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.
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)
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2018-table-cou...
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...