Varies from country to country. Here in Germany we have substantially stricter laws against hate speech for example. Even more egregious, we have pretty strict laws against insults as well, which do get abused by people in power. For example, not too long ago someone got his house raided by police for calling the state interior minister a dick on twitter.
These kinds of laws are only possible because we have less strict and explicit rights to free speech in our constitution than the us.
Yes, sure this is a bit of dark spot for freedom of speech in Germany. From what I'm seeing though pauli zoo got suspended from twitter afterwards and there has been neither suit nor countersuit in that case. So maybe there is more hidden detail here than is publicly known.
So I wasn't really participating in social media anyways, but it still had a cooling effect on what I'm willing to say in public.
The leader of my state (Berlin) is a cheater (proven; plagiarized heavily in her diss) and I strongly dislike her. I'm also positive she's exactly the kind of petty and vindictive person to go after random people insulting her.
A police raid in itself is a huge punishment already. Your home gets violated, lots of stuff destroyed and in this case, all computers and hard drives taken away. If that happened to me, it would be months of absolute pain to return to normality.
Which is hilarious given the restrictions on freedom of speech in the US
European countries have different levels of restrictions on the US, more lax in some areas, tighter in others. The main difference with the US is that the EU doesn't pretend they have unlimited free speech, the US does.
