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Comment by ivan_gammel | Hacker News Reader

One calls it censorship, someone else calls it protection of democracy and freedoms, because freedom of speech is not absolute and not of higher priority than other human rights. Human rights are always in conflict with each other: today USA is deciding to violate right of property for Russian oligarchs because rights of Ukrainian citizen are violated. Right for free movement was restricted during Covid pandemic for many people and often restricted as a punishment for crimes. How freedom of speech is so different that people cry about it without considering the context? Why people think that Germany is a model state for censorship, when there are states which censor media for real, before publication, do it for longer, more efficiently and to suppress opposition?

Just for reference, Germany has the same high HFI index as United States: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...

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You are defending generic restrictions on speech, but the NetzDG makes very specific restrictions - such as prohibitive (up to €50 million) fines if something claimed to be illegal (by a mere complainant, not a court order) is not taken down within 7 days, and within 24 hours if it is "clearly illegal", resulting in severe chilling effects.

Try to defended those instead.

(Yes, no fine is levied if the content is not taken down, and turns out to not be illegal. What sane company will take such a risk?)

> NetzDG makes very specific restrictions - such as prohibitive (up to €50 million) fines if something claimed to be illegal

That is wrong. Merely, NetzDG imposes an obligation on specific social network providers to establish an "effective and transparent process" to deal with complaints about unlawful content. Without prescribing a specific process in itself, it specifies certain functional requirements. Among them, this process has to ensure that "blatantly illegal content" is being removed within 24 hours, unless the social network provider has agreed on a longer timespan with the law enforcement agency.

Any fines the NetzDG stipulates do only refer to failures to meet requirements of process design. In no case there are fines for social media providers in the case of wrongfully consider a piece of content lawful in a specific case.

It seems to me that this whole discussion is fundamentally unable to consider these legal nuances. Also, blaming NetzDG for actions of authoritarian governments is just plain silly.

Do you have a precedent where this resulted in unlawful restriction of speech or it’s just a generic speculation?

I had a look once at the form in one of Meta services to report hate speech: it does require some effort to fill the form and it does require the issue to be reported to police. If you don’t want to report the case to authorities, the platform will not take down the content. I do not see how this could result in a real censorship in a state with the rule of law.

A few examples (though the reporting could be clearer):

https://www.techdirt.com/2018/01/12/second-time-week-german-...

https://www.dw.com/en/facebook-slammed-for-censoring-german-...

Fortunately for the defenders of that law, the notoriously opaque censorship of social media companies helps hide what is going on, so few examples surface. I could not find anything as convenient as a list of (wrongfully or not) censored content by this law. Often the censored party is not even told that the NetzDG was involved.

Silence on this issue should not be confused with a lack of problems, however. For example, in Germany:

“it can be a criminal offense in Germany to call another person a ‘jerk,’ or even to use the informal du, or ‘thou,’” to communicate a lack of respect for the recipient. German courts have penalized other similar “derogatory epithets,” including “asshole,” “bastard,” “old goat, “fathead,” “dope,” and “whore.” [..] German courts heard 26,757 criminal insult cases that year, leading to 21,454 convictions and 20,390 fines. - https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/germanys-netzdg-and...

To me this looks like a severe overreach of speech restrictions, even if one doesn't idealize the US 1st amendment, and accepts the need for some government censorship. Yet I've only learned about it just now, from a very obscure post.

Your first two links don't support the claim. Twitter removed an impersonator spreading fake news.

Unlabeled satire posted context-free to Twitter where it gets interpreted at true and repeated, is a different complicated problem (and why Twitter is a fundementally terrible design).

Laws that are bad because of abuseability didn't somehow transcend from good to bad the first time they were abused, they would have already been bad before that event.

But you still have a point in so far as that you can't look at a law ignoring the legal conventions and processes of the environment where "the code is run", something that would be perfectly fine in one environment could be terrible in another.

I have looked at the NetzDG reporting on YouTube and Twitter and while both of them require you to cite a specific law the content is in violation of, they both do not require any report to authorities. The NetzDG doesn't require involvement of authorities, it was especially designed with the goal of moving the work from the state to private companies.

Without freedom of speech you don't have democracy, or true freedom of association, etc. It's a critical foundational right on which other human rights are founded.

It is not foundational, it is one of the many rights that our society recognizes. In Universal Declaration of Human Rights it’s Article 19, coming after 18 other articles. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

In German constitution it is Article 5 and it is explicitly limited, considering the importance of the balance. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/German_Federa...

It is absolutely foundational.

You're talking about laws, but free speech isn't about laws, it's a notion of moral philosophy.

The sense in which it is foundational is as follows: you cannot have democracy without freedom of speech, because without it there is no free formation of opinions. You can't freedom of association or freedom of assembly without freedom of speech. These latter are interconnected, because an aspect of freedom of assembly is to assemble to hold, for example, political meetings.

this is not how the german state (or german democracy?) is built. Freedom of speech has bounds here and this can be defended.

So because others are worse Germany's laws are good?

I don't know but laws that allow someone to be locked up indefinitely without conviction don't sound like freedom to me.

What laws are you referring to specifically?

Bavarian Police Act

1. Who selects the censor?

You might be ok with <your candidate> making speech restrictions.. but are you ok with a hardline opposition candidate doing the same?

