The thing about Europe: it's the actual land of the free now
economist.com
economist.com
There is most definitely innovation in Europe. It just gets bought by the US, who is quick to forget where the technology came from.
As for unicorns and trillion dollars companies... some may say it's a feature, not a bug. It's great to claim to have free speech and competition, but when a few people own a few big monopolies and control the media, is it real? Regulations are not bad.
Deregulate the market and you get the oligopoly US of today (not the "great" version of the 1950s that had regulation which distributed the wealth much more equally).
The CCP is providing absurd amounts of funding for commercial innovation. Not just money either. Everything from monetary stimulus, tax exemptions (and strategically forgiving outright tax evasion) even "honey traps" (hiring prostitutes to entrap foreigners, even long term), even kidnapping foreigners.
The same way you make sure your planes fly, your code is updated, and you improve your product - you pay attention to your regulators.
The SEC was defanged for years. The pendulum swung to low regulation, and lower taxes, leading to greater wealth concentration via asset purchases.
These are all rectifiable. At all levels. It just not going to happen if we are listening to zero information news sources and disengage with everything but rage.
Quite a singular case and it sparked a huge controversy on free speech in Germany, with most scholars and officials siding with the sentiment that what David Bendels did was disguisting, but probably covered by free speech to some degree.
Compared to the free speech violations (and the seemingly inconsequencial nature of the discussions after they happened) this is still just a singular case.
Also, purely from a conceptual standpoint I do not think that a free society has to tolerate every opinion of people who objctively seek to abolish it. If you have a significant fascist movement in your country your speech will have become less free, so limiting their speech before they do is an act of defending democracy and everybody who believes in it.
Just replace Nazis/fascists with radical islamists and check how free your speech really is.
Similarly, we should not tolerate the "free speech" of those that seek to silence others (e.g. fascists).
In general intolerance just breeds more intolerance, people are much less tolerant today than 10 years ago due to the massive amount of intolerance towards intolerance that proliferated the past 10 years.
I think all the above are, although the trade-off line is somewhere above mockery.
> Is publicly mocking people for having a different culture violence? no
> Is calling for harm upon them? maybe
> Is, through policy, causing harm to them violence? maybe
> Is it violence if it's through willful inaction? no
Nowadays, there's a lot of violence that is predicated upon misinformation in social media platforms.
e.g. The Southport riots (UK) were fuelled by entirely fabricated and false information: https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zshjs82
40 police officers were injured and 27 taken to hospital, so I would certainly classify that as violence. I don't think we should tolerate that level of misinformation designed to stir up racist hatred.
Maybe your translator confused background with background story.
That the EU doesn't have unicorns is not an accident of whatever rules you like or dislike, it's entirely by design.
The second thing that I wanted to say is that even though there are examples of originally not ultra-rich people becoming ultra-rich in the US (e.g. Zuckerberg and Besos), the likelihood of this happening is almost zero. Why is it that people keep hoping that it may happen to them? We should not build a system for a handful to become ultra-rich, but for most to live as well as possible.
Some regulations spit in the face of logic. It's as if the legislators said, "let's make being sick illegal! Checkmate, modern medicine, now everyone is healthy!" Such style of thinking is erosive of trust towards the political establishment and government.
That's not to say that the European tech sector is doing fantastically. Still, as an end user, I'd rather have a thousand companies like Proton, Filen, Tutanota, Tresorit, Infomaniak, or DeepL than one Google.
Not sure what your point is.
A bunch of scared real-estate investors and pension funds who have their roots in STAYING in Europe when the (ad)venturers went overseas and built what has become the US.
It's not in the culture and it won't be.
Would that be more accurate? No, but no less either.
Cope much?
As a European I'd rather not have half of our industries critically depend on AWS and Microsoft, especially now that the US has fully embraced governance by RNG. The choice isn't having or not having your own digital infrastructure, it's either having your own or having to depend on someone else.
I'd rather have neither.
People need a trillion-dollar company for even simpler tasks like exchanging messages with their friends and families.
Why? Because the UX and reliability of that option is superior to anything else. Which of course means Billions of users flock to that service. Which brings insane revenue and economies of scale. Which can be invested into improving the UX and reliability further than the competitors. Now the company has a big moat around its business and a Trillion dollar valuation.
Just because you consider ONE product from a large company good, doesn't make every single big tech product the same. Meta is from a completely different sector from the one I was talking about, and its other two money-making main products are riddled with tracking and dark-patterns.
My point stands: nobody needs a trillion-dollar company to host a website.
We need to do better, but it should probably be done in our own terms.
Telcos sunk a considerable amount of money into building hosting facilities but could not deliver the same scale, international coverage and breadth of features that AWS could, so when Azure came around a lot of telco and datacenter people jumped ship.
