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Comment by yAnonymous | Hacker News Reader

>Do you have an example to share?

Government critical pages with millions of followers were deleted, playing directly in the hands of the (re-elected) government.

I don't want to be the judge of what's reasonable and what's not. As you see, having any kind of hate speech laws can and will be abused and end in censorship and stupid political games, as almost anything can be labelled as hate speech. It only depends on the perspective.

Personally, I'd go with the American model of anything goes. I don't think it's great, but it's better than this. Hate speech laws don't change anything - there will always be people who say something stupid or something you don't like. I prefer offensive people any day to people who deliberately misinterpret things and paint themselves or others as victims to discredit their opponents.

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> there will always be people who say something stupid or something you don't like. I prefer offensive people any day to people who deliberately misinterpret things and paint themselves or others as victims to discredit their opponents.

Well, hate speech is not about offending people... It's about inciting violence. A good example would be a nazi or ISIS leader publishing a video calling on their followers to attack, say, Jews, homosexuals and journalists. Hate speech laws exist to forbid such communications, because they are likely to result in violence against others. Of course there are many cases which are less clear cut than my example, where it's debatable (and hotly debated) how much violence is actually caused... but that's very different from debating "offense" or "misunderstandings", which have nothing to do with hate speech laws.

> Government critical pages with millions of followers were deleted, playing directly in the hands of the (re-elected) government.

Can you give us sources on this please?

> As you see, having any kind of hate speech laws can and will be abused and end in censorship

Not really, you haven't provided any evidence or details.

Here's about the most prominent example.

https://i.imgur.com/mY0iBWU.jpg

That's an earlier screenshot of the page. It had about 2 million likes at the end. They posted provocative content, government critical stuff, some of it true, some of it false and some of it utter nonsense. None of which is illegal. Welcome to election campaigns around 2018. It's not our fault they have sunk to such a low level, but that's what it is and there's no consolation price for being the good guy.

This page had more readers than all but the biggest printed newspapers, which is quite a feat. Then one day their page was disabled and later deleted.

No real person has been and would be prosecuted for what they did. Personally, I think their content was crap and didn't follow it, but that's besides the point. They did what most politicians and official newspapers do to get attention and clicks.

This was in the early days, when the law was in planning, but not officially passed. Since then, many other pages like that simply disappeared.

So a facebook page was deleted. Are you sure this wasn’t Facebook enforcing their obscure and often-changing terms of service? What makes you think this was the German government enforcing hate speech laws?

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