Twitter Fingers and Trigger Fingers: Both Can Land You Behind Bars

France is currently pushing to pass a law that would allow for social media officials to be jailed for up to a year or fined 250,000 euros for not deleting anything that can be considered "hate speech" within 24 hours. France already has laws in place that restrict people from engaging in hate speech, so this would just be an extension of that really. However, I think this is a TERRIBLE idea.

First of all, what is considered hate speech is completely subjective. What one person might consider to be harmful and hurtful, the next might take as an innocent joke. Who would decipher the difference when it would come time to jail a social media official? Second, There are millions upon millions of people on social media, and no where near as many officials as there are users. Social media provides every single person the capacity to say whatever they'd like, and there are tons of people who have negative things to say! It seems nearly impossible to be able to keep up with every single hateful thing said on every social media account, so well that everything that can be considered to be hateful would be deleted within 24 hours. You'd need an army of social media officials for that. Third of all, why not punish the people who actually spewed the hate speech themselves? That's like sending your mother to jail because you got in a fight and hurt someone, just because your mother didn't tell you not to fight that day. It makes no sense! Lastly, what will this do to social media? The majority of what I look at on twitter are jokes that are making fun of people! That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's funny. It's comedy. It's life. With how hypersensitive society is today, if you give someone the opportunity to send someone to jail over something they said on twitter, there would definitely be more jailed twitter comedians. I think there are far worse things to be worried about in this world, and I pray that this law does not get passed.

Here's a link for further research: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/france-pushing-law-that-would-jail-social-media-officials-for-not-deleting-hate-speech/