Comment by Certhas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Certhas | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

No we don't. The law is against insulting people, not against "saying stuff we don't like on the internet". The laws predate the internet by decades. The freedom to express your opinion is constitutionally protected, this does not cover all speech acts, in Germany and everywhere (see slander laws). Courts protect this constitutional guarantee, as several recent cases showed. Vigorously enforcing laws against insults and other speech acts that are hostile towards constructive discourse seems to me to be the only way forward when it comes to restoring a semblance of sanity to societal conversation. The social networks by themselves have proven to be utterly incapable of doing so.

The most comprehensive survey on various freedoms in the World that I know of ranks Germany at 94, ahead of France at 90 and the US at 86. (100 is the perfect score)

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2018-table-cou...

Freedom of speech is also a guaranteed right in the German constitution, as it is in the European Convention on Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

In every jurisdiction there are limits to the freedom of speech. This applies to the US as well as everywhere else:

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

In this case, the content of the insult is a subset of "stuff we don't like" said over the Internet.

Well, not really. On a summary Wikipedia[0] investigation you can find that the UN definition of freedom of speech also contains caveats[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#cite_note-3

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080705115024/http://www2.ohchr...

Can you now explain what is considered hate speech? You've just painted a pretty convincing argument on one side (Freedom of Speech).

Here's the English translation of Section 130: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stg...

Which might help explain what is considered hate speech. These discussions tend to devolve (as all good online discussions do) into the nuance and what-about's. It's the role of the courts to determine that, and it's an ever-evolving collection of legal precedent as a result.

If that standard was applied worldwide, there would be hundreds of lawsuits here, on HN every day (and HN is heavily moderated). It s one of the reasons why no social media can grow in europe.

There are hundreds of attacks every day on HN against people on account of their belonging to a national, racial, or religious group? Guess I've been missing all the spicy comments

parent said "The law is against insulting people"

yeah I know these terrible attacks hurt someones feelings every single day, by that measure half of HN posters should be raided, and the other half deserves to be raided for being spineless spice hating mongrels

Above all, dont insult the German football team.

and politicians

I'm not sure how insulting people can be a crime?

Insulting is explicitly illegal in Germany. In person or internet, doesn't matter.

You’re getting downvoted, but it’s true: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...

From the link, not every insult is punished :

"Mutual exchange of insults

If an insult is immediately reciprocated, the court may declare one or both of the persons involved in the exchange of insults not to be liable to punishment."

There's a group of people downvoting everything I post, even about c++. No worries

Freedom of speech is not guaranteed in Germany. If it were, holocaust denial wouldn’t get people jailed.

Remind me of a time I was in Germany. I was out with some friends (none of us was german) and one friend joked about hitler, he put a finger over his mustache and did the hitler salute to tell a joke. A guy who was standing next to us came running and said you will get jailed if the police who were close to us see you. So much for freedom to tell a joke. It seems this is the norm, so be careful when in Germany [1].

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-40842853

Well it's one of the typical lawyer tricks. There is a paragraph in the constitution that explicitly grants you freedom of speech. There's also others that more or less say you get to jail for saying xyz. Unfortunately, law is not a program that has to compile.

Then put selective enforcement on top and you have a very powerful weapon that gets great PR ("against hate").

No, there is no such paragraph. The German constitution guarantees freedom of opinion - not speech.

So you can’t get prosecuted for disliking someone (and saying so) but you can for saying insulting or untrue (e.g. holocaust denial) things - those are not opinions.

Well you can get convicted for saying you like a joke. That did happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com