Hacker News Reader

Comment by alpaca128 | Hacker News Reader

> What are you supposed to do when a politician is corrupt or fascist, if you aren't allowed to talk about it?

In the same country (Austria) a court actually ruled that a certain right-wing politician can be said to be close to nazi ideology due to the existing evidence.

So, you are allowed to talk about it, but you might get problems if you don't have a basis for your claims.

View on HN

So in Austria you're not allowed to insult a politician unless a court agrees with your insult? That's incredibly fascist.

This isn't specific to politicians. Calling someone a fascist in public(meaning 10+ witnesses I think) is considered defamation and, yes, if you cannot prove such claims it can have consequences.

Note that this does not apply to just any kind of insult as you say. It's for cases when it's considered harmful for one's public image, as usual with defamation. I've never heard of a simple "Idiot!" leading to any consequences. I don't know why it's "incredibly fascist" to win a defamation case when someone called you a fascist in the open. Though I do admit that it's hard to draw a clear line with these things, and there are arguments for both sides as long as it doesn't steer towards censorship.

These things could easily end up in ECHR, because a "fascist", just like an "idiot", could be considered an opinion, judgement, not a fact and so it cannot be false, unless it means something very specific in Austria.

It doesn't mean anything else in Austria, but do keep in mind Austria as well as Germany is still sensitive about such topics due to their past, which is also why denying the holocaust or doing the Hitler salute is illegal.

Which doesn't mean there aren't some stupid, backwards laws that have no place in today's society, like for example the blasphemy law which weirdly still exists. There will always be room for improvement and it's never wrong to question established rules.

When courts gatekeep criticism of politicians, that is fascist. Austria's history of fascism makes this even worse, since they of all people should know better.

Stop arguing with a false premise.

The issue here is whether courts in Austria have the right to constrain people's public statements to some standard of demonstrable truthfulness, or not.

From the Western viewpoint the answer is clearly no, but Austria will keep walking down that path regardless of whether it's morally right.

That's simply not true; including in the US. Libel statutes make distinctions between true and false statements, and between knowingly misleading statements and honest mistakes. Do you think truth should be irrelevant? I don't think society is stable under those conditions, but certainly that's not the law now.

There's no meaningful slippery slope here either; because the vast majority of cases don't involve anything questionably true, they clearly involve statements that have evidence or do not, and where there's doubt, the protections are generally fairly solid (this is in the news often enough too; witness how Musk's knowingly false and clearly negative "pedo guy" comment was still not ruled defamation).

What's worse is the fact that you don't need to win a defamation lawsuit to punish someone if you're much wealthier than the defendant, because too many jurisdictions let each side pay their own legal costs - such that those wanting to stifle dissent can often simply threaten legal action, even knowing full well they'd lose. The point doesn't need to be to win, the point can simply be to impose costs that are felt unevenly.

Public insults for the sake of insulting someone should be punished in an age where common sense is almost gone. Even more so when appellatives that can seriously ruin someone's image like fascist, racist, antisemitist (etc) are thrown around. Politician or not is irrelevant.

In an age where common sense is almost gone, I'm pretty reluctant to say that insults should be punished. Because, you know, that punishment is going to be applied without much common sense. So it's going to be applied much more broadly than it should, and in situations where it doesn't fit, and it's going to ruin peoples' lives.

The law forbids knowingly making false and defamatory statements that could lead to persecution of the accused person.

So for example, you can't accuse someone of being a rapist, for example, if you know that the accusation is not true.

Similarly, you can't accuse a politician of being corrupt just because you don't like them if you don't have any reason to believe that your accusation is true.

But it's absolutely allowed to publically insult a politician. And you also have the right to call a politician corrupt if you have a reason to believe that they are.

For example, I know that calling our former finance minister a corrupt self-serving asshole is not going to get me into trouble because there have been multiple news reports about him taking bribes.

I think for Americans it's just hard to believe that we don't protect made up lies as "free speech" around here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com