I was looking at the lists of instances and where they’re hosted, weighing up migrating. Part of that was to figure out which servers might be best for connectivity issues with my region. But looking at the terms of service for some of the possibilities, I noticed that they often just say something like “This instance and your use is subject to the laws of <country>”.
But lots of countries have unusual laws I couldn’t know about. Some of them might affect data privacy, some of them might affect what can be said or shown in pictures, some might be seemingly random to a foreigner. Some of the laws might be beneficial to random people, others won’t.
Obviously different instances decide how they choose to enforce their interpretations of those laws, rightly or questionably, but there’s also the question of what happens if they receive a subpoena from their regional law enforcement.
Just to be clear, I’m not trying to post anything that I think would be illegal in any country. But, for all I know, there’s a law somewhere that says I have to spin around three times and then stand on one leg while writing any comment.
So, what regional laws should a user know about before choosing an instance? Bonus points for the unusual ones that will take me down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. I offer you a non-digital unusual law in return: Since 1313 it’s illegal to wear a suit of armour in the UK Houses of Parliament.
So as a user you should actually be more concerned about what regulations exist in the region you’re living, not of the region the server is histed. Because that’s the law you have to abide by.
Worst thing regarding the law of the server position is, that your post will be deleted / account will be banned.
And in the context of Online behavior I would argue, that in general all American/European laws are the same.
If we want to talk about details: In germany a very serious crime that is activly enfored, is to downplay crimes of the nazis. Even something like saying “trivial thing x is as bad as what the nazis did” could be interpreted as such a crime.
The Nazi symbol laws were one of the ones that came to mind. Strangely, that’s not even consistent among European countries - Austria and Germany will strictly enforce swastika display (although they may provide exceptions for limited artistic and educational use?). But as far as I can tell, it’s legal in Denmark, Italy and possibly Finland. I suspect that legal status would not be so clear if actively being used to promote hate, understandably.
The laws of my region I’m largely familiar with, so I’m not too concerned about abiding by those. But I noticed many instances have in their Terms of Service or Code of Conduct that the user is responsible for ensuring their content complies with the instance’s regional laws - that’s what sparked my curiosity. Other instances like lemmy.world have an oddly unbounded position like “Do not post illegal content of any type”, but I assume is implicitly scoped to their “governing laws” section which lists Netherlands, Germany and Finland - and I’m unsure which would take precedence if there were conflicting laws.
Edit: Another part of the curiosity came from the recent stories about the US taking Reddit to court to compel turnover of information about the person who criticized ICE.