EU Agencies Falsely Report More Than 550 Archive.org URLs as Terrorist Content

How do you square this with the recent surge in flat Earth and anti-vaccination beliefs? The merits of truth aren't guaranteed to win this battle.

Heck, some things have become so heated that there can only be one right answer, ex: global warming. If you dare voice anything other than slavish obedience to this notion. If you DARE question anything about it - from the models/assumptions used to the moralizing - then you are branded an outcast and castigated.

Interesting side fact: unlike in english, there are two completely distinct words for illegal and legal drugs in russian language. Which a lot of times makes it easier to spot russian-speaking posters, as they tend to refer to illegal drugs as just "drugs", while referring to legal ones using other more specific terms, like "pills" or something else.

Some more general information in English here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Internet_Restriction_B... but this is not the only law, there are many additional bans (Russian parliament is sometimes called "crazy printer" in Russia because it has issued so many insane laws). You can read about banning Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Wikipedia_in_Russia

Europe isn’t one big whole, parts of it are already obviously worse than others.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...

Doesn't sound so bad, does it? Well, turns out that police can be a social group. So can government employees. And members of parliament. Of course, back when they passed that law, some civil libertarians did point out the vagueness. But it went exactly as it usually does in any Western country - the politicians were pinky swearing that this is all about Nazis and radical Islamists and other nasty people like that who deserve it, and obviously it wouldn't be used for anything inappropriate; but, you see, if it's too narrow, then the bad guys can find ways around it, so it has to allow for some flexibility.

For most Westerners, the immediate reaction to this is, "it can never happen here" - not the laws, since many countries have similar, but the part where they get misused. We'd never tolerate it, the argument goes. But we are tolerating it. France also has exemplary hate speech laws - and under them, wearing a t-shirt that advocates a boycott of Israel is a hate crime, a felony even, and people are actually getting arrested, charged and convicted under it. The law in question is 15 years old now, and it's far from the only one like that in Europe - just the most abused one so far.

https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la...

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/01/trusted-sources/

This is a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario.

Such as when government is given too much power over it.

I'm sure sympathizing or trying to understand a terrorist's motives (perhaps their home country is being occupied by the US?) can fit under the terrorist content umbrella.

Edit: Let's not leave unaddressed the farcical idea that Europe prior to World War I was some bastion of free speech, and that this somehow led to the wars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#German_E...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingd...

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=766

Have they learnt the right lesson though? What's the alternate history theory here? You toss Hitler in jail after he makes an inflammatory speech to a large crowd, but before he's elected and that prevents WW2?

None of this solves the underlying issue of there being deep political problems in any country that ends up with this kind of leader getting into power. The hope of free speech supposedly being that someone will eventually put their finger on the real cause of the problems and get people on board with it, rather than an unfortunate group being scapegoated.

Unless it's libel (i.e. intentional or neglectful causing of actual harm to a person) or speech connected to specific lawless action (like saying "let's whack this guy" to a contract killer) - no, there's not. Which things do you mean?

> Germans in particular are acutely aware of the disastrous consequences of allowing incitement to go unchallenged

Germans problem was not just "incitement". It was putting Hitler in charge of the government. That wasn't done by "incitement", that was done by actual German top politicians, who thought that putting a strong leader in charge and suppressing opposition (Ermächtigungsgesetz and so on) will solve their stability problems. They did it for security, to keep the tranquility and peace in the nation, so they had the troublemakers arrested and the people who can right the course of the nation assigned the power instead. Too bad those people turned out to be the Nazis.

I think the lesson from here is that no opposition voice needs to be suppressed, no group should be excluded, and nobody should be given absolute power over others. Somehow some people in EU think that the lesson if that right people just need to suppress the right things instead. After all, we have so good record in choosing who are the right people and what things they should be suppressing, don't we? We won't make any mistakes again there?

I reckon on the whole people have fought more to protect free speech than to limit it, although both have indeed occurred, fascism being the main example of the latter.