Since then (it's been ten years for me) I've seen dozens of EU hosters consistently fail to add the kind of enterprise and security features that hyperscalers provide, and that IT departments _need_ for compliance purposes (Google is still catching up on some of those).
It's not about hosting VMs anymore or having Kubernetes for your startup, it's about the whole enchilada (auditing processes, distributed datacenters, management APIs, development ecosystem, etc.), and not even major hosting providers (some of which, by the way, were almost completely reliant on VMware...) can actually deliver.
And the same goes triple for all of the EU-sponsored/state-sponsored initiatives for datacenter creation/public cloud services/etc.
I agree. But that's the long-term problem to fix. Getting into bar fights or rambling about how we are So Much More Moral and So Much Better than everyone else isn't going to make the EU more competitive.
Telcos aren't going to be able to pivot this without paying for knowledgeable staff.
Amazon's biggest superpower is their ability to convince customers that they need the scale, international coverage and breadth of features regardless of the reality of their needs. Being on $BigCloud is a signal many small companies are sending to show they keep in step with the times. The real needs could often be addressed in simpler, cheaper ways.
Your car doesn't do everything a road vehicle can do. Your software doesn't do everything a software could do. Why would your cloud provider need to offer everything a cloud can offer? It's that "nobody got fired for choosing AWS" even if any future move is a prohibitively expensive redesign of everything.
It seems to me that's a point in support of the idea that Unicorns are a problem and should not exist.
Nobody wants absolute freedom. We all want some set of rules (e.g. "You should not be allowed to burn my house for fun"). Of course, we may want rules that benefit us personally ("Taxes should be paid to me personally, not to the country"), but that obviously doesn't work (if taxes are paid exclusively to me, they can't be paid exclusively to you).
So as a group, we agree on a set of rules that benefits society the most. We want to "maximize the global utility", if I can say it like this.
If "not having unicorns" is better for the society at large than "having unicorns", then it works. And your short-sighted, convenient understanding of "freedom" doesn't change that.
Also refrain from personal attacks on this site - you don’t know my understanding of freedom and denigrating me doesn’t help your argument.
Edit: my implicit argument is that restricting unicorns while sounds nice on paper is that the net benefit of an implementation of that is net negative - not that absolute anarchy is the solution.
Because your sarcasm was constructive, maybe?
> my implicit argument is that
Next time, maybe consider making it explicit and without using sarcasm.
My explicit answer was that if you consider that regulations are fundamentally against freedom, then I disagree. To me, it's perfectly fine to regulate unicorns if we believe it is better for the society. You can disagree with the fact that it would be better for society, but that's not what you said. What you said is that regulating against unicorns would be against freedom.
Enact and enforce anti trust laws.
I said, "Unicorns are a problem and should not exist." I suspect that regulation that protects competition and the free market is a pretty effective way of preventing Unicorns from arising in the first place.
In my mind, regulations preventing unicorns (I.e statups > 1B in valuation) would require restricting personal decisions on where to invest money based on size. Protecting competition or free markets IMO would not succeed in preventing unicorns but maybe there is a plan that could work.
There are a lot of links in that chain that strong pro-competition regulation could break.
Europe tends to have more established, "old" companies that do their own bit of innovation, and a few outliers like ASML that are crucial to many industries (besides silicon, there's pharma, media, retail, and of course a lot of manufacturing, each with their own innovation ecosystems, because many established companies have long figured out that it would be easier to sponsor local startups and then incorporate them than rebuild their orgs at random).
Hard to compete with the power of the dollar. I guess the Trump plan to push the value of the dollar down may finally make US acquisitions of European companies impossible and US salaries uncompetitive.
I don't think that unicorns, which tend to have a quasi-monopolistic position in their market segment, are healthy for society, or even for the economy (in the long run), vs many smaller companies.
So I see this as a good thing. The problem is that the draw of unicorns in the US does create a brain drain for those attracted by the prospect of becoming rich.
It's quite difficult to become rich in Europe, compared to the US. It's mostly "old money" that's passed down. But you can be successful and comfortable. Is it important to be "rich"?
That's a weird complaint. 27 member states, manage to agree on a seven year budget, in less than a week. That's seems alright to me. I get that there have been weeks if not months of work done by bureaucrats leading up to that week, but still, seems reasonably fast.
Oh, and the EU should PRONTO implement the suggestions in the 2024 Draghi and Letta reports.
- You can absolutely get in trouble for voicing political speech in Europe. We've seen plenty of headlines of people who got fired in Europe for making offensive statements. In the UK in particular criticizing the wealthy is extremely dangerous because of slander laws.
