The big question is can free speech go too far? If I threaten to murder your family and "in my opinion" accuse you of horrible crimes--again in my opinion. When does it go too far. I am US Citizen living in Germany for over a year now, and I appreciate these laws.
We have the Fifth Article of our Grundgesetz. The difference lies in how Germans and Americans understand „freedom“. Americans have an ultraliberal, individualistic definition of the concept; Germans are more ready to restrict an individual‘s freedom to protect others‘.
I cannot believe that we went to a point where people will be censored for what they say without directly or indirectly harming anyone - except only the people who want to live with the illusion that everybody loves them! Being raised in a Commie country, this brings back memories... but it's even worse! People back then openly shared thoughts only in circles of trust. Personally, I'd rather allow people to say their hatred openly so that I know what they think rather than policing only their verbal output and disguise their thought process, which I only care about as that could lead to actions and harm! In fact, this censorship can only make people who have those destructive thoughts and ideas to do real harm more united as they now feel persecuted!
P.S. I didn't know there are so many censorships fans on HN!
There is no free speech movement in europe. With UK gone , only France maybe advocates a radical version of laisez faire , but its hitting deaf ears in europe apparently. Germany is generally the most proactive in promoting EU wide regulation that limits speech.
We're no longer humans, but ostriches shoving our heads into the sand. I think it's priceless to know exactly what people think of me, and not twist their arms and tongues, and then get a knife in my back once of a sudden. Everything could be qualified as hate speech... unless it's politically-correct hate speech, like, the hatred against single white heteresoxual men, who are openly being vilified nowadays.
I kept being called a "white man" and associated with crimes neither me, nor many any ancestors have done for thousands of years! So are my kids who are being harassed by the educational system and labeled "white". This is reverse racism! Race is not a scientific concept either! Can we stop using it and calling people "white", "black", "brown", "yellow", etc.?! I'm not even white per se - I'm only perceived as "white", because I'm not dark-skinned during the winter when I see no sun. How is this humane? How is this progress? How is "white and inherently racist" not hate speech, but it's allowed.
Heartbreaking. I feel for you, I really do, but right now the anti-racism resources are heavily taken up for the whole "getting murdered for the crime of 'jogging while black'" thing and so on.
I'm not downplaying your troubles in life. Sure sounds tough. But with limited resources, we have to pick where to concentrate the efforts.
I don't deny there's racism, but I'm not the offender, because of the appearance of my skin if I don't see enough sun. Neither are my kids. People who believe in self-identity do not honor that I don't identify myself as a white person. My people have never colonized countries, never had slaves - on the contrary, we've been slaves for a total of 7 centuries throughout our history! So, I sympathize and try to help, but, please, don't send my kids home crying with the guilt of being perceived as white people! This is not helping solve the racial issues by building up more unfairness! Racism is an individual guilt, it cannot be a collective one - just like any other crime. Accusing people of profiling Arabs as terrorists while profiling white people as inherently racist - how is this fair?!
Like gender, race involves both racial identity and socially ascribed race. Privilege, which relates to (but is not in and of itself) passive participation in systematic racism (and, on the flip side, oppression and victimization by racism, whether active or passive) is mostly a factor of socially ascribed race, not racial identity.
You can try to intellectualize this growing unfairness as much as you want, and twist every concept to your own liking, but don't think people are stupid, and don't see what you're trying to do. Eventually, all this will not end up well. Event the most patient run out of patience eventually and that's what I think people behind this is a seeking - a wide-scale conflict. Just look back in history! And see the writings on the walls around the globe! People are tired of this nonsense and activists planting guilt in them and their children.
And this is the intelligent and civilized way as silencing voices, even the demonic ones, has been proven wrong over and over again! It does not work either as people can pretend, but meanwhile accumulate pressure, and then explode and have much dare consequences! A civil discourse with even the most greatly polarized opinions is the only civil and civilized way to find the truth, and educate people!
No we don't. The law is against insulting people, not against "saying stuff we don't like on the internet". The laws predate the internet by decades. The freedom to express your opinion is constitutionally protected, this does not cover all speech acts, in Germany and everywhere (see slander laws). Courts protect this constitutional guarantee, as several recent cases showed. Vigorously enforcing laws against insults and other speech acts that are hostile towards constructive discourse seems to me to be the only way forward when it comes to restoring a semblance of sanity to societal conversation. The social networks by themselves have proven to be utterly incapable of doing so.
The most comprehensive survey on various freedoms in the World that I know of ranks Germany at 94, ahead of France at 90 and the US at 86. (100 is the perfect score)
Freedom of speech is also a guaranteed right in the German constitution, as it is in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
In every jurisdiction there are limits to the freedom of speech. This applies to the US as well as everywhere else:
Which might help explain what is considered hate speech. These discussions tend to devolve (as all good online discussions do) into the nuance and what-about's. It's the role of the courts to determine that, and it's an ever-evolving collection of legal precedent as a result.
