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Comment by Kbelicius | Hacker News Reader

> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech.

This doesn't mean anything in isolation.

> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.

Do we know each other?

> The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy.

No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.

> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.

I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?

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>> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech. > This doesn't mean anything in isolation.

It's pretty good proxy for freedom of speech, one of the features without which democracy is not possible.

>> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.

> Do we know each other?

Probably not, but I can smell a state believer when I see him.

> No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.

If they are, it's a pretty low baseline. They are but a shadow of what they once were.

>> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.

> I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?

The article I posted has a link [1]. There you can see the number of people arrested went up from 5502 in 2017 to 12183 in 2023. It's a pretty sharp decline in freedom of speech.

[1] https://archive.is/kC5x2

The problem here is that contextually you are falling into the trap of "talking about committing a terrorist act" as being relevant to "having private communications", and in the process you are conflating the two. This means you are falling into the trap that the UK government intentionally creates to suppress privacy — within a reader's head, now the two are related. This also means you haven't had to develop any arguments other than "muh free speech!" with respect to why having private communication is important.

The second problem is that American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue, so to an onlooker who is not in the USA, when people talk about "free speech", it comes across as someone defending someone's right to say incredibly harmful, violent things about Jewish people, Transgender people, and so on. I think for most people outside of the USA (and, to be honest, most minority populations within the USA) you should consider "free speech" as being an incredibly tainted phrase for that purpose.

The flipside of all of this is that fascism is very, very possible even with freedom of speech (actually it seems to rely on it, given how virulent the spread of outright Nazi rhetoric has been in the USA so far). Freedom of speech is not the sole thing that holds up a democracy and it weakens your arguments for you to rely upon it like this.

> American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue

The famous US Supreme Court case[0] that explicitly confirmed that "Nazi speech is free speech" was brought to the court by the ACLU[1], a left-leaning organization that defends things like LGBTQ rights. Your take is completely divorced from factual reality.

American conservatives aren't "framing" it. They are restating what the US Supreme Court has already determined in a case brought to the court by the liberal left. This is a principled defense of free speech that has historically been supported by people across the political spectrum.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

[1] https://www.aclu.org

You completely missed the point of what I wrote and ignored the majority, just so you could claim that Nazi speech is actually a left-wing issue — which is not a claim I think many people outside of the USA would agree with.

I do not think you understand the optics of how this looks outside of your USA-centric echo-chamber audience.

>> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech.

>This doesn't mean anything in isolation.

For anyone who cares about free speech, this is very scary and very troubling, regardless of any other factors at play.

No they’re not. Without free speech there is no democracy because only speech that is allowed is by those in power/who they direct money to police

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