- Europe absolutely does not have an extremely generous immigration policy. An estimated 24,000 immigrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean. And this is because of European policy. It's because Europe refuses to honor refugee/asylum claims at the airport desperate people are forced to cross the sea in rickety dinghies.
- Europe does not track wealth of its citizens. Many companies are privately held. Many assets are held overseas. So how does the Economist know wealth inequality is low? But it is known that every time a heat wave hits Europe many elderly die because they can't afford to cool their home.
- “Nobody in Europe is even casually implying they will invade other countries.” Did the Economist forget that European soldiers actually joined the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq? Europe also used its military to topple the Gaddafi government in Libya. Europe doesn't just talk about invading other countries, it actually has invaded other countries in recent history. Must be amnesia! (You might believe these invasions were morally justified, but that's beside the point.)
- It's true that Europe does not have out of control tech execs who boast about throwing bits of Europe into the wood chipper. But this is because Europe's entirely depends on the US for tech and we don't have any oddball "founder CEO" types. There is no European Bezos, Gates, Jobs, or Musk. CEOs in Europe are professional managers. It's not the same.
The article isn't horrible, but it makes way too many claims that don't hold up to slight scrutiny.
Funny how now an American is somehow trying to blame Europe for it while America is acting like a victim because they were not sole benefactors of the alliance.
2. This isn't about blame or NATO or ethics. This is about the Economist rewriting history.
2.) This is about trying to blame everyone except republicans and conservatives for what conservatives do.
A journalist in Germany was just sentenced to seven months for posting a meme of a politician where she holds up a sign saying "I hate free speech".
https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/nancy-faeser-afd-...
The Online Safety Act in the UK has been discussed here before and it is part of a general trend to prevent "harmful" speech including specifically "legal but harmful speech".
Also, AFAIK while calling him an idiot might not be the direct reason for the raid, it is a crome in itself, right?
I'm not sure why that matters in the context of this discussion. He is free to file as many criminal complaints as he wants, no? Living in a free society means that idiots can do idiotic things like filing 700 criminal complaints.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-... (scroll down to explanation).
its not the only European country where this is possible, at least in theory: https://www.politico.eu/article/european-countries-where-ins...
I disagree that this is a problem per se. Pretty much all jurisdictions across the world have laws like that. It really depends on how exactly the law is implemented.
In fact, American libel and defamation laws are, in some ways, more problematic than many European ones simply because of how the legal system works. If you are sued in a place with no SLAPP laws, the mere lawsuit can be so expensive that it can have a chilling effect on free speech, even if the defendant ultimately wins the case.
(I do agree that laws singling out politicians are stupid.)
Bendels was sentenced to a 7 months suspended sentence and a fine of 1500 Euros, has to remove the image and apologize to Faeser. Bendels will appeal the decision.
I'm going to guess that this will be overturned on appeal. Every country has stupid courts that make bad decisions. I think this is kind of an edge case between satire and defamation, since Bendels is ostensibly a real journalist who reports on real facts—it seems odd to me that he would publish doctored pictures. Still, I think this will lean towards satire in the end, since I don't think most reasonable people would assume the picture of Faeser was real.
You can read about it here (German):
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/nancy-faeser-erwirkt-...
It's really quite interesting to read at some point, but I believe that nobody should have to "clarify it was doctored". Because that image was also very obviously fake - it's literally a meme template, and nobody should be prosecuted for that. I do have to question your judgement if you believe that is real.
They believe those things because they don’t see it obviously fake.
Obviously is highly subjective.
There is a reason why satire accounts have to clearly state they are satire and why things like /s exist.
The judge came to the conclusion it wasn’t obvious.
I'm not speaking from a legal standpoint, I'm speaking from a common sense moral one. We cannot cater to the most mentally challenged in society to make sure they cannot harm themselves.
Satire is entirely ruined once you put a /s behind it. Let me quote the Onion here -
The court’s decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the bal- loon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true. But some forms of comedy don’t work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with a straight face. Parody is the quintessential example. Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it—and by doing so demonstrate the target’s illogic or absurd- ity. Put simply, for parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original.
Journalists typically write, not draw. Was there an article ? On which grounds was the journalist sentenced ? So on, so on.
> it was not published in a satire magazine, there was no prior public dispute with Ms Faeser, and the montage was not easily recognisable as such
This is not a definition of a crime that is compatible with western democracy.
Would it be free speech if I convinced 10 teenagers to go on record and say that you sexually abused them? Or would you say it should be illegal for me (and them) to do that?
> Additionally, sexual assault is a crime while hating free speech is not.
Completely missing the point: nobody committed a sexual assault here.
> Are you organizing this conspiracy with an intent to hurt me? Are you making false police reports? Do you believe the accusations yourself?