And yet, if you seriously brought that argument forth, I suspect people would be more disgusted than if you applied it to freedom of speech. What makes religion so much more important than speech? The main difference I can think of is that freedom of speech is primarily a more individualistic kind of right, while religion is inherently more collectivist.

The dangers that come from suppression of speech trump the dangers of free speech by far. And your 'historical analysis' is laughably shallow. Frankly, your comment reads like regurgitated propaganda.

European countries ban those forms of speech, and also ban other forms of speech based on subjective non-criminal harm that is perceived to be a potential result of such speech. For example, denying the Holocaust could lead other people to think it didn't happen, which may cause them to view Jewish people more negatively.

The US simply doesn't engage in that kind of subjective interpretation of speech. Speech has to be a component of a criminal act, or a clear precursor to an imminently criminal act. You can't play association games like "he said this, which could lead other people to think X, which could lead people to say Y, which could lead to some form of violence", which most (all?) European legal systems seem to do.

I do understand the need for certain limited restrictions on speech in times of war and martial law, and perhaps for brief periods after wars end, but the EU hasn't had a major war in a long time. I get banning swastikas and banning Holocaust denial in the 50s. But I'm an American Jew, and I've been to Germany a bunch in the past decade. I don't care (in a legal sense) if someone denies the Holocaust, and in fact think that banning Holocaust denial greatly empowers them and their cause, not just in Germany but globally. I've seen this firsthand, many times.

I’m not sure that current hate speech laws would have been effective at countering Nazi propaganda.

The Nazis were not openly advocating their most extreme policies before the war. Even during the war, the worst atrocities were mostly kept quiet.

Evidently not, as that would probably mean we would not be on the road to make at least some mistakes again.

We also had hate speech laws in the 19th century...

But the real curious argument is that the state was lacking oversight and control over public content. It almost makes you angry thinking about it.

Germany had a laisser-faire approach to recent content control. That worked brilliantly. That changed and suddenly we have some really angry people wanting to change some things.

Additionally, the far right people want content control as much as everyone. I don't want to see a smug smile while they implement hate-speech laws like in Austria.

Using the german experience to justify content control is infantile.

I'd say about none.

The "it's not foolproof, so it's fruitless"-argument strikes me as missing the point. We can't prevent many things from happening (rape, thieving, excessive drug use, etc.) but that doesn't mean that efforts to contain this are useless.

All signs point to the UK taking an increasingly authoritarian attitude to the net post-Brexit.

https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/study-google-is-the-biggest-be...

So you had Farrah’s and others playing the usual “Hey struggling masses, all of your problems are those immigrant’s fault” game. Over time the political success of UKIP and internal strife within the Tories led David “The Chinless Pudding” Cameron to promise that he would hold a referendum on the issue of re-elected. At the time he assumed that he would win by the same narrow margin he had previously and once again would enter into a “power-sharing” deal with the Liberal Democrats. He could then blame the LibDems for blocking the referendum, defuse the Tory civil war, and shut Farage up for another election cycle.

Then he won, decisively, and the LibDems tanked. So Cameron had no excuse to not have the referendum. He assumed that people who had been openly pro-remain such as Boris Johnson would put aside their personal ambitions and support Remain, but of course that didn’t happen. So what you had was a group of highly motivated people such as Boris who used this as a means to get power, people like Farrage being populist demagogues, and the ERG playing ideologue while just looking to get even richer. Cameron quit and literally walked away humming a little tune, and the Tories went to war with themselves. In the end everyone “died” and out of the ashes rose the silent one, Theresa May, who had switched from staunch pro-Remain to equally staunch Brexiteer mode overnight.

The rest is history. In a sense at the highest levels where Brexit isn’t about gaining short-term power and settling grudges, it’s about the long-term goal of being able to capture UK regulatory bodies. “People” like Jacob Rees-Mogg see how the business class can rob the state in the US, and they want a slice of that. The EU would prevent much of it, so they want out of the EU. The details of why individual people (who bothered to vote at all) voted to Leave is a lot less interesting and has less to do with Brexit than the political reality.