If that standard was applied worldwide, there would be hundreds of lawsuits here, on HN every day (and HN is heavily moderated). It s one of the reasons why no social media can grow in europe.
There are hundreds of attacks every day on HN against people on account of their belonging to a national, racial, or religious group? Guess I've been missing all the spicy comments
yeah I know these terrible attacks hurt someones feelings every single day, by that measure half of HN posters should be raided, and the other half deserves to be raided for being spineless spice hating mongrels
If an insult is immediately reciprocated, the court may declare one or both of the persons involved in the exchange of insults not to be liable to punishment."
Remind me of a time I was in Germany. I was out with some friends (none of us was german) and one friend joked about hitler, he put a finger over his mustache and did the hitler salute to tell a joke. A guy who was standing next to us came running and said you will get jailed if the police who were close to us see you. So much for freedom to tell a joke.
It seems this is the norm, so be careful when in Germany [1].
Well it's one of the typical lawyer tricks. There is a paragraph in the constitution that explicitly grants you freedom of speech. There's also others that more or less say you get to jail for saying xyz. Unfortunately, law is not a program that has to compile.
Then put selective enforcement on top and you have a very powerful weapon that gets great PR ("against hate").
No, there is no such paragraph. The German constitution guarantees freedom of opinion - not speech.
So you can’t get prosecuted for disliking someone (and saying so) but you can for saying insulting or untrue (e.g. holocaust denial) things - those are not opinions.
Germany has been arresting people for violating their laws against hate speech for 75 years. It’s unsurprising, yet comforting, to find out that they do so when the violations are committed online.
"stuff we don't like on the internet" is a very broad class of speech, far broader than the German law attempts to control.
We would really need to see examples of what the hate speech actually is that caused these people to get raided. Was it that the earth is flat? Was it that they believe Angela Merkel is incompetent? Was it that they want all Syrians and Jews to be rounded up and murdered?
I wonder if the Nazis used the laws to work in their favor and grow in power. If no one could insult the Nazi party then it would be easier for them to grow in power because they could just censor opposing views via the laws.
"Contrary to what most people think, Germany did have hate-speech laws that were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis, including Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher, were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. And rather than deterring them, the many court cases served as effective public relations machinery for the Nazis, affording them a level of attention that they never would have received in a climate of a free and open debate."
Germany has very different freedom of speech laws than the US. Personally I think the US has it right. You can’t claim free speech but then selectively decide what’s acceptable, politically correct, or moral. It’s a slippery slope.
It is a tough line to walk. However, having seen in our own and other countries’ histories what happens when hatred is allowed to spread unchecked, we have decided that it‘s more important to slightly restrict one right (within tight bounds) than to risk that abusers of that right destroy the very democracy that gave it to them.
> So we're sending police at the homes of people that say stuff we don't like on the internet?
Merely describing it as "stuff we don't like" is either inaccurate or reductionist, in the same way murder could be described as "actions we don't like", or a threatening letter is "some scribbles we don't like", or child pornography is "some movies we don't like".
The German law may be vague (I don't know), but the bar seems to be higher than "stuff we don't like".
Whether it should be censored is a good question, but it does nobody any good to be reductionist about the content of the speech.
What does 'subjective' mean in this context? That its effects can't be examined? In at least a subset of circumstances, they can be (unless having or not having, say, PTSD, is 'subjective'). Psychological evaluations in the legal system are much like physiological ones.
Let's say somebody has a sensetive finger, and breaking it causes extreme pain, according to that person. Assuming something like the eggshell skull rule still holds, should we dismiss his complaint or treat it as lesser because his pain is 'subjective'?
All harms are subjective, and not all actions result in equal harm to the victim. A concert pianist is arguably harmed more by having his fingers broken than an English teacher is. A professor once said he'd rather someone break his leg instead of a student falsely accuse him of sexual assault.
Well, the thing is, in Germany we‘ve experienced first hand what happens when hatred goes rampant - when criticism turns to ostracism, hateful words to hateful deeds, inflammatory speeches to flame-filled cities.
And I‘m not just talking about Hitler and the Holocaust. Elected representatives of the people, from village mayors to members of parliament, are giving up their office because they can no longer bear the barrage of abuse and intimidation thrown at them. What starts online doesn‘t stay online. The current mayor of Cologne was stabbed the night before her election, a top Hessian state official shot dead in his own garden.
Democracy cannot survive indefinitely under an atmosphere of fear and hatred. If you want more examples, look at the end of the Roman republic, the Weimar republic, the pre-Civil-War United States. Free speech is a precious right. But if you abuse this right to undermine the very democracy that gives it to you, you have thereby forfeited it.
the roman republic is an odd example to bring up. "hate" as we understand it today had very little to do with the transition to empire. it was much more an outcome of internal squabbles among elites and the failure to separate military and political power. ironically, the assassination of caesar may well have hastened the fall of the republic.
