Stefan Herwig: In search of the anti-hatspeech formula

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If we equate the Internet with the commercially usable form of the World Wide Web, i.e. the ability to access pages via a web browser, then we will officially celebrate the 30th birthday of the Internet on August 6, 2021.

In time for the anniversary, the question of whether and how the Internet must be politically contained and regulated is one of the most pressing social tasks.

The current example of Twitter shows how urgent it is.

The elected US President Donald Trump lied so often in the resonance chamber of his almost 89 million followers that the short message service closed its account on January 8, 2021, shortly after his supporters stormed the Capitol.

Facebook followed.

That was right and wrong at the same time.

Presidential hatred is unacceptable for a democracy - but the fact that, of all things, highly commercial and, moreover, non-transparent private companies control the limits of freedom of expression on the internet shows once again how urgently the internet needs to be structured according to the rule of law.

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Stefan Herwig, 50, founder of the network policy think tank Mindbase in Gelsenkirchen, has been pondering how this could work, a constitutional Internet, for 15 years.

Mindbase earns money with IT consulting solutions for medium-sized companies.

Herwig's approaches to the liability of platforms and data centers, to questions of anonymity and responsibility in the internet and the economic effects of the data and market power of the big American tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon show the complexity of the topic.

But in all these years Herwig has by no means got the feeling that politics has penetrated this complexity in its entirety.

In mid-December, the European Commission put forward reform proposals in the “Digital Services Act” on how the EU would like to ensure the rule of law on the Internet in the future.

EU Head of Unit Prabhat Agarwal, one of the authors of the “DSA”, is enthusiastic about the “ambition level” of his reform catalog, he speaks of a “best of the ideas of recent years with far-reaching requirements and transparency obligations”.

Less hate, less illegal content

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It is still only a proposal, but if the act comes, Agarwal promises, then the internet will be a better and safer place for European consumers because: more control over data, less hate, less illegal content.

The EU Parliament, every single member state and the lobby troops from Google & Co. will argue this year about what will ultimately become law.

Stefan Herwig can hardly share the enthusiasm of the EU Head of Unit.

He speaks of a "symptom policy" that does not venture into the causes of problems on the Internet.

Herwig recognizes a kind of European network enforcement law in the "DSA", which describes a procedure for dealing with hatred, lies and illegal content.

But "the EU has not internalized the social perspective, the responsibility of the platforms for the fallout," complains Herwig.

The network expert Herwig is a rustic man of conviction who is by no means squeamishly looking for a verbal exchange of blows with those for whom total freedom on the Internet is the top priority.

Even if it is less and less clear today what kind of internet freedom is actually being referred to, in view of the level of gap that has spread on the large platforms.

The mainstream of German network policy also relies on highly ideological principles.

Anonymity is treated as the highest good, the so-called upload filters are the devil, every form of regulation is considered the end of freedom.

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If someone like Herwig confidently claims that he knows how to rid the Internet of hatred and fake news, then politicians have a hard time finding an attitude.

With the subject of internet regulation no politician can distinguish himself in this country and easily embarrass himself in the swarm-rumbling "net community".

Little has changed in the hysterical “This is the end of the Internet” mood, as it was when the General Data Protection Regulation was introduced three years ago or during the protests against the reform of copyright law.

At the center of Herwig's analysis is the criticism of the legislature's release from liability for host providers and data centers.

Because this means that services like Facebook or Twitter only become active when they learn of hatred, violence and lies on their pages.

So hatred, violence and lies first have to be released, Google & Co. do not have to be liable for the social damage that has occurred, although the non-transparent algorithm of the services continues to fuel the hate polarization of society.

Advertising for "holistic liability logic"

Herwig has diagnosed nine social problem areas - hatspeech / fake news, cybercrime, cyberbullying, cybersecurity, youth protection, election campaign bots, extremist propaganda, copyright infringement and product piracy - which are causal in the connection between indemnification and anonymity.

Since the legislature does not want to intervene technically, the political handling in Germany lies with eight different authorities and ministries.

Herwig speaks of a “patchwork quilt” and promotes a “holistic liability logic” that rebalances anonymity and responsibility online.

A logic that neither encourages the surveillance state nor the anarchy, but takes a realistic model: the road traffic regulations.

Stefan Herwig gives an example of the seat belt requirement from 1976, a regulatory measure that most people consider sensible today.

