Slashdot Mirror
Germany Cracks Down On Illegal Speech On Social Media. (smh.com.au)
ArmoredDragon writes: German police have raided 36 homes of people accused of using illegal speech on Facebook and Twitter. Much of it was aimed at political speech. According to the article, "Most of the raids concerned politically motivated right-wing incitement, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office, whose officers conducted home searches and interrogations. But the raids also targeted two people accused of left-wing extremist content, as well as one person accused of making threats or harassment based on someone's sexual orientation."
This comes just as a new law is being debated that can fine social media platforms $53 million for not removing 70% of illegal speech (including political, defamatory, and hateful speech) within 24 hours of it being posted, which Facebook argues will make it obligatory for them to delete posts and ban users for speech that isn't clearly illegal.
This comes just as a new law is being debated that can fine social media platforms $53 million for not removing 70% of illegal speech (including political, defamatory, and hateful speech) within 24 hours of it being posted, which Facebook argues will make it obligatory for them to delete posts and ban users for speech that isn't clearly illegal.
There should be no such thing as illegal speech.
Thankfully, here in the US the Supreme Court unanimously disagrees with this "hate speech" BS. Letting governments censor any sort of political speech is just a bad idea. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Germany's limitations on far right speech have been around for seven decades, and were born out of the Allied Occupation and Allied Denazification policies. We can argue whether those laws are justifiable now, but the intent, as with banning the Imperial form of Shinto by the US during the occupation of Japan, was to assure that the militaristic regimes that had killed hundreds of millions would not rise again.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Shouldn't this be under the censorship icon?
You do realize that meaningful death threats are illegal, right?
Yes, that was my point.
That's the whole point of free speech; you are free to say anything but NOT free of consequences from what you say.
Incorrect. The point of free speech is to keep the government from jailing you for speaking out against them.
Everything else in your post is sheer drivel.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Guess who insisted that criminalising Nazism was a pre-condition for an independent Germany?
Oh wait, it was those enlightened Free Speech activists known as the USA.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Is the US raiding homes because of speech? News to me, got a source?
The bathroom debate is more about a poorly written version of post-modern law, i.e. should the state recognize the gender you choose at any given time or should it use objective standards that represent 99% of the population. To quote Ted Cruz: "it isn't about the Caitlyn Jenners of the world. But if the law is such that any man if he feels like it can go into a womens restroom and you can't ask him to leave that opens the doors for predators.". Poorly written laws with good intentions are still bad laws. I don't like the idea that if you feel a certain way you can do anything you want. A pedophile feels attracted to children, does that mean I should be tolerant of that because of their feelings? No. I will not capitulate to feelings that disregard objectivity and the vulnerable.
Whether you agree that the law should have a post-modern influence or not is very much different than raiding your home because you said wrong-speak. I would rather a Trump than a benevolent dictator.
German here. The National Socialists were considered right wing at the time, not afterwards, and they still are. This categorization is not based on whether they were fascists or not, although most Germans still associate fascism with the radical right (and where the radical right is active in Germany today, they usually also have a fascist agenda). The Nazis were a rightist worker party with an absolutist agenda that was almost entirely based on race and national identity. Even today, after the meaning of our terms has slipped somewhat, this fingerprint cannot be considered "left" by any standard.
If I were to hazard a guess, the US' public confusion and outright denial about the Nazi-rightist connection comes from several factors: First, the Nazi ideology was strongly collectivist, and collectivism is often associated with extremist left-wing regimes, plus the American right has a strong dislike for socialism and thereby is strongly anti-collectivist. Second, and I realize this may sound a little bit mean, but sympathizing even with extreme right-wing ideas is so mainstream in the US right now, that some redefinition of words was necessary in order to clean up the image of mass-supported rightist extremism, to purge it from harmful historical associations.
It's important to keep in mind that the Nazi party is not a blueprint for whatever is happening in the world right now, and it's neither fair nor accurate to brand the mainstream rightist movements currently sweeping many Western democracies in this light. In my opinion, people should also be aware that the currently leading rightist and leftist movements both are thoroughly authoritarian ideologies. In fact, authoritarianism is so popular that it even wins over centrists. I'm pointing this out, because people seem to be lost in escalating left vs. right debates leading nowhere, while their freedoms are taken away underneath them.
The lack of education in your post is nearly unbearable, especially in combination with the fact that equally uneducated moderators have modded you up. Since when have so many people become completely ignorant? You should really read some history books.
National socialism is and always has been a right-wing movement, both in their own terms and according to every reasonable description that has ever been made of them. They were fighting socialists and communists and put them in Concentration Camps. Not only that, nearly every fascist right-wing movement in modern times has claimed to help workers and has mimicked false concern about the working class. That's why people have expressed so many fears about Trump, because he uses exactly this far right-wing rhetoric.
Like many people you're confusing a mixture of classical liberalism (e.g. Smith, Locke), utilitarianism and democratic conservatism with the rantings of the far right, which have nearly always been "pro workers class and for the rights of the 'small people" just like socialism and communism. The far right and the far left are similar in many respects, since they are both promoting different forms of totalitarianism, but they are based on different principles. Both of them have few things to do with moderate democratic positions like left- and right-wing liberalism, conservatives in general (who can be leaning left or right), those who are called 'progressives' in the US (i.e., mostly center left conservatives and left-wing liberals), or social democrats.
Also, your statements are way too general. For example, both the Franco regime in Spain and the Salazar regime in Portugal were certainly fascist, but they were neither left-wing like communists nor radical right-wing in the sense of Nazis, they were rather conservative, catholic right-wing fascist movements (though of course not 'fascism' in the sense of its Italian origins). No offense, but these two examples alone illustrate how mistaken you are.
You need to get away from your limited partisan views and take a look at the actual ideologies that were defended, and then you will quite quickly find out that blanket statements are simply false. Neither is Italian fascism a pure worker's movement, not does being pro workers indicate a left-wing position, nor is e.g. Italian fascism on a par with Nazis. And let's not even get started that you seem to be unwilling to even distinguish different forms of left-wing traditions such as anarchism, socialism, democratic socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc., as if they were all the same.
In countries like Portugal communists were tortured or died fighting against fascism. That doesn't mean you need to become a communist, but you should at least show some respect by getting a hint of an education before opening your uninformed mouth.