What kind of questions are those. "I didn't intent to hurt them, and I believed they were consenting" make it okay to have sexual intercourse with a non-consenting person in your book?
The question is more something like: did it hurt the person and was it meant to look like it was true? It's free speech to make fun of Elon Musk because he made nazi salutes. It's not free speech to make fake, realistic video of Trump making nazi salutes and pretend it is real.
Defamation is still not a criminal statute in the US - it’s a civil statute. The other things I mentioned are actual crimes that the US government can imprison you for - I actually don’t think your example of the fake video is a jailable offense in the USA without some sort of conspiracy attached to it.
And I don't say that the US are wrong: that's how it is in the US. Now that's not how it is in Germany, and maybe it doesn't mean that Germany is wrong?
Which he will do exactly 0 months because it's a suspended sentence. Still crazy but nowhere close to "7 months of prison for a meme"
PS: Didn't the US just deport people to a foreign prison because they had tattoos ?
Quotation marks are usually used if you quote someone. Not if you make up additional things in your head that a person supposedly said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czrn57340xlo
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-authorities-arrest-pales...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/06/foreign-stud...
In practice, even on this website, I have great difficulty figuring out how to phrase anything I want to say on Palestine and Israel in a way that's not likely to induce vitriol.
Heck, neither could Yitzhak Rabin, in his position as Israel's Prime Minister: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Yitzhak_Rabin
--
Hmm, I've just noticed something: you say "Germany", but some of the news I've been seeing from the USA is people losing their visas by supporting Palestine…
There was a similar case (though actually had a judge and a court process involved) in Germany recently.
That particular case seems egregious, especially the jail part (edit: oh, it's a suspended sentence, so zero jail time). On the other hand a world where news organizations can just photoshop any sign onto any politician and claim they support whatever doesn't seem great either.
But neither does using ICE to snatch people off the streets for making social media posts. (Someone will reply to this with some variant of "oh, but they're immigrants, they don't deserve the freedom to criticize the US", and then we're back at the whataboutery Olympics)
Perhaps it's only worth getting worked up about free speech when the speech is true, authentic and accurate?
(epilogue: this whole topic was at the top of HN for about a minute before it got flagged off, lol)
UK equivalent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
> "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" (for the benefit of my MI5 handler, that is a quotation not a threat)
All societies regulate speech. There is no such thing as free speech in the literal/absolute sense of the word. Probably every society has an instance that someone can point to as stifling speech. Your phrasing succinctly gets to the crux of the matter.
In the US, the restrictions are left to things like yelling fire in a crowded theatre. Because that is harmful to society.
The focus should be on the real damage of the speech - not the “authenticity”. Also we should not restrict people from expressing their opinions regardless of whether or not they are authentic.
These ideas are meant to prevent a tyrannical government from jailing individuals because it doesn’t like its speech.
> Because that is harmful to society.
So you agree that "harmful to society" is valid reasoning .. which justifies banning things like holocaust denial and incitement to racism?
I would say the harm of those individual actions don’t rise to the harm of restricting the speech itself, with a bias towards free speech.
As with all laws and regulations interpretations are handled by the judiciary.
I like the phrasing OP makes because it grounds the discussion of free speech in a more reasonable fashion rather than nitpicking about some extreme situation.
I for one am pretty happy every law that curbs racism. It has worked great so far. The people that play victim are just cosplaying and looking for attention.
That's called defamation.
Just because he later claimed it's satire doesn't make it satire.
Seven months for that seems insane to me. It looks far more like a meme/satire than an attempt to create a realistic fake, given it's just pure-black impact font and an implausible message ("I hate freedom of speech!") to be holding up on a sign.
In these circles, false quotes have been repeated as true again and again for years.
A simple “satire” in the article would not have been enough, but it would have had the same effect.
Even if people did go on to repeat it as if it were a real quote (can't find evidence of this, from a quick search), I don't feel the fact that not everybody got the satire should turn it into defamation, so long as a reasonable person would recognize it as satire and the intent is humor opposed to deception. Should the fact that The Onion/Clickhole articles and quotes have often been circulated by people believing them to be real result in sentences for their editors?
> A simple “satire” in the article would not have been enough, but it would have had the same effect.
Confused by what you mean here. To my understanding Bendels posted the meme on X/Twitter, not in an article. By "would not have been enough" do you mean that even if it were explicitly labelled as satire, it would've still been defamation?
The photo is based on a real photo of her holding a paper with „we remember“ written on it.
Sorry by article I meant the tweet. A journalist should mention if his posts are facts, an opinion or a satire especially when he knows his audience.
Those satires have lead to insults and death threats in the past and people like him know that.
