In Switzerland, signatures are currently being collected to get a popular initiative off the ground that would anchor the protection of fundamental rights and democracy in the digital space in the Federal Constitution.
At first glance, the initiative sounds good and sensible to me personally. But I wonder:
To what extent would the legal article below cause problems for the Fediverse?

Initiative's website: https://www.internet-initiative.ch/initiative/

The initiative text, translated into English:

Federal popular initiative “For the Protection of Fundamental Rights and Democracy in the Digital Space (Internet Initiative)”
The Federal Constitution is amended as follows:
Art. 93a Protection in the digital space

The Confederation shall enact provisions on the protection of fundamental rights and of democratic decision-making processes in the digital space.
It shall oblige providers of communication platforms and search engines, as well as providers that generate content by means of automated or artificial-intelligence-based systems:
a. to protect people from violations of their fundamental rights;
b. to prevent the dissemination of content that contains sexualised violence, incites violence, or glorifies violence;
c. to limit systemic risks with regard to the manipulation of democratic decision-making processes, in particular through disinformation or algorithmic amplification;
d. to protect the population from cybercrime.
Providers shall be obliged to examine, free of charge, reports of violations of their obligations under paragraph 2, to take the necessary countermeasures, and to report publicly on this. The Confederation shall regulate the procedures and the supervision of providers.

Seems to me this article is aimed at the national government?! It wouldn't affect the Fediverse directly. It would force the national government to take care of rights in digital spaces and enact laws, which then -in turn- will govern internet platforms like the Fediverse.

The first thing when any laws are proposed is to see if there aren't any overlapping laws. If there are, then chances are it will negatively affect whatever's in scope. Law redundancy, seeing what's been done to the Brazilian laws in comparison, works only as backdoors for problems to not be solved.

Exactly. As it says:

It shall oblige providers of communication platforms ...

So the providers of communication platforms (fediverse instances) would have increased juridicial accountability, wouldn't they?
But actually I know basically nothing about current regulation in any country... Maybe something quite similar is already the case anyway.

I think so. I mean issue with law is always what exact laws they come up with, how it's phrased and if there's exceptions in there...

Unfortunately I'm not an expert on Swiss law. I know they're one of Europe's oldest democracies. And it's probably a clever idea to make democracy extend into the digital realm. But it's completely unclear to me how such a law would look like. I mean how would an email provider assure democratic decision-making isn't messed with? And how are they planning to balance that with the user's freedom to not have the government mess with their mail? They'd need to come up with detailed guidelines how to do it, whom this applies to... Maybe it's more the government and large corporation's job to make sure fundamental rights are enforced and individuals running webservers don't have to put in a lot of effort. Maybe it's supposed to apply to all social media... Maybe having moderators, like we do, is enough... Maybe we need more accountability, preemptively detect misinformation with some kinds of algorithms, ... Maybe we'd need to do bookkeeping or adopt impossible age-restriction measures to protect minirs. All depends on those hypothetical laws and what they'd entail.

I think generally speaking the Fediverse is making an effort to honour fundamental rights. We're mostly against racism, discrimination, caprice, depicting violence isn't okay here, we try to ban bot armies and abusive people... So we're already going that direction.

But yeah, I'd agree. Increased accountability usually means more effort. On the flipside if there's clear rules that could also make some things easier. But since we're an international network it's probably not going to make anything easier for us.

Seems to me this article is aimed at the national government?!

Basically, this is a popular initiative. It's a mechanism in Switzerland through which the citizen can submit their own proposals for constitutional amendments, which the people then vote on and is binding when accepted.

Usually this is used in the manner seen here, where the constitutional amendment requires the government to enact certain legislation.

Ultimately any legislation to come of this will be subjected to a referendum if people care about it enough. So I'm not too worried personally.

I'm not really worried myself. This is just an initiative telling the government to implement legislation. We can always oppose that legislation with a referendum if necessary.

I'm not too keen on the inciting violence part (because of how broad that is, imo people should be allowed to talk about eating the rich and such, but that does fall under that), but other than that those are definitely things that I believe we should signal to the government that we want action on that front. And that's what an initiative like this fundamentally does. It forces the government to address our concerns.

Whether we accept the solution they come up with is a separate issue. I really doubt invasive stuff like age verification would pass here.

I very much would like the internet to be treated more like the physcial world. There is a ton of bs that started on the internet and then bled to the real world when it was accepted there.