taken down by a German user's request? Whose laws apply to that post? The post is perfectly legal in the USA so why does German law apply?
The internet is harder to legislate for precisely because it doesn't respect the old territorial boundaries. Until every country gets together and sorts out an agreed framework on how laws should be applied to the WWW (fat chance) you're left with attempting to apply local laws to content from other countries, which is just never going to be practicable.
Then there's the problem of whether something is, actually, illegal. Ultimately the legality or otherwise of a post should be decided by a court of law, not by a social media company employee.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