As a journalist he has to be held to a higher standard when it comes to public posts. Newspapers already have a trust problem
When there's a blank template of someone holding a sign, and people are adding on messages intended to be humorous/satirical (e.g: https://x.com/Wrdlbrmpfd_Wrdl/status/1618755937355063296) then spreading it on social media, that'd generally be called a meme.
> The photo is based on a real photo of her holding a paper with „we remember“ written on it.
I linked the original and edited version above, yeah.
To be pedantic, Bendels' edit appears to be based on a blank template used by other posts (e.g: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnrNpDzXgAEsmtI.jpg) and not directly on the original photo itself.
> Those satires have lead to insults and death threats in the past and people like him know that.
People sending death threats or calling for violence should be prosecuted. But I do not think it's reasonable to criminialize satire like this on the basis that it might "lead to insults" from other people.
Or at the very least, if you do hold that view, you should see why others would consider it an impediment on free speech.
Context matters a lot. It's different if we talk crap at home with our friends vs. broadcasting a message to 10M people.
It is, but see what the article has to say about that (translated with google translate):
> Among other things, they complain about the inappropriate severity of the justice system against an allegedly satirical statement. What is left unmentioned, however, is that the trial only took place because Bendels previously refused to pay a fine of 210 daily rates imposed by the same district court in November.
I know nothing about this person or this case, but it sounds like he has done this before and refused to pay a fine, so the court said "enough is enough" and sent him to prison.
If this was the first fine, would you agree that ~$60k is disproportionate?
I can't help to notice how with just a little bit of context we've come from reacting to "A journalist in Germany was just sentenced to seven months for posting a meme" to deciding if a fine was disproportionate.
With all that, the only sensible answer I can give is that I don't know. It's useless to be outraged by something that might be a non-story.
Even in Germany, I don't believe a meme like this one would typically incur any fine.
> (2) "Bendels has no criminal record" -- does that mean he was never convicted of defamation, or is that a red herring because defamation a civil (not criminal) matter?
My understanding is that he has now been convicted of criminal defamation (so it should probably be past tense), but had no such prior convictions.
> I can't help to notice how with just a little bit of context we've come from reacting to "A journalist in Germany was just sentenced to seven months for posting a meme" to deciding if a fine was disproportionate.
I don't personally believe there should have been any fine or prison sentence for posting the meme. I ask you whether you think the fine seems disproportionate based on current information because I see that as the smallest and most likely concession for you to make, assuming you can be intellectually honest, not because the fine being disproportionate is the full extent of my stance.
> With all that, the only sensible answer I can give is that I don't know. It's useless to be outraged by something that might be a non-story.
We've got the original post, the court's sentence and reasoning, and most other information you want to know could be researched online. There has to be some point at which we start publicly discussing an issue - that doesn't prohibit us from updating our views if there really is some decisive new evidence.
That would make sense for someone with all the relevant context about this story. While I agree with you that "most other information [I] want to know could be researched online", that would take a lot of time (I can't read German) and energy which would be best spent learning about way more important stuff happening in the world right now.
I've often seen people criticize scientists for not engaging with crackpots, with the argument if what they're saying is really dumb it should be easy to show that. I see that as naive -- there's only so much time in the day, you can't disprove every crackpot, so pick your battles.
This case feels like the same thing -- it started with someone claiming that a journalist was jailed for sharing a meme, then I learned this is a complete distortion. So I assume I'm dealing with a crackpot (not you, but the person who made the original claim), and so I refuse to spend more energy on this.
And if I'm being honest, I'm only writing this reply because it doesn't feel good to read "assuming you can be intellectually honest" while engaging in what I assumed was a cordial exchange, so I can't help but defend myself -- which I think I'll stop now and just let go.
Earlier, for instance, you said "it sounds like he has done this before and refused to pay a fine". Could you not similarly say whether, based on the information we have now, it sounds to you as if the fine is reasonable?
My understanding of the context is that:
1. Nancy Faeser was photographed holding a sign saying "WE REMEMBER"
2. That picture was turned into a blank meme template to fill with text intended to be satirical/humorous (e.g: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FnrNpDzXgAEsmtI.jpg - not actually humorous, but intended to be by its author)
3. Among those posting memes was David Bendels, who put "I hate freedom of speech!" (in black impact-font text) on the sign and posted it on X/Twitter
4. "Faeser was reportedly alerted to the post by the police, and subsequently filed a criminal complaint"
5. Bendels, who "has no prior criminal convictions", was initially ordered by the court to pay his daily income times 210
6. Bendels "filed an objection against the penalty, which automatically led to a trial"
7. The court considered the Bendels "made a deliberately false factual statement", and Bendels subsequently recieved a seven-month suspended prison sentence (plus a €1500 fine, and must "apologise in writing to Faeser")
> This case feels like the same thing -- it started with someone claiming that a journalist was jailed for sharing a meme, then I learned this is a complete distortion.