At the beginning of the 1970s, despite up to 21,000 road deaths per year, things were completely different. A fierce social debate broke out here as well. “Men fear for their freedom, women for their bosom,” wrote Der Spiegel.

Today, with exponentially more traffic, there are still a good 3,000 deaths per year.

According to Herwig, the legislature had recognized that road traffic is a social space that should be regulated.

In the justification of the Federal Ministry of Transport from 1970 for the revision of the road traffic rules to a holistic road traffic regulation as we know them today, it says: “The fact that the dangers of modern traffic force constant caution must become common property”.

The same could be said about the dangers of digital traffic today, only the legislature has not yet defined the digital sphere as a social space.

In the public spaces of a constitutional state, regardless of whether it is road traffic or the data highway, it is always about balancing freedom and anonymity on the one hand, responsibility and liability on the other.

To stay in the picture: the license plate grants those following the rules a high degree of anonymity, while the rule-breaker can still be identified, for example if he is flashed on the lawn.

In any case, there must be a final responsible body that can be held liable in the event of damage, Herwig demands.

Similarly, his proposal for the Internet is a two-way responsibility solution: Host portals are either liable for the behavior of their anonymous users (important for journalists, whistleblowers or dissidents) or the users can be verifiably pseudonymised and the platforms receive an exemption from liability in return.

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Herwig's partner Lukas Schneider, 36, has designed a verification model that separates the identity and authentication of users in the network.

Schneider speaks of the "separation of powers in the network" and means that the administration of a person's identity (e.g. at the post office or telecom), the authentication of the user (at consumer centers or non-profit organizations) and the knowledge of their activities on the Internet (Facebook & Co .) has to be distributed to different "brokers" who control each other.

Who will take responsibility?

The good thing, says Schneider, is that all the necessary technological prerequisites have already been tried and tested.

If the whole thing were to be set up with public funding, the certification of this infrastructure could be organized via a kind of TÜV, according to Schneider's suggestion.

The political reality is far from that.

The platform's release from liability was not affected in the latest draft of the “Digital Services Act” by the Commission.

So who will take responsibility for the social damage that will result from the privilege of the platforms in the future?

The division of society due to hatred and lies, the local law enforcement authorities, which are already hopelessly overwhelmed by Internet crime, the external effects when thousands of Facebook & Co. employees have to filter out millions of pictures and videos of the most abnormal violence from the network every day?

Leading network activists like Julia Reda insist that real people sift through and - if well justified - delete all questionable network content.

Apart from the fact that this doesn't seem feasible due to the sheer volume, who knows what this will do to people - the award-winning documentary “The Cleaners” provides insights - also knows that the digital avant-garde concept of freedom is reversed here .

"The DSA is about to take the wrong turn," says Stefan Herwig. "Maintaining the exemption from liability could fix the status quo of hatred and violence for ten years.

Then American conditions threaten us. "

The image that Stefan Herwig paints of himself is that of Don Quichottes from Gelsenkirchen, who is fighting against digital windmills.

That may be far exaggerated, but in the past few months the author has experienced for himself how difficult it is for German internet politics to deal with someone who puts his finger in a wound.

After a request for a discussion, the office manager of Anke Domscheit-Berg from the Die Linke party, a well-known network politician, wrote that “Ms. Domscheit-Berg does not approve of the whole topic because it would mean total monitoring of all content, <...> over-blocking would be preprogrammed . “In fact, Domscheit-Berg doesn't know Herwig's approach in detail, and there never was a discussion about the approach.

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The SPD MEP Tiemo Wölken, who is mainly worried about upload filters, basically does not want to discuss with Herwig.

He doesn't say why.

So much demonstrative fear of contact is interesting because others like the Austrian Digital Ministry, the Austrian Competition Authority, the Federal Ministry of the Interior and two former constitutional lawyers at the Federal Constitutional Court, including the former judge Udo Di Fabio, find Herwig's approaches extremely exciting in terms of regulatory policy.

For Ansgar Heveling, legal advisor of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group and member of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection, Herwig clearly recorded the problems on the Internet at an analytical level.

Question: Then why not address them?

From a political point of view, according to Heveling, it is just extremely difficult to get the spirit of liability privilege back into the bottle.

“Of course, there are enormous interests in maintaining the privilege like this.” Heveling means the interests of Google & Co .. Who would have thought that in a constitutional state it would be a privilege to bring hate and lies to the people - with the exception of Donald Trump .