Hacker News Reader

Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but no. Forcing companies that disregard the law to pay fines (not 'arresting people') is no strike at freedom of expression in Germany. (Note that your link [1] is about the UK, a different country.)

Yes, holocaust denial and Nazi propaganda are prohibited in Germany for historical reasons, but the notion that his severely impedes the freedom of political speech is mistaken.

And yes, I've read my John Stuart Mill, and mostly agree with him.

As an aside, I'd still rate the level of public discourse in Germany as way above what's happening in many other countries (though it's going downhill, with all the private TV stations and social media, whose goal is not edification and education, but advertisement driven profit and "engagement").

View on HN

June 20, 2017 - Germany Raids Homes of 36 People Accused of Hateful Postings Over Social Media

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/world/europe/germany-36-a...

Given that these types of people literally do incite things like in the following video, i fail to see anything troubling in such police action.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmTtCyLvGUg

this is very lazy reasoning on your part.

i was also posting it in response to GP's line:

> disregard the law to pay fines (not 'arresting people')

you may not treasure your rights enough to protect them even on behalf of people you despise, but you will forgive those of us who do.

Germany actually has these restrictions because it affords its citizens more rights than most countries. And these restrictions exist exactly because rights may only be exercised unless they impinge on the rights of others.

And i invite you to read the very first law in the german body of law, that enshrines a right that does not exist in all countries:

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...

Enforcing laws that restrict expression is restricting expression.

This law will absolutely be used to curb political speech, that's the whole point. And you know it will be applied by the ruling party against anybody whose views they don't like.

When you're banning "hate speech" without strictly and narrowly defining what it is, it's a pure censorship instrument with pretty much unlimited reach.

I, for instance, think The Bible and The Quran are full of hate speech, but do you think they should be banned in the whole country simply based on my view?

What about a Android vs iOS debates? Should we ban every shit-talking conversation on the internet?

What about BMW vs Audi? Tabs vs spaces? Chocolate vs vanilla?

So, first, I'm no expert in this (and defer to rbehrends's excellent comments in this thread). The law seems to have problematic parts, as mentioned in the article: "the statute gives companies incentives to remove content, and it lacks a procedure for users to appeal removals."

Yet, the issue is not clear cut. There are legitimate limitations on free speech - the famous "screaming fire in a crowded theatre" thing.

So, in Germany (with a history of institutionalised genocide), the lines are drawn a bit differently.

The notion that the ruling party will use it against views they don't like seems far fetched, though again, I grant you that it's a slippery slope - Principiis obsta ("resist the beginnings").

But, I object to the notion that freedom of political speech is fundamentally under attack here.

[As for the Abrahamic texts, there is case to be made that they ought to be banned, though I grant that that wouldn't help much. As for your "reductio ad absurdum" (tabs/spaces): again, there's unproblematic speech, and there's legitimately prohibited speech, and then there's a grey area, and that's what we're discussing here - where in the grey to draw the line.]

It's just amazing that you can talk about banning the religious texts and at the same time claim the speech is not under attack. That's some olympic-level mental gymnastics.

I am saying that this law discussed in the article constitutes no attack on free speech.

By implication, hypothetical stricter laws might be defensible, even. Next, the Abrahamic texts do contain truly awful prescriptions (genocide, killing people for all sorts of silly reasons, such as blasphemy, apostasy, homosexuality, eating the wrong food, etc.), which one ought to argue against vigorously, and which could be illegal under (hypothetical, stricter) laws (insofar, for example, as quoting specific sections could be understood as a 'call for action' to murder people).

I don't see the mental gymnastics there?

The "fire in a crowded theater" standard is considered a legal joke these days. It has been superseded since the 1960s by FAR more stringent tests on speech limits. Expunge this saying from your vocabulary — it has zero relevance in modern case law.

Good to know. (As I said, I am no expert here, but (as I know from other areas) that does not prevent people from having an opinion...)

Do I understand you correctly in saying "more stringent tests" that more types of speech (beyond that) are considered off limits today?

Precisely the opposite. "More stringent tests" mean that any law that tries to limit speech must pass an exceedingly high bar — higher than ever before. The "clear and present danger" test used by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his "crowded theater" opinion basically says that any speech that could cause dangerous effects could be outlawed. Modern 1st Amendment jurisprudence, by contrast, has evolved toward the "fighting words" standard, which basically limits restrictions on speech to outlawing "true threats"; e.g. me saying I'm going to kill you.

Oh that's interesting. First time I heard about. I keep always hearing about "fire in a crowded theater" in "free speech" arguments and discussion.

So what's the new thing then?

Institutional genocide was enabled by the Reichstag Fire and by the restrictions on free speech that followed.

This is actually not a real risk, because the German Federal Constitutional Court is generally not any fonder of content-based speech restrictions than the US Supreme Court (it is more permissive when it comes to content-neutral speech restrictions, however).

As I wrote elsewhere, the problem here is primarily not what the government does – because there are effective constitutional safeguards in place –, but what social media companies may do.

The problem with your argument is that you're looking backwards at what the government has done to predict what it will do. What if someone like Trump is elected? Oh wait, there went that theory. How about what the south African government did or what the American dixiecrats would have done (further) if they had they power to suppress speech?

> The problem with your argument is that you're looking backwards at what the government has done to predict what it will do.

I am not predicting what the government will do. I am predicting what the Constitutional Court will do.

To be fair: That's the same thing. Counting on a system of humans keeping its stance regarding a certain topic while declaring laws is a recipe for disaster.

It's not the same thing. A constitutional court has independent judges bound only by their conscience, the constitution, and precedent, the government is answerable to its voters.

And if you actually get to a point where all these checks and balances do break down, you have much bigger worries than just suppression of speech (which at this point becomes just a further symptom of an autocratic or totalitarian regime, not its cause).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com