The original claim in this chain was:
> > A journalist in Germany was just sentenced to seven months for posting a meme of a politician where she holds up a sign saying "I hate free speech".
Which still seems true to me. I don't think anyone here is a crackpot.
> And if I'm being honest, I'm only writing this reply because it doesn't feel good to read "assuming you can be intellectually honest" while engaging in what I assumed was a cordial exchange, so I can't help but defend myself -- which I think I'll stop now and just let go.
Sorry - that probably came across as more accusatory than I intended. Meant to be read more as reasoning for my belief that you could admit it seems disproportionate based on current information, as opposed to an accusation that you haven't been intellectually honest thus far.
Things is though, the same would apply to today's Europe vs Europe of 20 yrs ago - and the same if you compared Europe of 20 yrs (more) vs USA of today (less).
Both Europe and USA has lost a lot of their free speech privileges, both via social norms and actual regulations/application of law.
Now, wherever Europe or USA currently comes out on top os - in my person opinion besides the point: its bad either way.
> [...]
> What is left unmentioned, however, is that the trial only took place because Bendels previously refused to pay a fine of 210 daily rates imposed by the same district court in November.
So I don't see "sentenced to seven months for posting a meme of a politician where she holds up a sign saying 'I hate free speech'".
What I see is "mislead people into thinking the politician said something she did not, and then refused to pay the fine imposed by the court".
Not defending this specific decision, but you can find individual cases like this in the US as well. Overall the laws in Germany are somewhat more restrictive in certain areas, but I don't think that fundamentally affects free speech.
The 60 minutes segment was also quite revealing of the (in my opinion, poor) state of free speech in Germany. [1]
As Bill Maher said, "Germany is so afraid to look like their Nazi past, that they're knocking on people's doors, taking people's phones and computers if you insult people online."
[0] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/gewalt-gegen-poli...
He posted a doctored image to make it look like that, which is a completely different thing, and should definitely be punishable.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/03/eu_backdoor_encryptio...
To be fair, it's only in discussions now, it hasn't been voted AFAIK and it hasn't been implemented.
Compare that to the NSA... ever heard of Snowden?
Correct but ChatControl now has a majority among EU Commissioners. The fact that something like this is even proposed in the "free" land and the people responsible not laughed out of the room is sickening.
> Compare that to the NSA... ever heard of Snowden?
Spying on your unencrypted communication? That's not comparable + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Either you're in bad faith, or you actually don't know how it works in the US and what the NSA was (probably is still) doing.
I agree that this is terrible, but based on prior ECJ rulings, this will almost certainly be struck down if it's ever passed.
David Bendels has been threatened with prison time and sentenced to seven months of probation for a Twitter meme [0]. It is the harshest sentence ever handed down to a journalist for a speech crime in the Federal Republic of Germany.
This is the tweet, poking fun at the German minister of the interior Nancy Faeser (the sign says "I hate free speech"):
https://x.com/Deu_Kurier/status/1762895292075053348
[0] https://www-welt-de.translate.goog/politik/deutschland/artic...
> Bendels claimed the meme, posted by his newspaper's X account, was satirical.
> But the judge in the case said during the verdict that Bendels published a 'deliberately untrue and contemptuous statement about Interior Minister Ms. Faeser (...) that would not be recognizable to the unbiased reader and is likely to significantly impair her public work'.
The comedic value would be even higher if it was an obvious tongue-in-cheek edit. Given it's professionally and seamlessly edited, then it's too ambiguous to be a meme and thus should not be protected as free speech.
They are basically sold to some circles of influence, such as Qatar and are merely propaganda.
Example, the world cup:
" The Economist
https://www.economist.com › leaders › 2022 › 11 › 17 › in-defence-of-qatars-hosting-of-the-world-cup
In defence of Qatar's hosting of the World Cup - The Economist The claim that Qatar is a den of homophobia is also misleading. "
The Economist
https://www.economist.com › middle-east-and-africa › 2022 › 11 › 02 › qatar-races-to-ready-itself-for-an-unusual-world-cup
Qatar races to ready itself for an unusual World Cup - The Economist
The Economist
https://www.economist.com › international › 2022 › 11 › 17 › the-qatar-world-cup-shows-how-football-is-changing
The Qatar World Cup shows how football is changing - The Economist Much of a broader $300bn economic development plan called Qatar 2030
etc.
1) Big companies actually don't innovate, they are slow and bureaucratic. It is startups that do innovation
2) Look at the top 10 companies by market cap, it's all the Chinese and American companies. Therefore USA is the pinnacle of innovation and Europe is falling behind(because of your favorite scapegoat)
3) Europe has many startups but they can't become huge because of excessive regulations. They end up moving to US, leaving Europe to lag behind
4) China has grew much more than the west, the west is lagging behind now. This is because the west has become socialist, we need to remove the taxes on the rich reduce regulations and protections to be able to compete with China.
