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Comment by gewa | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't seem like you are very familiar with German politics or culture, but this is definitely an outlier. Freedom of speech is a central part of our constitution. Defamation is one of the very few ways and enforcement and interpretation is mostly restricted to defamation of policemen. This is the reason why this has resulted in an outcry as the proportionality does not respond to the interpretation how defamation is treated legally.

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> restricted to defamation of policemen

This is 100% completely wrong. There's §185 and that applies to all citizens. That's the law, there's no such thing as Beamtenbeleidigung or other stuff that gets quotes often. We have to work on educating people that insulting the police is no different than insulting your neighbor. Such a law just doesn't exist and it never did.

> but this is definitely an outlier.

It's an extreme case, but not an outlier. Especially since new laws and regulations for online-activity became active recently.

I’m sure as a member of that culture, your opinions are opinions are not at all influenced by any number of different political, nationalistic or cultural biases. But from the perspective of an outsider, you have all of the same criminal statutes against speech that most other western democracies have been gradually implementing. The only thing that’s slightly different about Germany, is that you also have defamation laws that are more typical of 3rd world country, like say Thailand.

I’m sure the values of free speech are important to Germans, but much like in the UK or any number of other of places, those values haven’t been preserved in legislation, and you’ve let yourself slowly compromise them away over a number of decades.

You argue that the Germans have let the lawmakers erode the law of free speech over time. This does not make sense, since the laws and the system allowing for the abuse of power by this minister are very old. The fact that this could have been abused for the last 50 years and happened only now seems to strongly suggest that your argument does not hold true.

Whether this particular case would have been enforceable 50 years ago or not doesn’t undermine my point at all. Germany (like almost every other western democracy) has been slowly eroding freedom of expression liberties. However restrictive the country was 50 years ago, it’s more restrictive now, both as existing laws as applied to novel new speech suppression scenarios, and as new laws are created. As recently as 2017 (as far as I’m aware) Germany has been legislating new speech criminalizations (with the Network Enforcement Act), which was rather widely criticized for suppressing freedom of expression and the press.

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