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Munich Court To Try Facebook's Zuckerberg For Inciting Hatred (dw.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Deutsche Welle: A Munich court has opened a lawsuit against Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, German media reported on Friday. News outlet "der Spiegel" wrote on its website, before the main weekly magazine's Saturday release, that it had obtained court documents charging the social media mogul with incitement to hatred. Zuckerberg is reportedly being charged alongside Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, chief Europe lobbyist Richard Allan, and his Berlin counterpart Eva-Maria Kirschsieper. According to Spiegel, the complaint comes from the Wurzburg-based attorney Chan-jo Jun. In the suit, he accuses Facebook of tolerating appeals for murder, threats of violence, and Holocaust denial, among other things. Laws regulating hate speech in Germany are extremely tight, with most Nazi symbolism and racist propaganda strictly forbidden, a legacy of Germany's role in World War II. Although Facebook is obliged to remove illegal content from its site, it has repeatedly garnered hefty criticism for the time it takes to do so.
Freedom of speech is a necessary pre-requisite for freedom, so it's worth mentioning:
The reason Germany has such strict anti-speech laws is actually a tool of oppression from the allies. They didn't want to have another uprising like Hitler leading into World War 3 (also part of the reason the US has military bases in Germany), so they took measures to ensure Hitler's specific type of propaganda would be oppressed.
So Germany is not an example to the world here, but neither were the laws intended to be.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The fact that that Zuckerberg is Jewish makes the fact that he is being named in a German lawsuit about hate speech an holocaust denial particularly deliciously ironic.
Yes. Likewise, it is rather devilishly clever how fast freedom of speech can be called into question when it is renamed Hate. After all, hate is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone has the right to be offended. Too.
Christ, we are a mess.
The correct response in most cases is to tell the offended person to grow up and get the fuck over it. Words don't really hurt you, only your own overreaction to them gives such power to whoever says them.
I personally accepted long ago that with several billion people in the world, I'm not going to like the opinions and beliefs of all of them. Also, plenty of them won't like my own thoughts. None of this gives me the right to censor anyone. Understanding that is part of growing up - so is understanding that any excuse for restricting freedom is very dangerous.
If you're going to have a criminal code, the punishment needs to be in proportion to the crime. If I say something that offends you, how long does it take for you to get over that (assuming you're immature and weak-willed enough that you got offended in the first place, instead of deciding to no longer listen to me)? A few minutes? A few hours maybe? In what way would this materially, measurably, objectively harm you? It wouldn't. Throwing someone in jail and placing large fines against them, just for this, is complete overkill. That's not remotely proportional.
Obviously I'm not talking about things like death threats, but in that case it's the threat of violence -- not the communication of unpopular/"offensive" ideas -- that causes it to be a crime. When it comes to Holocaust deniers, bigots, etc., I actually want them to speak up without fear of legal reprisal. I want them to openly identify themselves. That makes it much easier for me to choose never to associate with them. If I don't know who they are, this process takes more time and effort.
Free speech is for mature adult people who can deal with life. Censorship is for two types of people: 1. Overgrown children (often in adult bodies) who value fleeting emotional states more than their own precious freedoms, and, 2. Control freaks who love an excuse, any excuse, that "justifies" their desire to control what other people say and do. It really is that simple.
They LOVE hate speech, but only when it's targeted at cis-gendered heterosexual white men.