Those all(and a few more actually) have some truth in them and a lot of wrong. A new narrative that captures the picture correctly is needed because at the current state those few camps are wedging wars where each ignore contradicting evidence instead of structuring it in a way that things fit.
The idea that the West is more socialist than Communist China, a one party state run by the Communist Party of China, just goes to show how completely useless ideological labelling is now. Just as "woke" has become a shorthand for "anything I don't like".
Well indeed. What does that mean? Nobody seems to be interested in any kind of intellectual accuracy or coherence, they just want to use "socialism bad" as a thought-terminating cliche.
And also the pragmatism of not handing over too much control from national governments to the EU bodies.
> There are thus no European Rasputins pumping untold millions into political campaigns, getting pride of place at leaders’ inaugurations or their own new-minted government departments to run
I think this is underselling the very real risks of European-style fascism, driven by the same social media and other forces, just because it doesn't exactly resemble Musk. But it does seem like the crisis is now compelling the cozy ""centre"" to actually do something, like re-armament and actually prosecuting politicians for their financial fraud. Not just Le Pen but previously things like Wirecard.
In the end, all those things can be traced to curbing Russia's direct and indirect warfare. Re-armament? Direct Russian threat. Le Pen? Financed by Russia. Marsalek? Part of a Russian spy-network that operated from Austria, where the FPÖ is not just financed by Russia but also has a literal cooperation contract with Putin. Similar story with the AfD in Germany.
The US used to be good at this as well. If they were as close to the war in Ukraine as Europe is, they might still be. But instead they have gone from being the biggest opponent of Russia to one of it's most subverted supporters.
Most European countries do have their own far-right parties (like Le Pen in France, AFD in Germany, etc.). But with multi-winner districts and lots of other parties, they struggle to gain anything resembling a majority that would enable them to rule by fiat. Also politics in most European countries is much more parliament driven, with the prime minister having a lot less power and more oversight than e.g. the US president.
What about the 60 Minutes segment from February 2025, where CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi interviewed German prosecutors about Germany’s strict hate speech laws? The report, aired on February 16, 2025, discussed how German authorities can raid homes and seize devices over online posts deemed offensive, such as hate speech, insults, or misinformation. The prosecutors, including Dr. Matthäus Fink, Svenja Meininghaus, and Frank-Michael Laue, explained that German law allows police to act against speech that incites hatred or insults.
I'm particularly concerned that "hate" and "insult" and "misinformation" can be so subjective. That's why the US 1A protects even hate speech.
And what about British police arrested people who post memes online for the similar reasons?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...
Not a one-off, either:
https://nypost.com/2025/02/21/world-news/germans-cant-insult...
Freedom doesn't mean that no errors are made but that they are aknowledged as errors.
The responsible politician still gets rediculed for that and isn't praised by his fanbase.
You are not allowed hate speech on the internet in a lot of countries. You will be prosecuted for that.
But different to other countries, in a majority of the european countries (turkey, greece are currently problematic) people are not deported, put in jail or camps and forgotten, even without a sentence and hearing.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/europeans-don-t-have-or-understand...
Now let's set something straight: Europe is bureaucratic hellhole, which is the reason why entrepreneurship is fairly uncommon. Here we are taught to go through the procedures, get whatever licenses and paperwork is required, make sure we follow all steps and cover everything up and then and only then start building a product. The US philosophy is the complete opposite approach: start building and figure it out along the way, which is the reason why Europe is always behind the curve.
This however ended up being both a curse and blessing in disguise for us: the digitalization of everyday life took longer, whereas everyone and their dog in the US had a smartphone and social networks from day 0. In addition, here in Europe we've been exposed to bad actors such as russia for centuries and many of us can navigate through their tactics, whereas the US instantly swallowed everything that was thrown at them with the oldest trick in their book: "media is lying to you, see this picture/video only here". A decade and a half of actively trying to discredit establishments and it ended where it's at. And as much as GDPR is a pain in the ass, companies here are very well aware how badly things can go for them if things are not kept in check. Which, as a citizen, is a great thing.
The other problem with the quick rise of digitization in the US in conjunction with practically non-existent regulations around privacy are grifters, which truly swarmed the internet. Business strategy: make a dumb video "owning someone", share it around so people learn who you are, get them roiled up against one another, having half of them become your worshipers, release a book, merchandise or courses and you are set for life. From practical nobodies all the way up to presidents - it's a guaranteed success. But you have to have 0 moral values to do that and at some point you will need people around you. Thing is that it's only a question of time before everyone around you starts realizing that no one has moral values and start screwing each other up. The US is currently in that stage.