2. Governments change

Even a government that starts using a power - say restricting access to bank accounts - for something good like stopping actual terrorism or money laundering can decide to start using it against political movements they don't care for.

3. Governments grow

Governments only grow in power. They get bigger. They use more powers. Even some of the hardcore censor states started with more narrow objectives. China started with objectives to stop false information and external propaganda - now they use that power to suppress victims talking about sexual assault by party members.

Fundamentally I do not trust any government to have that power. It will always be abused, and we must always resist it. Australia is an excellent example of a liberal democracy using safetyism to quickly run towards authoritarianism.

Governments exist to protect those, who cannot protect themselves. If you do not give the government power to balance execution of human rights by restricting some of them in reasonable ways, the government will fail to protect vulnerable minorities and eventually your democracy will be destroyed by those, who will exploit the power of media to promote their agenda and to attack people, who have different ancestry, beliefs or do not fit in that agenda in other ways. The government should not remain unchecked, of course, so voters must have the power to replace them in a democratic process, that’s it. Nobody invented yet a better system, that actually could work.

The harm of speech is low.

Yes, people can say things that mean. People can say things that are wrong and misleading - and you may even believe them. Everyone has the ability to protect themselves from others speech - stop listening to them. This works even for very small children.

The freedom of speech brings with it the ability to ask for a redress of wrongs. It is how people can talk about alternative candidates. It is the most vital of freedoms because it is the foundation of the others.

Or, you know, the government restricts human rights in "reasonable ways" that are not reasonable for a given minority. Historically it's largely been abuses of governmental power that resulted in atrocities.

Historical lessons are important but it’s a very long stretch from atrocities of the past to this specific law in Germany — so long that I don’t really understand how is this related.

Those indices are ridiculous, and at best merely reflective of the values of the people who compose them.

> One calls it censorship, someone else calls it protection of democracy and freedoms

Yes, only those are dictators or wannabe dictators... In Democracy they are free to speak, also against Democracy, after they grab power no one are free anymore...

> today USA is deciding to violate right of property for Russian oligarchs because rights of Ukrainian citizen are violated.

Really? Did you look for something more tangible than mass-consumption Bernaysian propaganda? Start with this old governmental (EU) report: https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/e/7/233896.pdf go to the USA think tanks side like https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html and https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/R... and also far in the past https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/AERODYNAMIC%20%20%20VOL... who is actually violating what?

> Right for free movement was restricted during Covid pandemic

Witch is another scandal, actually one per WHO pandemic declaration... Again I suggest some official governmental sources one from the last pandemic for instance: https://assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2010/20100126_Stateme...

Yes, Democratic Civil Rights are regularly violated and they are because that's mean profit for some until the people remember that in Democracy they rule and arise. Only they tend to remember that way too late, when arising it's not just a legal action or a protest but a civil war and they are so easy to influence that's they tend to be quickly steered/diverted.

That's the real issue: how can we have Democracies when we do not have Citizens but only subjects/people? How in the history Democracy happen?

The reason free speech is special is that it can be used to rescuscitate the other rights if they are infringed, at far lower catastriphic risk than, say, freedom to bear arms.

Any censorship is disgusting and should be rejected. Regardless of context.

Disagreement with that means you're a threat to democracy, period.

Speech can't hurt you. Speech by itself doesn't violate any of your rights.

Private property cannot hurt you, yet property ownership is restricted (e.g. you have to pay taxes). Restrictions often exist not to prevent immediate harm, but to make society functional and enable implementation of other rights. Restriction of free speech can be necessary if it is used to incite violence, thus triggering violation of other rights.

Oh no, verbal abuses do hurt and in very subtle ways.

Democracy is a conversation where we, as a society, craft policy.

What makes it a democracy is that all members of society participate in that conversation. Freely.

Anything less is mere tyranny.

But if we need a way to manage spam, lies and the other poisonous forms of conversation, then empower the individual to handle that. Because we do not trust you.

>What makes it a democracy is that all members of society participate in that conversation. Freely. Anything less is mere tyranny.

I guess the keyword there is „that“, right? Freedom of speech should not be restricted if it helps to support the democracy, but OTHER conversations are different matter. As I said, freedom of speech is not absolute and is checked by other freedoms and rights.

To suggest that any conversation is more deserving of a guarantee of sincerity than any other seems bad.

Should we assume that there is an invisible man between us, transforming our words? That seems really bad to me.

Freedom of speech is foundational for other rights. Take that away, and the other rights might as well not exist.

This is not correct. Nobody takes it away. It is limited by other rights through the laws that explain when and how the rights should be balanced.

Talk of "balances between rights" always ends up in restrictions on liberty. Communitarianism sounds possibly workable until you start to realize that those making the laws you mention (if you're lucky to get them instead of vague guidelines, and then Katie bar the door) and those adjudicating the laws will only decide on the side of whatever benefits them and their cronies. That's taking away freedom of speech, that's taking away all sorts of rights. Liberty is too precious to leave it to politicians and bureaucrats.

> What makes it a democracy is that all members of society participate in that conversation. Freely. Anything less is mere tyranny.

Are bot accounts paid for by an external part (e.g. foreign government agency or multinational company), which 24/7 post inflammatory (not illegal) and bad-faith augments (not illegal) in a conversation part of that society?

So prisoners having no internet access makes a society a mere tyranny?

I think you should rethink your criteria.

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