> Free speech is a precious right. But if you abuse this right to undermine the very democracy that gives it to you, you have thereby forfeited it.
also, what? we can debate the value of free speech, but it doesn't seem like much of a right if it can be lost so easily.
> "hate" as we understand it today had very little to do with the transition to empire
Fair point. What I was thinking of was the general decline of respect for the (semi-democratic) republican system of governance. The Republic crumbled when politicians stopped using the „constitutional“ means of settling differences and turned to gangs of thugs instead. So I wasn‘t so much thinking of „hate speech“ as of „anti-democratic speech“.
A core criterium of German law is loyalty to the constitution. A number of political rights (the right to free speech, the right to form a political party, the right to hold public office or be employed by the government) are predicated upon the citizen‘s constitutional loyalty, his/her upholding of our democratic values. The idea is that our democracy does not want to aid its enemies in its own destruction, as was partly the case in Weimar.
> it doesn't seem like much of a right if it can be lost so easily
Multiple US states refuse ex-convicts the right to vote. Talking about convicts: prison sentences are nothing but the government stripping you of your right to free movement. Capital punishment is you being denied the right to life. You may object to all three of these forms of punishment, but the fact remains that all countries restrict peoples‘ rights in some way or another. (What constitutes just cause for such a restriction of rights is a fascinating and tough question, but one I unfortunately cannot answer...)
Germany’s laws are very clear that any form of endorsement of Naziism (or any hate speech) is illegal. It has been since the end of WWII. From the US, it looks ridiculous because most of that would be protected by the First Amendment. But in Germany, they really don’t want another Hitler.
A failing economy from having to pay reparations from WWI was a big part of what started his political career. People were hurt. I’ve heard anecdotal stories of people requesting to be paid in the morning (and given some time off) so they could buy their groceries before hyperinflation made their pay worthless
He knew how to capitalise on peoples‘ fears and prejudices. He gave them common enemies (the democrats, the communists, the Jews), played on their pride, and helped them when they were vulnerable. Then he indoctrinated the hell out of them.
You‘re kinda misrepresenting the article. The author/interviewee is not for unlimited speech, she just argues that it should be private organisations doing the censoring rather than the government. (Which quite frankly, I find even scarier - Facebook can‘t be voted out of power within the next four years.)
>There were dozens of prosecutions, including successful prosecutions, against Nazis — including Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Sturmer. And it just became a propaganda platform for the Nazis. It got all kinds of attention they otherwise would not have received, and sympathy they otherwise would not have received.
For context, in Germany displaying a swastika or endorsing Naziism has been illegal (with some exceptions) since around right after WWII. They take their hate speech pretty seriously.
Do you know why promoting Nazi symbols is illegal, but communist symbols (a system that claimed magnitude more lives than Nazism) are completely fine to promote?
The reasons would be both historical and ideological. The end of WW2 saw the western powers and Soviet Union join in an alliance that thwarted the Nazi plans of a world empire where a master race (white folks) would be explicitly and morally entitled to enslave the rest of the world. Such an ideology is an anathema to liberal democracy and communists alike, and formed one basis of the alliance that crushed the Nazis. Only after the war and the common enemy was defeated did the split between liberal democracy and communism become the main conflict, and even then it rarely escalated to hot war.
BTW, to evaluate ideologies based on counting the dead in conflicts between powers, or on number of victims in famines that occur because of failed policies implies ideological and historical ignorance, despite the popularity of such blame games on social media. But it shows that people are getting fed up with all the killing at least.
You are most likely unable to choose the class you are born into, so where you belong is outside your control, in a similar way to the colour of your skin. In that respect I fail to see how Communism is different from Nazism. In both systems the outcome is that part of the population becomes enslaved, they only had different criteria who is going to suffer.
If your method of understanding the world consist of constructing hypothetical scenarios like that you will not be able to understand history. History isn't shaped by considerations such as "x has some common traits with y and therefore x and y should be treated the same" (leaving aside the whole discussion of what actually constitutes common traits).
Case in point, you had a question which you couldn't answer through that method. I gave you an explanation that explains the need for another method (study of the historical events in their context); you came back insisting that history should bend to your will. You might be surprised to learn that doesn't work like that, eventually.
Displaying a swastika is not illegal in Germany. It's only illegal if you use it for nazi propaganda purposes. Stop spreading misinformation. Relevant quote [1]:
"Whoever domestically disseminates or produces ... the contents of which are intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization ... shall be punished ..."
This is a weirdly hostile attack. I assumed that's what the parent meant, but still, you're right that it's important to remember that things like educational contexts exist.
No, the "total ban" mentioned in the BBC article existed only in the context of video games. Displaying the swastika has been allowed for many purposes for quite a while.