All things considered, the US has fallen really far behind in terms of freedom in single digit months.
Edit: Some time ago my mum was watching some interview with an analyst who really summed it up: "I used to believe the US was about 100 years ahead of China in terms of innovation. I was wrong, it's probably closer to 50. And if you ask me where we are in Europe? Preoccupied with coming up with more inconvenient bottle caps to solve a problem we don't have".
This very much depends on where in Europe you were living. In parts of the Nordics (at least Sweden and I think Finland as well) cell phones were very common already in the 90s, and a few years later smart phones as well. I don’t even remember when it wasn’t possible to handle taxes, banking and similar stuff with an app or online. We also had social networks but I guess most died when Facebook arrived here. The US are usually ahead of us in consumer products, but to say that all European countries are bad at all kinds of innovation is quite exaggerated.
It sure can, as proven by all the countries where it is.
Foreign intervention in Romanian or US elections is a fairy tale. Justification for political corruption of the judicial branch. It is funny how once right wing candidates get close to winning political power, they suddenly turn into criminals and traitors. Makes total sense.
Alexander Litvinenko – Ex-FSB officer poisoned with polonium in London (2006).
Stanislav Markelov & Anastasia Baburova – Human rights lawyer and journalist, shot in Moscow (2009).
Boris Nemtsov – Opposition leader, shot near the Kremlin (2015).
Denis Voronenkov – Former Russian MP, shot in Kyiv (2017).
Nikolai Andrushchenko – Journalist, beaten to death in St. Petersburg (2017).
Alexei Navalny – Opposition leader, died in prison after previous poisoning (2024).
---
Maybe Europe isn't perfect, but the Russian morals are so low that no effort is requried to be better than them.
Actually, the range of methods is slightly wider. E.g. there was a French politician investigating the сase of corruption of Ursula von der Leyen. That politician died from "heart attack" just a few days before the hearing. Ah, that's a "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theories" are explicitly forbidden now in several EU countries. Also, very convenient.
Same for comments in the Internet. E.g. if you writing something western people doesn't like on Reddit/Facebook/whatever, the only reaction you'll get will be "you're a Kremlin troll"
No need to think and analyze yourself. There's only one truth in the world and it comes from Bloomberg/CNN/BBC.
"You can't ask these questions, or we'll all go to jail."
I don't think anyone will take that seriously.
Well, according to the Academic Freedom Index [1], there are 2 countries that have worse academic freedom than the US: Hungary (as mentioned) and Greece. The UK, Portugal, the Netherlands, Serbia and North Macedonia are broadly comparable.
> No detention centres await foreign students who hold the wrong views on Gaza.
In the UK, we do have terror legislation that allows us to detain journalists who talk about Gaza for 48 hours and confiscate their devices indefinitely (and no, we don't have free speech protections allowing us to not divulge passwords to these devices) [2].
> news outfits are not sued for interviewing opposition politicians
We do like to put them into prison though [3].
[1]: https://academic-freedom-index.net [2]: https://scottishpen.org/statement-on-detention-of-author-and... [3]: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/04/pers-a04.html
This is just wrong. People have been fired for expressing opinions related to COVID, to ethnical tension, islamisation, and so on. Woke in Europe has a lag time of a few years, but the bohemian bourgeoisie is present in full force.
Not only is academic and intellectual freedom under threat, but the danger and persecutions are very very very very obviously being applied with massive political double standards. If you're on the left and you spout narratives that subsidized institutions and lobbying groups agree with, you won't get penalized. If you're on the right, a meme posted by someone else can get your rights suspended.
Such an environment is not as business friendly as it seems. Most politicians in this environment see a solution to every problem in new taxes. Hard to talk about freedom, when you're not allowed to vote on taxes.
There's a also a push for truthspeak - younger generations are no longer sure freedom of speech should be sacred, because it wasn't explained as important enough, so they themselves get ideas about what should be censored and why. Again, the gvnmt is quick to agree with them by offering a way to compile a list of truths.
Also, public healthcare in EU is only for the poor - if you can afford to pay private, you're not even thinking about going public. It just doesn't work like some people here thinks it does.
So, no, Europe is not a dreamland compared to USA, it just has a different set of problems.
55.9% *, at highest bracket. And when you get there, you usually have means to have at least some of your income as capital gains, which is uniformly taxed lower. I.e. you don't become a high income individual, you become an owner of profitable family business.
Edit: I said originally, "55.9%, marginal", but that was wrong. Corrected.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/top-personal-income-ta...
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/capital-gains-tax-rate...
> supported by a big majority of population
That's democracy for you.